Actress’ »Radical Frame« draws on Fred Moten’s thoughts on the Black avant-garde, that's challenging the canonisation of the avant-garde as Euro-American. Musically, Cunningham remains unmistakable. The lo-fi aesthetics of his earliest productions have long since disappeared, but what remains is the constant shift between fragments and fully realised tracks. Fleeting piano miniatures over 4/4 beats, sharp synths doing their work in isolation, and cut-up vocals remain his tools of choice. The album ends with the 16-minute »Sheets«, featuring Rainy Miller. Here, Actress moves into a less familiar IDM style, before the track breaks apart and fades out as an ethereal ambient composition. At the very end, only the sea can be heard rushing.

»The idea of the black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing.« – Fred Moten

When we go searching for a Black avant-garde, we have to be prepared to look in unexpected places. The route to a Black avant-garde involves walking down – what some might consider – peculiar highways. Where they see strangeness, a road leading them nowhere, we see nothing but beauty. The paths Darren Cunningham went down, the highways he took to make Actress, are a chapter in the story of the Black avant-garde. Cunningham the footballer. Cunningham the Wulfrunian. Cunningham the ex-footballer. Cunningham the DJ. Cunningham the Londoner. Cunningham the producer. Cunningham the painter. Cunningham the writer. Cunningham the composer. This is where the Black avant-garde in Britain is made. This is where you have to go to find it.

Across an expansive discography of more than ten LPs, Actress has created his own arcane language of hermetic references and inter-dimensional electronic composition.

»Radical Frame« arrives 18 years since debut album »Hazyville«, and it feels like an apotheosis. The image realised. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISDEAD on »Live By You« (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston).

Perhaps »Radical Frame« is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde.