#supersound

[dprjjang]

Congratulations to #DPRIAN for winning the BEST ALTERNATIVE ARTIST OF THE YEAR award on the Supersound Festival stage! 🎉

[victorianrob]

Musica in 🚘!

[daodag]

Wu Na & Hou Chang Qing

chinesische zouberwaud

[schnickundschnack]

[herewegobebe]

TAEMIN ✦ Guilty | SuperSound Festival in BANGKOK - 231119 [Video Cr.x]

[ruinedholograms]

Statik (2024)

[joanofarc]

my trumpets, eggstone (1991).

you're in technicolor i'm in black-and-white you've got funny accent i smoke lucky strikes

[xxwenrenexx]

231119 Supersound Festival 2023

[disease]

DUNGEN // ALBERTO BALSALM [LAGNIAPPE SESSIONS V1 12″ COMP, 2016]

[lee-sanghyeok]

231118 BOYNEXTDOOR @ SUPERSOUND FESTIVAL IN BANGKOK, THAILAND

[dustedmagazine]

Actress — Statik (Smalltown Supersound)

Photo by Ola Rindal

Darren Cunningham AKA Actress begins his latest album in “Hell.” Silence, then scraping granular beats, a grey-scale palette, tapping into The Wicker Man vibe of Boards of Canada at their darkest. Yet in the background, faintly celestial tones sound, as if the trajectory is upwards via the grinding of dungeon tools and babble of dementing voices. As the rhythms mutate, the balance shifts more urgently between dread and hope. Resolution withheld for now, Cunningham spends the remainder of Statik in ascent, reassembling elements of club music into ambient soundscapes that flow over a glitchy crunch of percussive effects.

Gradually adding light and warmth Cunningham plays with dichotomies of movement and stasis, light and dark, insularity and co-existence. He treats his tracks like a scientist, studying the behavior of his musical molecules as they orbit and collide. As he introduces new elements there are moments of readjustment, of acceptance and reaction. Gamelans, RnB vocal samples, warm synth pads, thudding kick drums, sometimes upfront and smooth then pushed beneath vinyl crackle, reverbed, distorted, or atomized and reconstituted. For all this Cunningham seems more interested in a search for calm amidst the bustle. On “Six” his bass tones are like a thick carpet beneath the clicking beat. The static feels like the gentle lapping of wavelets against a dinghy. If there’s a portent of storm, it’s not coming this way. By “Cafe De Mars,” the music begins to swell and twinkle, the abrasive edges eroded to a background swish as Cunningham expands the track in concentric rings. There’s a couple of odd detours that somehow add to the mystery of Statik. The parping synth line in “Dolphin Spray” brings Falco to mind whilst the whipcracks and drones of “System Verse” sound like a malfunctioning submersible sinking to the seabed.

This is head music, discursive in a suggestive rather than rambling manner. As Cunningham pans across the channels, his sound design strikes the ears and creates synaptic leaps that draw pull the listener’s focus. Many of constituents will be familiar to fans of Boards of Canada, Two Lone Swordsmen and Aphex Twin and if the early tracks of Statik sound more challenging in their discordances, you will feel borne along by the idiosyncratic juxtapositions Cunningham creates.

Andrew Forell

[dprjjang]

DPRIAN at Supersound Festival Bangkok

cr: Allnewsth

[iamlisteningto]

Actress’s Statik

[daodag]

[musicollage]

Carmen Villain – Only Love From Now On.   2022 : Smalltown Supersound.

[ support the artist ★ buy me a coffee ]

[zef-zef]

Anja Lauvdal - Fantasie for Agathe Backer Gr​ø​ndahl from: Anja Lauvdal - From a Story Now Lost (Smalltown Supersound, 2022)

Produced by Laurel Halo, the album From A Story Now Lost is a jewel of subtle beauty and innovative detail that shows Lauvdal finally exploring her own voice after more than a decade of improvisations and collaborations with the likes of Jenny Hval and Lasse Marhaug.