When Actress tweeted out a phone number this past September, he wasn’t inviting fans to hop on the line with him. It’s simply not his style. The producer has kept us at a distance while carving a singular figure in electronic music, occupying an isolated space in the field. But the medium did suit him: upon dialing, fans were sent straight through to a voicemail transmitting fragments of a new single. It was a fitting presentation for a musician whose sound carries the granular hiss of an old answering machine message, with all its hints of ghosts in the shell. The Wolverhampton-born producer, real name Darren Cunningham, is an artist whose trajectory is di ffi cult to map accurately. Each Actress release has been a shedding of skin, exploring alternate identities. It’s across his introductory trio of albums, 2008’s Hazyville , 2010’s Splazsh , and 2012’s R.I.P . It’s in the purging of Ghettoville ’s grey-tinted grit (2014), a death knell followed by the robotic sheen of AZD (2017), for which live shows featured chrome mannequins, dressed in what looked to be Cunningham’s shirt and bucket hat, taking his place on stage. With the release of 2018’s LAGEO , a collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, something shifted again. A new, three-dimen- sional acoustic sound began to clear up the mist. Then, of course, he disappeared into the computer once more with 2019’s Young Paint , guided by an AI “collaborator” of the same name, before this year’s 88 A transitional mixtape of sketches, it was another palate cleanser. It seems, however, that he’s finally reached the afterlife. On his new album Karma & Desire , Cunningham wanders through the tracks Do you think about borders? The ones between the private and the public, between ourselves and others, man and woman, the ones resting be- tween the real and the unreal? It’s a defining topic of this epoch we call home. Ram Han is a South Korean artist-illustrator whose luminescent studies seem to be occupied with such questions of polarities. Hers are uncanny (dream)worlds on our screens. Han has spoken often about how much her creation is influenced by her childhood memories: the books of Japanese airbrush designs in her graphic designer aunt’s house; the memorable objects that were prevalent in her youth; the emotions she felt then and now. I’m reminded of those old VHS SMPTE color bars, or of floating through chromatic ethers, Enter the Void -style. In many of Han’s drawings, we find private worlds, bedrooms and bathrooms, unnervingly and simultaneously both familiar and unfamiliar. Giant cigarettes sit burning; oversized butterflies flaunt their colorful wings for us; flowers sit tamely in cages; mirrors and windows add confu- sion by extending spaces endlessly or opening up to views of outer space. Female figures are dominant, most joined by a cat and a phone, in a universe of their own, but never looking completely content. There’s a feeling of a kind of jarring perversion from somewhere that is polluting the image: Do they know we’re watching them? In some images, this feel- ing is made more explicit. In one image, a hyper-sexualized Asian female, naked and glistening, caresses a long flower that dribbles liquid from its top; in the background, a set of male eyes looks on. Han has spoken about how her image-making is influenced by what she sees in a mass media that frames women within the male gaze. This particular image compli- cates the narrative, however, as two women also look on, although less at the nude figure and more at us, the audience. Are there also questions concerning standards of beauty here? Or perhaps something altogether less didactic—an ambiguous futuristic eroticism? Am I being chagrined for looking? Study Star takes this uncertainty further. A female face en- velops almost the entire space, eyes literally alight with the Coco Chanel logo, a pearl-chained mouth gag prying open her thick lips. The study star, the A+ student, here becomes fodder for big brand commerce and submissive erotic proclivities—but again, the image is met by adjacent feelings that make us wonder who is truly in charge, and whether this is in fact straightforward act of submission. In other kaleidoscopic images, it’s not so clear where we are. We see surreal landscapes of float- ing islands, giant pierced ears, plants and roots, hanging pieces of jewelry. In fact, speaking of the surreal, there’s much to compare to the disem- bodied experiences of Giorgio De Chirico, the touchable objects of Méret Oppenheim, the fem- inine experience of Dorothea Tanning, the animals of Harue Koga—but in each case, Han updates these elements and adopts them as her own, making them strikingly contemporary. It’s clear that there’s no one-size-fits-all reading of Han’s works, as she herself has said: “The most important goal is to create something that leaves an impression, rather than something to be analyzed.” One thing that can be said for sure is that her style of illustration that falls somewhere between animation and photo-realism (again, floating between border), matched by a virtuosic eye for color and a technical skill for illusionism that helps to push the subject matter deeper and deeper into its own world. The resulting images continuously possess a phenomenal luster, a phantasmal sheen, a tactile gloss emitting outwards. Reach up and try to grab it and it might disap- pear between your fingers, half-there, half-not. Image courtesy of the artist and Whistles, Seoul. Photo credit: Kim Sunik Image courtesy of the artist and Ninja Tune. Photo credit: Jaxon Whittington like a ghost, as he and a cast of collaborators explore themes of love, transformation, and rebirth. In a career of reinvention, it feels like Actress’s biggest step forward yet. The first Actress album to feature lyrics, it welcomes the airy soprano of Sampha, sacred melodies from Kara-Lis Coverdale, and intimate vocals from NYC favorite Zsela, exploring the collapse of the self, the mental and physical, the sacred and the profane. With its counterintuitive core, listening to Actress’s music hasn’t always been easy. Now, this murkiness gives way to moments of mysticism. At its most pristine, it hums with a spirituality we haven’t seen in Actress before. Cunningham has described it as “a romantic tragedy set between the heavens and the underworld,” and it certainly plays out like an opera for a doomed paradise. Ultimately, its twisted garden of Eden is evocative of the self-sabotaging Anthropocene we live in: a natural world at once abundant and poisoned; a society highly functioning while crumbling at the seams. The end of the world as we know it. Actress is overlooking it all, soundtracking our transformation from a dank base- ment suspended in the clouds. Sexual fantasies and feminism are themes that unravel through the dreamy, candy-colored illustrations of Ram Han (South Korean, b. 1989, lives and works in Seoul), allowing a glimpse into her surreal world. Actress, moniker of British musician Darren J. Cunningham, will release his latest album Karma & Desire on 23 October 2020 on Ninja Tune. RAM HAN CANDY - COLORED FEMINISM Words by Thomas Mouna ACTRESS KARMA & DESIRE Words by Anna Tehabsim 62 63 SEASON FW 20-21 SEASON FW 20-21