Radical Frame marks Actress‘ return to Ninja Tune after several releases on other labels, including a reactivation of the producer’s own Werkdiscs imprint for a live collaboration with electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani.
Beginning the album with two fragmentary pieces consisting of muffled, cut-up voices, it’s clear that the artist remains enigmatic as ever. “Live by You” features a guest verse by U.K. rapper CASISDEAD, whose bitter, unapologetic rhymes are initially presented starkly over sparse, eerie synth notes. After a few bars, the track erupts with overloaded grime bass and scattered handclaps, while the emcee’s voice is distorted and glitched-out beyond recognition. The song ends short of the two-minute mark, malfunctioning and burning…
Tag Archive: Actress
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Since she started making music with a Buchla synthesizer in 1968 — an obsession that landed her a job actually manufacturing the machines, soldering iron in hand, until she saved up enough money to buy her own — Suzanne Ciani has embodied electronic music’s spirit of limitless possibility. Instead of imitating other instruments and conforming to conventional musical ideas, Buchla (and Ciani) set out to create a paradigm based on harnessing the flow of electricity itself. Ciani’s method with the Buchla is a way of taming electrical currents and shaping them into pathways, rather than composing music traditionally. She would later become known as a prominent new-age artist and a composer of commercial music for brands like Coca-Cola, but in…
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