- How often do you get to see an Oscar-nominated composer perform alongside some of the UK's top electronic producers? This is exactly the kind of unconventional lineup that roaming London party series Convergence specialises in. In a week of diverse performances that ranged from Manuel Göttsching's groundbreaking electronics to the experimental metal of Sunn O))), Friday's bill of leftfield club beats at Village Underground was the most tempting. The party was headlined by Actress, who performed material from his recently-announced fifth album, AZD.
It was still early when I took my place in the queue, but I could already hear feverish drumming from outside the club. Inside, Raime were midway through their live set. One half of the duo triggered anxious bursts of noise from a laptop, while the other let out seared guitar licks soaked in feedback. The addition of a live drummer lent their set a punkish energy—order teetering on the brink of chaos. The whole thing was captivating.
Mica Levi, the versatile musician whose work ranges from indie to experimental to the Oscar-nominated soundtrack for 2016 Hollywood blockbuster Jackie, appeared onstage at midnight for her DJ set. She seemed more concerned with sonic texture and hip-hop-style collage than in building momentum, which was frustrating after the sustained intensity of Raime. Every time she got the crowd going with a sleek breakbeat or chunky rhythm, she'd let the music dissolve into beatless melodies. At one point, she even dropped Counting Crows' '90s rock hit "Colorblind," much to the room's perplexity.
When Levi finished, a silver mannequin dressed in black was positioned centre stage before a keyboard in preparation for Actress, AKA Darren Cunningham. I'd seen him perform twice before—once playing sludgy house to an unmoving crowd, the other dropping crowd-pleasers from Aphex Twin and Radiohead—but I had no idea what to expect. He strikes me as an artist who always does exactly what he feels like. If the audience happens to like it too, then it's a happy coincidence.
The next 90 minutes of music shirked genre tags, swerving dramatically between tempos and moods. There was an HD sheen to many of the melodies, while the drums were chopped into glitchy, Autechre-style volleys. Cunningham was hidden behind a monitor to the side of the stage, leaving the crowd to watch a projection of silver figures whose bodies dissolved and reformed in an infinite loop. These deconstructions, blending the organic with the synthetic, were a fitting visual accompaniment to the mind-warping beats.
Cunningham moulded sounds as if they were molten plastic. During one particularly fluid passage, an airy electro rhythm was brutally cut into a merciless 4/4, which in turn transfigured into a turbulent jungle bassline—all in the space of two minutes. At the very end, he introduced a bright piano melody, mirrored by wheeling synth arpeggios. They felt like the first organic sounds I'd heard all night, and the effect was immediate: hands launched into the air and a loud cheer burst from the crowd. He had finally given us something to grasp hold of.
Photo credit /
Antonio Pagano