Featuring Actress, Zsela, Yves Tumor, Sampha and Aura T-09.
Last week Actress released his highly-anticipated seventh solo album, Karma & Desire. After teasing the project with a series of cryptic tweets, newsletters, password protected websites and another album, 88, the new record arrives as a departure from producer Darren Cunningham’s heady electronic compositions, featuring heavy vocal contributions from artists including Zsela, Sampha and Aura T-09.
These collaborators join Yves Tumor and Cunningham himself in the accompanying short film. Directed by Lee Bootee, the film pays homage to Wim Wenders’ 1987 classic Wings Of Desire, setting a mysterious love story of clandestine, nocturnal meetings, corporate espionage, virtual avatars and techno-conspiracy against tracks taken from Karma & Desire. The video also has some intriguing similarities, and perhaps a shared universe, with John Frusciante’s recent video for ‘Brand E’, which stars Lee Bootee and was produced by Aura T-09.
In characteristically obscure fashion, this redacted message arrives with the release: “Watch ██████ short film ██ Karma & Desire ████████ director Lee Bootee. A love story––or the story of a missed connection––███ ███████ ██████ isolation, cold beauty, ████ surveillance ████████. Find yourself a voyeur █████ ███ ████████. ████████ born again into this maze of karma and desire.”
Cunningham describes the new album as “a romantic tragedy set between the heavens and the underworld”, explaining that the project covers “the same sort of things that I like to talk about – love, death, technology, the questioning of one’s being”.
Karma & Desire is out now, on Ninja Tune.
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