2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl Box Set, Cassette
Darren Cunningham is the master of summoning vibes that feel just the tiniest bit off. He makes the perfect music for a world where the weather’s wrong, disaster and war are constant background noise, and AI adverts clog up your media experience with uncanny scams, and our once-simple communication tools sink into glutted dysfunction. In fact, he feels like a prophet, and he’s been conjuring this distinctive atmosphere for more than 15 years now, and sometimes it feels like reality is catching up with his queasily hallucinatory vision.
His vision is that of a 21st century flaneur: an alienated subject wandering the city—more specifically, London—and taking it in dispassionately. Even now, eight official albums and multiple other projects into his career, having worked with orchestras and created his own musical artificial learning systems, and with no less an icon than Beyoncé using his music as her stage show intro, that’s still the case. In fact, compared to the rarefied composition of 2020’s Karma & Desire, with its multiple guest voices, and 2018’s London Contemporary Orchestra collaboration LAGEOS, that sense of Cunningham as lone observer fells extra present here.
On LXXXVIII, you’ll find lo-fi house beats, melancholy ambient, crackly ‘80s boogie-funk loops and piano melodies that unfold across them. There’s also a lot of digitally-degraded muttering—barely comprehensible, sometimes swearing frustratedly. Even the track titles, in contrast to the more conspicuously poetic ones on Karma, often feel like weird half-thoughts: “Azifiziks,” “Its me,” “Hit That Spdiff” [sic]. The effect is constantly disquieting; it’s hard not to get drawn into a mindframe of estrangement from a strange world. Yet, even the bleakest vista can be very beautiful. The slo-mo but skittery hip-hop of “Game Over (e 1)” in particular is desperately sad but gorgeous, and the centerpiece miniature “Chill” can send shivers down your spine. There’s so much that feels arbitrarily, deliberately broken here—even the final track, “Pluto,” stops dead without warning. Yet among those “off” vibes, in among the lostness, there’s still the strange magic of human connection and creation.
