Actress: aLive at The CAMP (for K+CR)

As the property ladder eats its way further and further along Kingsland Road, the area pervading the junction of Old Street and City Road is the district’s most commercially malignant, answering to the higher calling of last year’s Cameron-fronted ‘Silicon Valley for east London’ proposals. The antidote, it would appear, to an area once comparable to the bric-a-brac DIY artistry of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant pocket, unapologetic glass-lit verandas apprehend the bordering skyline like the greediest of magpie flocks.

The City Arts and Music Project (CAMP), a dwelling in the basements of an indistinguishable office block mesh yards from the station, is one of a few rallying cries for EC1’s restlessly prosperous arts scene. In a number of ways, CAMP is similar in feel and location, rather than scope, to The Haçienda (or how I have imagined it): Huge, redundant utility pipes sag from a fettered concrete ceiling, illuminated by flickering green and red lights recalling the intersection’s veracious scuffle.

Similar in tone again is the bubbling, distinctively murky techno of London’s Darren Cunningham, known by his hourly-expanding army of followers as Actress. Draped from toe to nose in custom black, Cunningham’s presence, silhouetted in front of a white screen, is both mystical and electrifying at first sight. Leading the crowd by example, his perpetually bobbing and twitching hoody-cloaked head, driven like a Black & Decker through favourites Hubble and Maze from last year’s critically screened Splazsch LP, made for compulsive gawping.

(Photo: Vanessa Govinden)

Live, the songs we have come to recognise were lengthened and scrutinised, flattened out by Cunningham’s extensive creative artillery. Movements were as subtle and infrequent as strikingly stimulating, breathing life into a perpetual ebb and flow of low end digitalism. Bass was not merely a texture in this setting, but a function: Oozing into the gaps between dancers, the holes in the floor and the beer bottles on the bar, the drone was a key unifier, infecting even the most reluctant of dancers with a pensive twitch.

For one of, if not the, token dubstep-related recluses of last year, it was perhaps surprising to see just how keen a boot-shaker Cunningham is; flickering his arms to one side like Vishnu one minute, pounding his sweat-saturated face in and out of view behind his equipment the next.