Daedelus

Alfred Darlington is a singular, compelling figure. His aesthetic is full of contradictions; he performs in exquisite, tailored Victorian finery, colliding and sequencing countless samples onstage using an achingly new software interface. The music itself draws on jungle, techno, breaks, hip-hop, dubstep, jazz, electro, funk and even breakcore; this is a guy who sneers at boundaries in his rear-view mirror. He is Daedelus – the misspelling is intentional - and like his Greek counterpart, he is not lacking in ambition or invention. His superb concept albums, loaded with personal meaning and shimmering with warmth, are intricately detailed and stunningly diverse.

Based in Los Angeles, Daedelus has been making dreamy, genre-splicing tunes for the past decade, building up a hugely impressive back catalogue on labels such as Plug Research, Warp, Phthalo and Ninja Tune, with whom he currently resides, having released some of his best material – including 2005’s Exquisite Corpse, 2006’s Denies The Day’s Demise and this year’s masterpiece, Love To Make Music To, with them. Over the course of more than twenty albums and EPs, he has combined a bewildering array of styles to produce something unique and brilliant, cementing his reputation as a producer in both the hip-hop and electronic scenes and picking up a succession of quality collaborators along the way. TTC? Check. Saul Williams? Oh yes. Bus driver? Yep. MF Doom? Better believe it. Humility is still his watchword, however - when pressed, he simply says, “Thank goodness they were open to giving a chance to some sideways beats.”

Because of his interest in the subjectivity of music and the unique experience of the listener or audience member, he has expressed an interest in performing in “non-traditional spaces”. He has this to say about listening to music: “Sound largely lives in the air, and acoustic space decides quite beforehand where it will all have room to proceed. Now that might all seem a little too strange, but in one example think about how often we escape into headphones to abstract us from our limited or loud
acoustic environment. It isn’t dissimilar to when I’ll play a show and something about the temporaries will effect every decision.” Here is an artist who thrives on the opportunity to live in the moment and connect with the audience – you could say he was a more dapper Dan Deacon. He has occasionally taken this connection with the crowd to a logical conclusion, by sampling “whole bits of crowd interaction… But the technology is still coming together to make it as performance- (rather than chaos-) based as possible. For now it is somewhat a parlor trick rather then musical
gesture.”

Now to the technology. Daedelus has placed great stock in improvisation and rapid recording, with the smallest number of potential barriers to creative expression; with this in mind, he can be seen tapping away furiously at a couple of small boxes onstage, in an effort to create vast, textured soundscapes “on-the-fly”. These devices are Monomes – essentially interfaces for any number of software applications, whose neat rows of buttons can be used by musicians to trigger and loop samples, produce tones, tweak filters and quite possibly do your homework while you play the PSP. For Daedelus, it’s “very quick to play, lots of nights go many different directions, something that keeps me very interested in playing live”. The monome provides the immediacy which fuels his compositions and live sets, so he can concentrate on feeling and melody – “I prefer feeling because I understand it to be a quicker way to listeners’ hearts. Process music is far too much work, whereas melody makes
weepers and inspiration. I think that is what I am in it all for anyways.” Such devices seem to be taking off recently – witness the Tenori-on and Lemur promotional campaigns – and despite their “wildly different approaches” and varying degrees of flexibility, we can expect to see many more of them on the electronic scene in coming years.

Wandering through his back catalogue, you might imagine that Chris Clark, Aphex Twin, RJD2, The Avalanches, Prefuse 73, Plaid and Squarepusher had been secretly recording together as a supergroup for the past decade, under the radar and way out in left field. There is so much stunning music to be found here that it can be intimidating. There is a seamless, fearless mastery in all his work and an unpredictability and sophistication to everything he produces. It can all turn on a dime. Perhaps due to the thread of hip-hop and jazz running through much of his work, many see him as a Ninja Tune artist, and he’s unrestrained in his praise for the label: “Amazing history coupled with an eagerness to push forward. I have been
caught in their riptide, so to speak, thus far. It is amazing to be with a label that people have tattooed on their body, says something strong…” That said, they declined to release 2004’s lush Of Snowdonia. Maybe one label isn’t enough to contain all this restless invention…

It’s abundantly clear that music is his life. His wife Laura is another of his collaborators, as the other half of the gorgeous Long Lost project; incidentally, he says of friend Flying Lotus that “I think their will be a Laura and Lotus collaboration before I get the chance to. Never enough time between shows and records yet to do it”. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, having once played in a ska band which bore witness to the unmentionable dancefloor antics of pornstar Annabel Chong during a set. He mentions “bubblings up from the underground” of L.A., in the shape of Nosaj Thing, Matthew David, Free The Robots and Ras G. With one finger on the pulse, one foot on the dancefloor, one hand on his heart and his head in the clouds, Daedelus continues to draw listeners into his labyrinthine world.

Daedelus: Love To Make Music To

Daedelus, a Los Angeles producer lauded for his uniquely genre sampled releases, which owe a lot to his musically spoilt background in jazz and electronic music not to mention his aptitude for an array of instruments; has released this similarly dappled album.

A feature of his music which has thankfully been sustained in this release is his signature indulgence in musical anachronisms amid electronic backdrops. Throwbacks to Glenn Miller big band era and samples of ragtime piano relate his keenness for distinctively era specific samples and particularly for those belonging to the 30’s and 40’s. The frenetic whiplash electronic interruption in ‘Drummery Jam’ for example is fed to us through an oneiric depression era chorus in its introduction.

Daedelus is at his best cutting up samples of unusual sounds and blending them into chaotic collages rather than a concentration of a single style. Unfortunately this is made all too clear on tracks such as ‘Hrs:Mins:Sec’ and ‘Bass In It’ which due to their sparse use of this skill cause him to shoot wide of the left-field hip-hop that he successfully produces on the track ‘Touchstone’.

But these weaker moments only serve to emboss the albums highpoints, tracks such as ‘If We Should’ where doppler-esque glissando is cut short by synths sighing beneath Laura Darlington’s ambient vocals. Also the catchy ‘Make It So’ and the albums opener ‘Fair Weather Friends’ both feature the same endearingly optimistic beat.
It’s Daedelus’ willingness to introduce soundscapes paved with everything from samba drumbeats to electronic bleeps and cut-ups of noise turned music that redeem this album from the more forgettable tracks that unfortunately score through the continuity of its better tracks…

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRJ2YvRv3N4]