Hey Speccy. Get your feet off my coffee table, your neck out of yr arse and get a heads up. You don't have to dig Daedelus. In fact, the sporadical 'lectro god from LA kinda hopes you hate his astonishing new opus Love To Make Music To.
"All the albums I've ever really ended up loving. I've hated at first. I like records you have a relationship with, soetimes stormy, but unforgettable. We're kind of being tutored by the industry at the moment not to have that kind of relationship, to use music and move on. I like records that come back at you until you can't resist."
Daedelus (known to the postman as Alfred Darlington) has been knocking out wonder-on-wax for a nigh-on a decade now. After startling releases on Mush, Plug Research, Hefty, Tigerbeat6, and Eastern Developments (check out his work with Busdriver, as well - the riotous Denies The Days Demise). Love To Make Music To finds him on Ninja Tune and letting loose the most confident, instant-hit noise of his life.
"Spending a lot more time in Europe DJ-ing in the small hours for the kind of fucked-up, pilled-up audiences who demand your music is all over the place, being way happier with the label I'm on - it's all contributed to more confidence, I think, even though I'm still amazed anyone gets to hear what I do. What you have to learn making music by yourself is that it's not just about getting enough tracks together to call it an album. It's having a reason to create, something you need to express. Feel is everything. The rest is just colour."
This is borne our as soon as the din hits you tympanic membrane; the freshness of this mentalist-melange of hip-hop, avant-electro, bass-heavy robo-funk, drum 'n' bass and jazz is in its willingness to be personal, intuitive, imperfect.
"Because when an idea's done, it's done, it's dead, it's over. Once I visualize what I want, I have to nail it quickly and be kind of dissatisfied with it. So long as I'm feeling the emotional content."
This is no hermetically isolated sonic-Pollock though - the collaborations that pop-off are always more than the sum: having worked with MF Doom, Mike Ladd, CYNE, Laura Darling, Prefuse 73, and the mighty TTC on previous albums, Love To Make... sees the Sa-Ra production crew join in the surge and spin magic into the stew. It's not surprising when he says the first record to blow his mind was Acen's Trip II The Moon - his sensibility clearly comes from that nutsoid moment when rave, hip-hop and d 'n' b were grabbing everything they could and ram-raiding it into the rush.
"The thing you learn from Public Enemy, and a lot of music from that era, is that it isn't just about geting the right samples, it's about breaking them up, smashing them apart to get closer to the sound of your own head. There's a little bit too much politeness in music at the moment - a little bit too much music that just seems to want to enter storage, be 'respected' - rock musicians wanting to sound as artificial as electronic music; electronic musicians wanting to sound like authentic bands. None of it reaches through and moves you."
Love To Make Music To doesn't give you a choice. Listen Move. Welcome joy back. And that coffee table's getting stomped to sawdust. This summer, if you ain't dancing, your dying.
NEIL KULKARNI