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Out now (Ninja Tune)
Deadelus is a Los Angeles-based producer and musician known for his use of the Monome - a MAX/MSP grid-based controller which he uses to build his sample-driven electronic music. He also likes to dress like a Victorian gentleman...
Daedelus has released a lot of music in his career, so much that, to be honest we’ve lost track of how many albums and EPs in total. And that’s because he’s obviously a man with a lot of ideas.
At times in his career this mishmash of ideas has left his output of work feeling fairly disjointed and unfocused, fortunately though, on Bespoke he pulls it off with aplomb. The album seems to be equally influenced by sample-based old-school hip-hop and Daedelus’s love of whimsical Victorian-esque anglophile tendencies, which sounds bizarre (and it is), but it works.
Penny Loafers mixes looped beats with backing vocals that sound like they’ve been sampled from classical music and old fashion radio broadcasts. Sew, Darn, Mend on the other hand, mashes up instrument parts and ends up sounding like something from the soundtrack from an old Final Fantasy game - which isn’t a bad thing in any way. Slowercase D, meanwhile, is basically a cleverly slowed down version of Daedelus's own track Trouble With a Capital D from last year's Ninja Tune XX compilation.
Daedelus’s use of different guest vocalist on almost ever track does give the album a varied, and at times disjointed, feel. But on the whole he’s managed a superb job of combining some disparate and varied samples into a consistent and enjoyable whole.
