The shape of
things that came

>> With a fancy for a fantastical past, Daedelus is West Coast hip hop’s odd man out and about

EPOCH RIFFER: Daedelus

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Perhaps it’s because he’s from Los Angeles, a dream factory of a city that only blossomed in the 1950s, but Ninja Tune artist Daedelus, aka Alfred Darlington, is deeply in love with the past—or rather, a loose and idealized composite thereof. Darlington creates modern music, to be sure, straddling hip hop and brainy electronica (he’s had releases on Stones Throw and Warp as well), but this incurable romantic’s resources and intentions are drawn to a large degree from a time before the dawn of rock ’n’ roll.

“I try not to ever say no to any kind of music, ” says Darlington, on the horn from L.A., “because if it sounds right for the moment, it should be right. You shouldn’t say no because it’s illegal, or it’s from too old of an age and doesn’t resonate with some ’70s funk or something. It should be open and available. The only difference is that you have to be aware of it, so I try to cast a wide net in my listening. Luckily, my background is such that I’ve done a lot of classical and jazz playing, and when you do that, you realize quickly how other people become influenced by a particular moment in musical history. As much as ’70s funkateers are the mainstay of this hip hop sampling community, you see that their roots and influences easily date back to ’60s experimental rock, and that dates back to the folkies and the bop stuff.

“It all goes back to Erik Satie,” he laughs. “Why not utilize that natural interplay and sample what sounds right?”

Recast the past

Darlington’s Daedelus moniker is derived from not only Greek mythology and James Joyce, but also a spaceship in the anime Robotech. It gets one to thinking about Japanese pop culture’s romanticized, fantastical perception of pre-war Europe, a funhouse mirror distorting and blending various eras and societies (take the Harajuku gosuloli girls, for instance). It’s no surprise that Darlington relates.

“Be it the idea of steampunk,” he says, “or the pre-Industrial Revolution fantasy of the neo-Renaissance, the great philosophers and Romantics—it’s always the case that anything from the past, you can pour any kind of meaning into. History is very alterable, as much as it’s some fixed quantity of something that actually happened—the victor makes all that stuff up! It’s very possible to take people, places and events, and change them to your own will about things.

“I do like the fact that these EGL [Elegant Gothic Lolita] girls are picking and choosing aspects of something that obviously never existed, but the fact that it has some historical resonance makes it pop in a different way. It’s different from a mash-up because it’s done with a little more taste or their own input. It isn’t just two things rubbing together, it’s some new synthesis, and that’s entirely what I go for.”

Petticoat compunction

And not in half measures. Darlington’s known for the Victorian apparel he sports not only on stage but often in private. “Other than the fact that it’s highly impractical and therefore nigh-on impossible to really do on a daily basis, it’s really something you have to go out of your way to discover. I take the same approach with a lot of my sample sources, this idea that you can find something anywhere. I’ll go to a thrift store and find things that I can alter and change and mend and pattern to become Victoriana.

“It’s highly impractical where I come from. Los Angeles is an overly hot environment, and it’s well known that the Victorian era was a mini-ice age, so it makes sense that people would be wearing waistcoats and petticoats and greatcoats. It makes it more of a gesture when it’s unnecessary, it makes it more of a choice, which is, I think, part of the dandy ideal, and why anyone makes art anyways—because you’re making the choices.”

Considering the Daedelus discography, one gets to wondering, what might antique futurists like HG Wells or the technologically fixated Jules Verne have made of hip hop’s process and principles?

“I would hope, in my heart of hearts,” says Darlington, “that they would end up being Malcolm McLaren-type figures, seeing hip hop for what it is, getting to its essence, experimenting with the notion of it, this idea of storytelling in a quick, visceral form. You take HG Wells and that Deltron 3030 record, I mean, that’s a plausible thing that could happen. There could be a lot of intimate understanding of how this all worked out, how the whole idea of the future, what was to become the future, could work out. I wouldn’t be surprised if that fusion could be possible.”

With Ghislain Poirier, Devlin & Darko and
Ghostbeard at Igloofest, Quai Jacques-Cartier
(Old Port) on Friday, Jan. 25, 6 p.m.,
$10 ($5 before 8 p.m.)