DAEDELUS - Exquisite Corpse

If you had to boil down the music of Daedelus (the artistic alias behind which Californian producer Alfred Weisberg-Roberts hides, a man fond of dressing like a dandy from another era) to its core ingredients, you'd have to cite more or less seamless parts of hip-hop (both instrumental and not), IDM, electro, downtempo and jazz, all seasoned with samples lifted from old easy-listening and orchestral records. When "Exquisite Corpse" came out in 2005, Daedelus already had a fair handful of records under his belt, but it was only with this work that his musical synthesis reached a truly notable creative balance.

The opening track, "Dearly Departed", seems to come from some extratemporal dimension, with its liquid jazz chords of Rhodes piano and the voice of Sheena Easton who, delicately, almost lost within her own vibrations, sings "I Will Say Goodbye". Right after, "Impending Doom" boasts an irregularly polyrhythmic beat and guest MF Doom on the mic. More layered is the architecture of "Just Briefly", with a rhythmic path straight out of krautrock, echoes of space age pop, operatic ghosts and small swells of strings.

After the tremulous easy-listening of "Move On" (with Lil' Sci on the mic), a lullaby sung by Lara Darling and a sweeping piano collide head-on with a pulse loaded with digital grit, which resurfaces in "The Crippled Hand", the longest track on the album: a tortured mix of jagged beats, soft vocalizing (again from Darling), scattered piano touches and orchestral flashes.

The second half is slightly less captivating, with TTC's French rapping over the danceable "Cadavre Exquis" earning the dubious honor of weakest moment on the record, while "Welcome Home", with its relaxed electro stride (produced by Prefuse 73), stands as its most straightforward. On the other hand, "Drops" (closer to a classic form of jazz-hop), the orchestral grandeur of "Fallen Love", the dreamlike loop of "I Sent Off II Sus Per Coil (Jogger Remix)" and, finally, the scat-folk with a tenderly pastoral coda of "Thanatopsis" offer further examples of this combinatory art which, echoing the surrealist cadavre exquis, delights in generating ever-new meanings by juxtaposing sonic fragments that are often ideologically worlds apart.

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03/10/2020