Daedelus - Denies the Day’s Demise

Mush



Rating: 9/10

MF Doom, Sci, Laura Darling, Prefuse 73, TTC, Cyne, Mike Ladd, and Hrishikesh Hirway. These were some of the guest appearances that could be found on last year’s Exquisite Corpse, a record so unparalleled that its mere existence defied any successful progression from that point. For their follow up, Denies the Day’s Demise, Santa Monica-based Daedelus played all instruments and provided all vocals with the exception of "Sundown," sung by Amir Yaghmai, and "Our Last Stand," which deserved additional programming by Jonathan Larroquette.

And, although its predecessor is like a milestone in soundscaping, Denies the Day’s Demise proves that Daedelus needn’t have an army of guest stars to craft an enjoyable album. But this is more than that. Denies the Day’s Demise is an enjoyable album, one of those which ultimately leads to wild speculation as to whether any future albums in the same vein will ever manage as well. Releasing one album per year as Daedelus (real name: Alfred Weisberg Roberts) blends sterile digital fragments with dreamy swirls of sound and color to a pleasant and always promising result.

2002’s Invention from Plug Research had already beached Daedelus far from the insipid, uninspired playground in which modern producers are content to frollick, and Denies the Day’s Demise is the true and definite realization of the Promethean skills he hides under his fingers. Boldly creative tracks like the opener. "At My Heels" (isn’t that narration voice reminiscent of Burroughs?) and "Like Clockwork Springs" are defiantly at odds with the vacant promenade that is to escalate the American Top 40 on a Saturday afternoon.

By the third song, "Bahia," Denies the Day’s Demise treats listeners to the discovery of soaked Brazilian rhythms, remarkably able to still find space on the producer's palette. This time, Daedelus explores samba and bossa nova, and integrates their vernacular, juicy nutrients in an already succulent platform. He provides these bits of dash now ("Petite Samba") and then ("Viva Vida"), adding the punch just when it is needed rather than dumping it all over the map, opting to sound fresh rather than obnoxiously literal. Apart from these Latin influences and the funky element they provide, the disc is a dense, cerebral, sweated-over work of art.

The orchestral sketches in numbers like "Dreamt of Drowning," merged with some figures of an aural past, notably arrangements from the 30s, risk putting this record in the jazz section of a slippery home catalogue. The IDM counterpart in this record – there’s at least one in every Daedelus album; in Exquisite Corpse it was "Just Briefly" – is "Our Last Stand," a hit-and-run game that inebriates both the mind and the legs. His arsenal is like any other producer’s; a fistful of boxes, beats that defy gravity and common sense, and samples that induce headaches when isolated from the blanketed comfort that they give to their music. But, while most simply obliterate their potential in their haste to create the illusion of newness, Daedelus is a devoted, creative artist.

Alfred Roberts has been releasing records and remixes solo, under the Daedelus moniker, and also with Frosty as Adventure Time or, as he puts it, "soon enough The Long Lost (with Laura Darling)," but he never lets his music sound obsolete. Even after repeated listens. Choosing to take cues from the past, Daedelus never alienates the modern electronics he has in store. And, unlike Winsor McCay’s creation, Little Nemo, featured on the cover, he knows how to sound wiser every day.

http://www.lostatsea.net/review.phtml?id=369208214448daeb17c462

David Shultz - David Shultz

Triple Stamp



Rating: 8/10

This review inaugurates a new form of analyzing records. As I dig into my fresh memories of David Shultz’s self-titled record, it’s John Frusciante’s free Internet album From the Sounds Inside that’s playing in the background. Since they move in an analogous wavelength, I assumed there would be no problem establishing an ideological bridge between the two. Both write confessional tracks with a penchant for improvisation and they always avoid the endless boogie clichés.

This record is a logical progression from Shultz’s more proactive work: forty songs in his first two years as a solo act. For this, he chalked up ten hard-boiled tracks that take visual and aural quotes from each other. The result is an instrumental finesse that could only be found in the sadistic comfort of a bargain store. His finger-picked guitar style on tracks like "How It Was", "Abyss" or "Grey Away" takes its cues from the Pelt’s canons, but the stamina provided by the distensile bass is purely his own, or Marcus Shrock’s for that matter.

Backed by one-chord ruminations, "Fisher King" possesses a trait that may stymie a full comprehension of David Shultz: its noirish atmosphere unplugs the old amps and leads you to drony meditations that then drop out of sight, just as "All the Same" unleashes its receded intimacy. In this particular aspect, Frusciante does it better, constantly taking the temperature of the listener and never allowing him to get lost in the drowsiness of microtonal perception.

To wrap this album up, the guitar in "Blue Jay" is almost percussive, backed by lines like "Oh how I burned my eyes, I tried to stare at you anyway", which bleed into the great finale that is "Of All the Things". Always loath to acknowledge that acoustic music will save the universe, I have an occasional fondness for college folk and lustrous pop craftsmanship. There is a lot to be said about Shultz’s humble, spartan voice, but it’s really incautious to reduce this record to his vocal delivery.

In Shultz’s music, arrangements aren’t merely illustrative. In little more than half an hour, he shows how to grow cotton from apparently obsolete echo boxes and seemingly sludgy, crap beats. I’m not sure who’s the disciple and who’s the master, but John Frusciante and David Shultz are kind of replicating each other’s footsteps. Only, they don’t know how.

http://www.lostatsea.net/review.phtml?id=131640451044609c6242f64