DAEDELUS
Love To Make Music To
ZENCD142
Ninja Tune 2008
15 Tracks. 55mins00secs

With nine albums and a handful of EPs and collaborations under his belt, Daedelus’s Alfred Darlington has made the blend of hip-hop-infused electronica he has helped shaping up his own, giving it an unmistakable dandy slant. Love To Make Music To, his latest offering, his first long player recorded especially for Ninja Tune, is once again a distinctively colourful and varied collection, centred on an imaginary story which begins during the 1894 Chicago World’s Fair and concludes a hundred years later.

Released as a taster to the album, Hrs:Mins:Secs was originally given away on Daedelus’s website. With its chunky aggressive techno bits and maddening vocals, sounding uncannily like Black Sifichi, the track lifted the veil on a raw, vivacious sound, evoking late eighties British rave music, which, if not in any way defining the album, bounces back on the slightly gentler I Took Too, Bass In It and If We Should further down, while on the mechanical Assembly Lines, which seems to find its roots in Chaplin’s Modern Times, Daedelus gives his light-hearted electronica a welcome airing.

The album opens on a much sunnier note with the sixties-fuelled Fair Weather Friend, released as an EP last year, with its driven beat and child-like female vocal, and the breezy Make It So, featuring vocal contribution from Michael Johnson, setting Love To Make Music To on a very different path to that hinted with Hrs:Mins:Secs. Later, Get Off Your HiHats or the playful Drummery Jam, with its discharges of library music, find Daedelus in a similar cheerful disposition, busy arranging fresh hooks all over heady grooves. Elsewhere, a hint of R’n'B on My Beau provides the album with one of its catchiest tunes, while Twist The Kids, Touchtone or You’re The One confidently reaffirms Darlington’s hip hop credentials.

For this record, Darlington has once again surrounded himself with a wide range of contributors, including hip hop luminaries such as 1200 Techniques’ N’fa on Twist The Kids, Taz on Touchtone and Bass In It, Paperboy on Touchtone and My Beau, and Sa-Ra member Om’mas Keith on the rather splendid You’re The One, while Erika Rose gives My Beau a smooth silky chorus, and Darlington’s wife, Laura, with whom he is due to release an album later on in the year as The Long Lost, appears on closing piece If We Should.

Despite so many undeniable highlights, the album somewhat fails to gel properly and ends up feeling a tad bitty and lacking of conviction. It is as if the sheer scale of the project was ineluctably bringing it down. In the past, Daedelus has handled similarly varied and ambitious records with incredible versatility and bravery. Here though, it is as if he wanted to fit in just a little too much for one serving, resulting in a slight loss of focus. Love To Make Music To is certainly not a bad record, and actually features a handful of classic Daedelus moments, but it is not one that appears to have enough direction to rise to the challenge of previous records convincingly.

3.4/5

Daedelus (MySpace) | Ninja Tune
Buy: CD

VARIOUS ARTISTS
You Don’t Know: Ninja Cuts
ZENCD150
Ninja Tune 2008
50 Tracks. 224mins35secs

Ninja Tune have been going for an awful long time. Eighteen years in fact. Back at the outset, deep in the mists of time, when we were quite a bit younger than we are now (if we existed at all, that is), the Ninja crew were a bunch of cool fuckers. They rode in on the backs of the likes of DJ Food, Coldcut, Hex and co. Soon after the founding fathers came a second wave consisting of 9 Lazy 9, Funki Porcini, DJ Vadim and The Herbaliser. The early compilations – Funkjazztical Tricknology, Tone Tales From Tomorrow – were a lot of fun and contributed to a playful rebalancing of the rather-too-serious for its own good self-definition of trip-hop by Bristolian headliners (you know who I mean).

Later in the nineties and early noughties, fascinating leftfield luminaries such as Burnt Friedman, Chris Bowden, Roots Manuva and Jaga Jazzist hopped on the bus. But somewhere along the way the main stable seemed to get a bit hackneyed, those waggish ‘you are listening to a stereo recording’-type samples began to bring listeners out in hives and the Ninja Tune share price plummeted.

Had enough of the history lesson? Knew it all already? Fair enough, but all that’s the background to this three CD release which represents something of a lifting up of the proverbial carpet to see what strange mould outgrowths and unlikely furballs have accumulated in the shadows over the years. This is Ninja Tune taking the opportunity to open up the hoover bag and tell an alternate, arguably more interesting history than the one you’ve just read above (sorry!)

So how about The Cinematic Orchestra, DJ Shadow, cLOUDDEAD, Wiley, Amon Tobin, Spank Rock, Mr Scruff, Daedelus, Ty, Diplo, Homelife, Ghislain Poirier, The Bug? Occasionally, the likes of NMS intoning ‘the government have programmed your brain, it’s a brave new world’ begin to pall, but then along comes Mike Ladd to raise the bar again with the aptly titled Blah Blah. Likewise, Cinematic Orchestra’s Rites Of Spring feels too much like a tokenistic ‘oh look we even do free jazz blowouts’, but the downturn is quickly salved by the rather lovely backwards vocals and strings of Max & Harvey’s Thieves. Over a gargantuan, exhausting and probably over-extended fifty tracks and three hours, forty four minutes and thirty five seconds, we get taught a lesson, the gist of which is – Ninja Tune are a lot more varied, less cuddly, harsher and more in-yer-face than you and your wonky memory might have come to believe. On the evidence of this I’m loathe to disagree.

3.5/5

Ninja Tune
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