Daedalus

A teenage obsession with Greek mythology led Alfred Darlington to adopt the stage name Daedelus—a tribute to the artist, inventor, and craftsman - and become a multi-disciplinary artist in his own right: Daedelus has been sampled by Madlib on the classic MF DOOM track Accordion; they are part of the founding faculty of the prestigious Berklee College of Music’s electronic music performance program; and they are an an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, a scientific centre seeking extraterrestrial intelligence.

This speaks to the scope of Alfred Darlington’s talents: as a beatmaker, producer, performer, professor, and innovator, they simultaneously inhabit the worlds of cutting-edge music technology and improvised, off-the-cuff beatmaking, demonstrating that in an increasingly borderless music world, there’s not all that much difference between the two.

Daedelus laid down the building blocks of their sound as part of the L.A. beat scene, a loose collection of artists and producers working throughout the late ‘00s and early ‘10s to connect the dots between forward-facing electronica and underground hip-hop, redefining both of these labels in the process. Since then, their extensive discography has expanded to encompass abstract sonic collages, jagged beat science, and hallucinogenic synth explorations.