E-Harmony: Daedelus' Love to Make Music To

Which is what the rather antiminimalist Daedelus does too, on this new album. Just so much sonic information shoves for attention in these tracks, not to a claustrophobic, show-offy effect but with his now infamously architectural flair for sound design and, most importantly, extremely reverberant combinations of melody, harmony and texture.

From the impossibly up opening “Fair Weather Friends,” which is built on a sample of a Japanese surf guitarist from the ’60s, to the “failed experiments in minimalism” of tracks like “I Took Two” and “Twist the Kids,” however, some of the production ideas behind these tracks differ quite a bit from Daedelus’ typical styles, with less emphasis on the painting with samples of his past work and a newfound hands-on wrangling of a lot of vintage analog-keyboard gear.

Aubrey Edwards

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• Aubrey Edwards
• Denver International Airport
• Alfred Weisberg-Roberts
• Scott Herren
• Electronic Music

It’s that thick, fat, buzzing analog-synth sound that gives his new tracks this in-your-face sort of sociability, all of which arrives courtesy of the vintage gear of his beloved 1992 rave scene.

“On this record, I have a love affair with the Roland SH-09. In rave culture, the SH-101 is the most stolen synthesizer, and one of the early analog synths to have. It was one of the first to have an arpeggiator, in a real cheap form, so it wasn’t your kind of really fancy Jupiter synths, it was more a ground-level kind of thing. So, using the SH-09 allows me to sort of get to some of those sound sets, ’cause it’s really an exact precursor to the 101. It doesn’t have an arpeggiator, but it has its own unique bass sound. People talk about the Moog series having an amazing bass sound, but this one is really different.”

He’s also doing some extraordinary things with the famous old “Hoover bass” technique: Basically, a kind of very low subtone would come into a record at certain intervals, and in so doing on a big sound system, it would kind of blow people’s hair around back in the day. It can also make the material around the knees of your pants vibrate.

Then there’s his trusty midi-controller the Monomeme, which allows him to sample bits and pieces of a song he’s created, or even live material, and rips ’em apart on the fly, recombines, reverses, repeats ’em, allowing for a lot of improvisational control in an immediate fashion. That’s his main ax onstage, and he’s now used it extensively in Love to Make Music To.

“When I’m using the Monomeme live, I’m trying to find the audience,” says Daedelus. “I’m trying to find what people want to hear and what they want to do.” It’s a reflex that steered the early rave DJs toward the sound of surprise. The original rave masters “were making music that was futuristic, and it’s a future that never came to pass,” he says. “As quick as it happened, all those genres — breakbeat, house and techno — they all fragmented back into their own individual categories. So this is a dream more than a reality.

“It’s bittersweet to be dealing with genres that people aren’t familiar with, so when you’re subverting them, people won’t know. And rave music, a lot of people won’t know — and why should they? It’s a very specific moment in time, and that’s what makes it so compelling.”

Daedelus celebrates the release of Love to Make Music To on Saturday, July 12, at a private downtown location. For more information, go to www.groovetickets.com.