The beat scene has never been stronger. With Flying Lotus surging forward with his Brainfeeder imprint and the likes of Night Slugs pioneering the impossible-to-define mash up of forward-thinking club sounds, we’re spoilt for choice when it comes to beats. Alfred Darlington, or Daedelus, has played a pivotal part in the evolution of the scene and its sound. For the last ten years the producer has been pushing his unique brand of music forward, often incorporating the most surprising of elements and doing away with convention. The curiously dressed dandy, along with other key figures, made the thriving, anything goes beat scene we have today possible. And, for his many years of music making, few have managed to maintain the air of mystery that Daedelus commands. Fabrice Bourgelle caught up with the producer before his show in London last month – read on to find out about the ideas behind the music and discover how Archimedes was forged…

They say home is where the heart is, but where would you say your heart resides these days?
I have fallen in love with Los Angeles again, nowadays it’s such a vibrant artistic community. It’s where my house and my wife are, and in that regard my mind trips back there. But when you play shows in so many other citiOes, you also start to see a really special side to them and tend to leave a part of yourself in different places, for instance I can say that I have some deep personal friends in Barcelona, and in that way it’s also a lot about the individuals that make up the city for me; in L.A. right now, there are some amazing people, making up an amazing scene, and that feels quite special to me.

What were your first encounters with electronic music?
The records my parents had were on the art and academic and experimental side of things. Stuff like Xanakis, John Cage, some Steve Reich, early

recordings on Folkways (which just blew my mind) plus your standard pop fair from the ’60s and ’70s, so I was able to get a taste of what early electronic music was, which was in itself almost a commentary on classical music at the time, like, “Where can we push sound post-melody?” Later on, I was encountering a lot of the early ’80s experimentations celebrated on the L.A. airwaves, stuff like Parliament and Funkadelic or Egyptian Lover. I was even lucky to have family connections to Parliament and got to meet George Clinton. But where I really found myself in electronic music was in rave. In ’91, I picked some stuff off XL – early Acen, (Sons of a) Loop Da Loop Era – almost all encountered randomly as L.A. had a rave scene, but it was still way to mature for me. In ’93 I came to the UK, and that’s when I was bombarded with the good stuff. Hearing pirate radio with weird dudes talking colloquially about the music and the clubs and hearing the music in context, which L.A. didn’t have in its rave culture, so I lived that difference until I came back again years later.

Would you say you derived your sound from your influences in a kind of ‘future-classic’ way?
Don’t get me wrong, during this whole period of time of being exposed to electronic music I was playing classical music and jazz. I didn’t even think this world was even possible. But the classical all mines the same territory, which is of Sturm und Drang or storm and thunder. It’s the thematic or movie music aspect, like Wagner, Vangelis or John Williams – they’re hyping up the emotions to make a point, and that’s my stuff. I mean in classic mythology, Daedalus as a figure is a basis for so many stories that get retold in various different ways, and when I’m on stage, I’m just trying to tell the oldest story there is to tell… That is, the one that isn’t prostitution. The other oldest story, not that one!