swim together. There’s a really important musical concept to me called saudade, it’s a Portuguese word that means ‘longing’, which musically means the happy and sad. It’s a concept I encountered when I was making ‘Denies the Day’s Demise’, and it took me a long time to come up with an electronic equivalent that didn’t just utilize Brazilian music to express it. Oddly to me ‘Bespoke’ is the most Brazilian record I’ve done. It has both the surface tension of concepts mixed with a few fashion ideas, with a melodious veneer over some of the songs that sounds beautiful. But when you actually listen to the words, you realise that it’s actually sad and that’s really what I wanted to deal with on this record.

As well as your own evolution in music, there’s been a lot of change in the so-called beat scene as we know it. How have you seen it change as a veteran of sorts?
Well, in L.A. we were able to percolate on things in a certain sense. We got to borrow people like Dilla as well as a whole bunch of others who poured into the city from elsewhere and overseas, which in turn helped make it possible for someone like Flying Lotus to come up. I would have to consider him a sort of ambassador in that respect, even though people like Kutmah, Ammoncontact and myself in some way were all making sounds that could also be categorised as beat music at the time. Then came the next couple of waves of producers, people like Baths, Shlomo, or Salva who started to go further on what beat music could be. At the same time, I think producers from overseas started to be doubly impacted, both by the sounds of their own shores, but also by the sound of L.A., like Rustie or Hudson (Mohawke). I mean, I imagine they had to at least be geeked about the L.A. scene. The same for all over the world, so many people coming through hip-hop, which as a language goes infinitely

deep, but when its evolution gets codified, it becomes powerful, and that’s when genres are made. I mean, I get hit up on Soundcloud every day by the best kids, and it’s infinite because beat music now doesn’t have a BPM, timbre or tonality. People just wear that hat and you can tell.

There also seems to be a new wave of enthusiasm for the visual side of shows. You’ve come up with your own – can you tell us who Archimedes is?
Archimedes was originally a mythological figure who used shine shields to reflect the sun to set fire to ships. I think I was really questing for that new vision with this project, something different to the whole video mapping stuff. I am coming from a very DIY aesthetic and I was essentially looking to create a wall of moving mirrors to move light around the stage. When it comes down to it I also have some very specific issues: I’m solitary on stage, I use a machine that allows so many possibilities. But unless I interact with it the show stops, so I wanted something that had the feeling of motion even if I became static. What I also really wanted to celebrate with Archimedes is the fact that you can see the ‘bones’ of the machine, it kind of has a steam-punk aspect. I didn’t want it to be this sort of high tech veneer that keeps you separate from it, you’re supposed to see it breathe. You can see yourself in it in a way, like you’re the one actually making it do what it does.

Interview and portraits by Fabrice Bourgelle

Daedelus’ latest album ‘Bespoke’ is out now on Ninja Tune. To catch Archimedes in action, see the rest of Daedelus’ tour dates at daedelusmusic.com