Daedelus – Exquisite Corpse

Around the 1920s, surrealist artists invented a game that involved players drawing a portion of a picture and passing it along to the next player to draw their portion of the picture, not knowing what the previous had drawn, usually resulting in an abstract mesh of styles – the result was known as an exquisite corpse.

And with this record, Daedelus has created his own Exquisite Corpse alongside talented collaborators such as rapper MF DOOM, producer Prefuse 73 and slam poet Mike Ladd, among others.

In true exquisite corpse style, all of the artists featured bring their own to the table – first and foremost, Daedelus (who else?). Daedelus’ production work is far from the ordinary – think hip hop beats scattered with elegant string sections and evolving electronic backdrops with (very) well picked film, early jazz, lounge and orchestral samples. And for a few of my favourite collaborators – MF DOOM lends his unique vocal and lyrical talents to “Impending Doom”, Laura Darlington (Daedelus’ wife) brings a beautiful vocal lullaby in “Now and Sleep” and we even get an incredible acoustic and vocal performance from Hrishikesh Hirway (of The One AM Radio) on “Thanatopsis”. All four bring hugely different styles to the mix and they all work incredibly. Hats off to Daedelus for bringing together such a great group of people to play this game of exquisite corpse!

Take it from DOOM when he says “bro, this beat is sickly retarded yo/sound like it came off the Hate Ricky Ricardo show”.

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Cabbageboy – Genetically Modified

Si Begg (under the Cabbageboy guise) is a relatively unknown artist on Ntone (a now-defunct sub-label of Ninja Tune) serving up incredible futurist breaks and beats.

Opener “Departure” indicates where we’re going – a surreal trip through outer space, with an insane clatter of jazzy beats and samples over massive scaling sci-fi synths. Somehow, Cabbageboy manages to mix in an odd feeling of nostalgia into the futurism of his work. Even the album artwork looks like something from the old science textbooks we would all read in school.

Even stranger is how Begg manages to string together these uber-obscure samples and mix them in with gritty future beats, somehow making really engaging electronic jams without it sounding straight-up ridiculous. (Not many producers could pit Oprah Winfrey over acid house and do it this successfully)

Stylistically, this record has hints of electronica, acid house, breakbeat and hip hop, but the CD would be out of place on any music store shelf. It’s experimental music at it’s finest.

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