This winter Albert’s Favourites present the new mini album by influential beats purveyor Daedelus and unique poet/MC Joshua Idehen. ‘Holy Water Over Sons’ is a powerful yet vulnerable collection of poems contemplating life as a black man, and protest – made vivid on platforms of otherworldly, future electronics.
‘Holy Water Over Sons’ weaves through a world at extremes, bringing back to light the racial injustices which ignited the Black Lives Matter movement. Its eight tracks of minimal mechanoid lamentation and ethereal, almost dreamlike electro-blues pulsate under meditations of race, depression, identity and grief.
Daedelus is Alfred Darlington, a prolific mainstay of LA’s Beat Scene who’s renowned for crafting diverse, inventive and playful music for labels including Warp, Ninja Tune and Brainfeeder. Their track ‘Experience’ was sampled on the Madvillain classic ‘Accordion’ (also later used by Drake on ‘The Grind’), with Daedelus again appearing on record alongside Madlib for Dwight Trible & The Life Force Trio’s ‘Waves Of Infinite Harmony’.
Joshua Idehen is a British-born Nigerian based in Sweden. A gifted a spoken word artist and musician, he has contributed poems to Mercury-nominated albums ‘Channel The Spirits’ by The Comet Is Coming and ‘Your Queen Is A Reptile’ by Sons of Kemet. More recently, he formed Calabashed with Alabaster DePlume, a spiritual jazz crew who were recently named a 2021 one-to-watch by NME. He also worked on the most recent Sons Of Kemet album, ‘Black To The Future’.
With Daedelus freshly in Boston and Joshua recently in Stockholm, the pair began collaborating remotely in January 2020. Beats and verses were traded online, until the death of George Floyd and the resultant Black Lives Matter protest across the world forced a course correction. “We are living in a dark timeline”, Joshua says. “It felt dishonest not to speak on what I was feeling, watching everything unfold in the UK and US at the time.”
The results capture that darkness and anger, with an uncategorizable record that speaks directly to the times. Album highlight ‘If We Must Take It, Fair Enough’ is a visceral snapshot of the infamous Washington DC protest at the peak of the unrest, whilst ‘Haunted’ brings a chopped and screwed flavour, imagining a world where Tamar Rice lived on. ‘Standing In My Own Way’ Parts I and II, on the other hand, are meditations on lost friendship, accompanied by soft, melodic rhodes and a chorus featuring Katie Dixon.
This innovative record from two in-demand artists at the height of their powers is a singular, forceful vision, capturing the mood of the pandemic era.
Daedelus is an aspiration of music without limit. Their discography stretching back more than 20 years is fittingly erratic,
and list of collaborators dizzying. Most recently releasing with Albert's Favourites, artist in residence at S.E.T.I., and founding faculty of Berklee's EDI performance program....more
London’s Create Define Release celebrates 20 years with an experimental and electronic compilation that features their collaborators. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 11, 2023
supported by 9 fans who also own “Holy Water Over Sons”
Like so many others, this came like a bolt out of the blue and, even though it's well before payday, I had to have this astonishing album on vinyl to prove it exists. The feel of the tunes makes me feel like the Impressions do, Curtis Mayfield, the big spaces and instinctive horns and stuff drifting in and out. Great grooves and I can see lots of ghosts nodding along to this with big smiles on their faces. At last! Anthony Cottrell