Someone's Listening In: A Night at the Light Show

Daedelus Sept. 7, (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. (betw. Thompson & Sullivan Sts.), 212-796-0741; 10, $15 (also Sept. 9 at Crash Mansion).

Last October, on a particularly busy evening for me, a friend insisted I meet him at Mercury Lounge for an early set from some entity called Daedelus. Being the manic type of concertgoer I am, I agreed to make some space in my cramped schedule, figuring I’d at least hear a good chunk of the performance he was heralding as a can’t miss.

The Mercury folks had, of course, pulled their usual not-so-cute trick of pushing all the set times back 30 minutes, and I arrived at the intersection of Allen and Houston to see—written on the handy blackboard out front—the temporally displaced start time for Daedelus. I did my best not to hyperventilate: I guessed that, at best, I’d only get to hear a couple songs.

When Daedelus—who turned out to be a slender, white Californian dressed as an anachronistic, Victorian-style dandy with mega-sideburns—took to the stage, surrounded only by tech gear, I was a bit perplexed.

Then, after he peered into his Mac for a brief moment and tapped a couple buttons, the music started. The samples, however, weren’t being controlled by some invisible process revealed only to the composer on the crowd-invisible side of an LCD.

Daedelus had diagonally propped a square box, an electronic device evenly covered with a 16-by-16 grid of occasionally backlit buttons that I would later learn is called a Monome, so that its interface was easily viewed by the audience. A few of rows of lights crept at varying speeds across the surface, like horizontal Space Invaders with nothing to conquer, and then repeated the digital march again from the starting point once they had crossed the box.

Then he touched it and then touched it again: with every tap on the keypad, the grid of lights and its corresponding sounds altered, played by the composer with a flamboyant air, wielding his hand alternately like he was playing a harp or selecting an elevator floor.

A string loop, shimmering buzz or break beat that would have uninterruptedly strutted by to the edge of the box, resumed in its middle or reversed in direction, the corresponding keys lighting and altering according to every tap.

What Daedalus, whose real name is Alfred Darlington, does on stage is make a brand of sample-based, electronic music that instantly engages those (and I usually fall squarely into this camp) who want not just to hear music, but to see it being made.

Don’t think of it, however, as the gimmicky crutch on which Daedelus places his stage weight: the music—a smart mix of galloping, glitchy percussion, harmonic deftness and creative use of sounds from bygone eras—is an equal partner. The Monome being but an adaptable piece of hardware that any savvy user can integrate with hundreds of different applications, Daedelus uses the same intellect to craft his booming and clicking opuses as he did to create his live set-up.

For proof, visit either last year’s tour document, Live At Low End Theory, or this year’s Daedelus studio release, Love To Make Music To.

The former is a recording of a show in L.A., which proves from the first track on, as chunky, menacing vocal snippets of “I Put A Spell On You” loom over cut-and-paste drums and surgical beeps, that his live work is just as much an exploration-worthy soundscape in headphones as it is experienced five feet from the stage.

Love To Make Music To is a showcase, from catchy, hum-and-snap-along opener “Fair Weather Friends” to the vintage strings and layered vocals of closer “You’re The One,” that Daedelus is a world away from the tacky, popped-collar, $30-cover omst omst omst of a clubby Manhattan weekend.

So, as you can well imagine, I stayed ‘til the end of Daedelus’ set that night at Mercury, listening and watching as a blur of samples drenched the audience, forgetting both the time and the event I was intent on catching afterward.

Do yourself a favor and schedule your evening around Daedalus this week—he’s playing on Sept. 7 at (Le) Poisson Rouge and on Sept. 9 at Crash Mansion. You won’t be wondering what else you’re missing, but rather how someone can make you want to dance recklessly and watch cautiously at the same time.