Will Schube gets his horse race picks from Daedelus.
Is there a more trustworthy musical curator than Daedelus? If you want a killer and eclectic DJ set that bumps Tropicália music while giving equal and fascinated attention to EDM, Alfred Darlington is your man. If you want a dusty gem unearthed and flipped into a subtly perfect sample, go with Daedelus. The steampunk wizard’s record label, Magical Properties, is perhaps the greatest reminder that Darlington has one of the best ears in the business. His latest signees, the mysterious YAYAYA from Holland, confirm such suspicions with ear-busting bravado.
Today, POW is premiering the video for “I Go Up,” a two-step banger simultaneously one step removed from Chicago’s famed scene. The music is accompanied by a striped man dancing along, some distant version of Charlie Kelly’s Green Man. The video is nothing more than this possessed menace removing layers of his face before it eventually melts off as the juke subsides and a slow-building, epic synth line builds as the original sample is slowly reintroduced. It’s DJ Rashad meets DJDS.
This is a perfect microcosm of what makes YAYAYA and their self-titled LP so fascinating. Their incessant, maniacal fiddling of traditional dance norms is in line with their label boss, and as a result, the group (band? single dude masquerading for a performance art piece?) presents one of the freshest debuts in electronic music so far this year (or last year, really). With YAYAYA, Daedelus is correct, as he always is. His ears have led us down a virtuous path. He (all of us, really) has YAYAYA to thank this time around.
