A couple of weeks ago I headed into Toronto to check out Flying Lotus live in concert. While the show was great - particularly the visual effects that accompanied the music - I was unsettled by how much Flying Lotus shifted his sound from the more ethereal and contemplative music encountered on his records to a more straight-up EDM aesthetic. In a way I shouldn't have been surprised. It must be so difficult for electronic artists to not succumb to the temptation to load their with dynamic drops and overly-heavy beats simply to please the crowds desires. But I do have to say that, for an artist who has created some of the genres most thought-provoking music, I was surprised by how rarely the show shifted away from the simple call to "get crazy!!"
More than anything though, the show cemented in me the realization that I like my dance music to be of the funky variety (something I now see being reflected in Felix - put on some Robert Hood or Araab Muzik and you get no response. Put on some Talking Heads and he can hardly handle himself). This is where Dan Snaith's new dance project Daphni comes in. Shedding the more psychedelic indie sound of his group Caribou, with Daphni's new record Jiaolong Snaith channels the likes of Arthur Russell and David Byrne, bringing into conversation a variety of global sounds with minimal electronic sounds. The result is a excellent dance album (perhaps even my favorite of the year) that is extremely funky, and light of hand. Carrying such a minimal aesthetic, Jiaolong makes for good company, never pounding you over the head with an idea or riff, while never losing your interest as well. It's an album that, in my view, stands out beautifully in a world of electronic music that in many ways become over-saturated with with a heavy handedness that at first demands the listener's attention, but rarely, if ever, remains capable of keeping it for any amount of time.
So here's a taste of the record. "Ye Ye", the track that we first heard last year as a single (and heavily promoted by Radiohead's Thom Yorke), remains the centrepiece of Daphni's overall sound, and serves as a wonderful taste of what to expect from the record as a whole.
