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DJ Alfred Darlington’s pseudonym is no throwaway–this Daedalus is as much an inventor as his mythical Greek namesake; his wings are his rhythms and rhymes, his beats and freestyles–and the Santa Monica-born spinner soars on his own anarchic sound that is as genuine in its extolment of the contemporary as it is old-school. I’ve gone overkill with the literary comparisons, but the point is his knack for interacting with the crowd and keeping the listener on the club floor, even if vicariously–something nowhere more evident than in his show in Italy at the 2009 Dissonanze Festival, available on the Red Bull Music Academy site. You listen to his music, you go to his show, and you’re borrowing his wings. His gift is his beatmatching, which is most likely to solidify his signature sound– it’s a versatile canvas of moods from so many different genres sprawling into each other perfectly, and something sorely absent from the club scene of today, which seems tepid in its experimenting with different scenes. His only drawback is the occasional foray into monotonous and run-of-the-mill beats, but what an innate talent the man has for mixing jazz with R&B, hip-hop with 8-bit Nintendo noise– or pretty much whatever he feels like at the moment.

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