Daedelus, Joshua Idehen - Holy Water over Sons (2021)

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.