Daphne Oram was a female British composer and electronic musician, born in 1925...
Updated: Jan 13, 2024
20 August 2023
Daphni - Jiaolong (2012)
The 6 hour Four Tet & Floating Points recording of their DJ set at the closing of Plastic People has always been considered something of a blueprint to me when the idea for lo key collective was stewing in a pot, as we drove up and down the A34 to attend club nights at Lab11, Hare & Hounds and Rainbow Venues in Birmingham. I joked w/ Sexy Matty recently about how I always promised to drive us back when the party finished at 5am, yet I was always the messiest, especially during those days. Considering I'm 33 now I was either a late bloomer, or I've clung to this thing called 'youth' longer than most...
dark basement club nights doesn't have to be all about the doof doof
The mix itself, and seeing Flo Po and Four Tet @ De School in Amsterdam later that year, taught me that dark basement club nights doesn't have to be all about the doof doof.
Being able to sway from side to side whilst listening to Bossa Nova and slow Soul music, on the fattest sound system, yet not being able to see more than a meter in front of you was the most juxtaposing thing. An experience I realise I was so fortunate to have that early in the game of pursuing DJhood - it informed everything after that. The mixing style and the way we curate music over the evening at our many DJ residencies around BCP, deciding to focus of vinyl collecting as my main medium of expression, the sort of open minded, multi-generational and kind demographic I wanted to help foster at the lo key parties, everything.
One track that stood out to me though was Daphni’s Ye Ye. Blended out of (and sampling) William Onyeabor’s When the Going is Smooth & Good around the 4 hour mark. They did same combo of songs live too @ De School.
Ye Ye, is an early AM, post peak time weapon that makes you feel particularly warm just as you manage to wrestle control of your jaw and begin to feel the cold breeze again. The warmth of the synthy bassline is perfect for when you need grounding after an onslaught of peak time songs - perfect distraction from the chemicals leaving your brain and giving you that stabby feeling in your belly - I reckon if I ever heard it in a club on a meaty system again I will probably cry.
It builds and builds into this rolling bass ball of euphoria, allowing you to get completely lost within the reverb echo; and dont even get me started on that choppy vocal egging you on to pull your nastiest stank face. Some of my cohorts have described it to me as being quite 'techy', and sometimes I still don't really know what they mean by that word exactly.
It's the sort of song that makes you wanna tell the DJ to fuck off. Maybe that's what they mean.
Who is Daphni though? And why did I click bait you w/ the title, mentioning Daphne Oram?
The Instagram of @cariboumusic infers that Daphni, not Daphne Oram, is a musician/band. A relatively geeky looking man, you can tell he's smart. I've watched my fair share of RBMA Lectures and so many of these DJ's and producers that I aspire to, contain this air of intelligence about them. The guys a mathematician ffs. I bet he sees everything in numbers - cus let me tell you, the music is phenomenal.
Don't ask me how intelligence, or academia, and a certain flock of underground club artists that came onto the scene since circa 2005 are connected, but I do think it would make for an interesting topic, i.e. do only low IQ people listen to the worst of Pop music, or Gabba lol, or does complex music programming lend itself toward a technically minded individual? Young people around BCP definitely love their Jump Up DNB, but that's a teenage angst thing I reckon and from what I have heard Jump Up can be quite complex where sound design is concerned. It can't be easy to produce sounds that mimic a truck driving by on the motorway.
Untold of Hemlock, a senior web engineer in a former life, according to his LinkedIn, Sam Sheppard, Floating Points, has a PhD in Neuroscience and epigenetics - and there's one distinction I can make between all of them, they hung out in a legendary London night club, but we'll get onto that in a sec.
It’s a beautiful thing to see how the community supported one another and so many have their come up eventually…
Jiaolong is the sixth studio album by Canadian musician Daniel Snaith, released on October 16, 2012 by Merge. It is the first album in Snaith's discography credited under the moniker Daphni, and is more dancefloor oriented than his work as Caribou. - wiki
Jiaolong is also the London based record label, founded by Snaith in 2011.
I was chatting to Mitch, a friend of mine and a real interesting character to bounce these type of topics between. We were agreeing that we are done w/ the soul, funk and jazz now that we are well into the darker months. That's where the material on this album comes in for me.
Dan Snaith's most popular tune is arguably Home, and in an interview he speaks about how influential hip hop has been in his life. The legacy of hip hop is steeped in sampling, and these samples have traditionally come from digging through dusty crates for old vinyl records for music that was elusive. This is an idea that is no longer new to society, but is one that we are constantly evolving according to the technology available to us. The theme of sampling is heavily present throughout this record, track 2 alone standing out as a Remix, rather than his own production, yet still fits the brief of 'vinyl digging' - it's a dusty 7" record from the African continent and from what I can tell the last copy sold for circa £57.
57 great british pounds for one song. And some of you think you can become a decent Producer/DJ by downloading from a YouTube to MP3 converter site. You can do that if you like, but then you should at least ensure you understand bitrate.
Jiaolong has been on my want list for years before finally purchasing in 2022, and after taking all of the rest of the tracks in and reading a few reviews, I feel it captures a real excitement in club music experimentation that was present for all the punters who attended Plastic People regularly. I also own a few other Jiaolong releases and have played Julia to devestating effect @ a Feel My Bicep afterparty in 2017. You only have to look at a few of the pivotal record labels and producers of that 2010 post dubstep era to realise it was a real special place - a melting pot of excitement which does not occur all too often in the cycle of these trends. Untold (Hemlock), The Hessle Audio trio, Flo Po and Four Tet themselves amongst other greats like Mala (DMZ), Kode9 (Hyperdub), Peverelist (Livity Sound), Shackleton (Skull Disco)… I could go on. It’s a beautiful thing to see how the community supported one another and so many have their come up eventually…
I personally feel it is this era of producers and the night club itself that has inspired the current crop of 'all night long' selectors, and I am eternally grateful for stumbling across it and being able to roam around in similar circles.
It's pure witchcraft and wizardry!
This is club music, yet the intro to Long can easily be weaved into a radio set and builds into something that wouldn't be amiss if sat on the Tron soundtrack list. This record can be played alongside traditional sounding genres like funk, soul, disco where the music is often composed by many individuals all playing their chosen instrument - and it can absolutely be played alongside techno and other clubbier strains where one person has taken an idea and allowed it to permeate into a blissful array of arpeggios, side chain compression and other words I do not yet have the interest understand, where the tool of the day contains binary code, electricity and music software. It's pure witchcraft and wizardry!
It's the fluidity and versatility that excites me. I can play Ne Noya @ 3pm in a pub garden in Poole and I can drop Light @ 1am in a basement in London. The first 2 minutes of Pairs stinks of Fela Kuti's Nigerian influence and your missus really enjoyed the sultry licks of Ahora whilst we lay in bed together till 4am.
Let's be clear, these posts are not reviews of the records I share. If anything, treat me as your university lecturer giving you the required resources in order to join me on my quest of becoming the ultimate all night long wizard. Side quests include writing about it and obviously creating the core memories and moments I speak about - I often want to joke to people saying that I'm in the business of creating memories. If not for you, it's definitely for me.
Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes
I can't quite recall the core memory for Ye Ye - it's been one that I've kept playing over the years alongside many of my fellow disc jocks - Miche, Justin and it's featured in a fair few of my early mixes, now no longer online.
Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes: This is a statement stolen from the Pitchfork review I linked above.
At that time I was discovering this strain of exciting music mainly through forums and tumblr. In my last post I joked about these online platforms being 'nerd dungeons' haha, and if you didn't know I'm king of the nerds, bitch! I've been using personal computers obsessively to peruse my interests since MS-Dos.
I was trawling forums in 2012, yet the mix I refer to above came out in 2015. I definitely place the mix a bit later in my mind's timeline, however the sound palette of this album for me is distinctly earlier.
Maybe good music can allow you to time travel to a specific point in history, and maybe great music is referred to as timeless because it casts this big boundless blanket across all of memory. That's how this album makes me feel.
From a perspective of experimentation and forward thinking, the world of music that occupies this approach tends to have circa less than 5-10k views on YouTube, and I often wonder if it would ever reach mainstream popularity - I'm talking BBC Radio 1 chart levels.
We've seen how recent platforms like the combination of TikTOk and Boiler Room have contributed to a huge injection of new fans to this world we operate in. But I'll leave that topic until I tell you of my winter 2023/24 season club night experiences.
Until then, kiss kiss
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