Daedelus Brings Back Rave With ‘Wears House’

If you love music, I mean really love it, then you probably are already a fan of Daedelus, the LA-based producer who defies genres and descriptions, and seems comfortable making almost any kind of beat-driven music. His latest project is Wears House, an 80 minute mix tape with two 40 minute sides. The music includes tracks from '91-'95 along with original Daedelus compositions from earlier in his catalog (early 2000s) through today. The entire project is, in a word, joyful. It harkens back to the anything-goes spirit of the original 90's raves, where party crews could meet up at a single location to hear a wide variety of DJs spinning totally different styles of music. There might have been a jungle room or a chill out room, in addition to the main dance floor, but cultures mixed freely throughout the space, with different styles, fashions, and drugs of choice.

Today's mainstream scene brings people together to be the same-- same intoxicants, same place to look (the DJ booth), same styles. These things move in waves, and the current paradigm is changing rapidly, even as corporate promoters seek to capitalize on the revival of the warehouse scene. The diversity in both music and style is starting to return to the scene, but we shouldn't forget where it all began.

Looking back, LA had an incredible and often-overlooked rave scene from the 1990's where many of today's best-known DJs, and the aforementioned promoters, cut their teeth. Those who were there will remember the wild nights that turned into days, the drugs, the fashion, and the DJs, but mostly the sense of joy and discovery that came from listening to new music in an old warehouse with a bunch of friendly people.

What's so cool about Wears House is that is somehow distills those feelings into 80 minutes of expertly mixed madness. If you're too young to have participated in the original scene, this mix will give you an approximation of what made it so fun, and why it was so influential to a generation of musicians, who realized that total freedom could be found on the dance floor.

We caught up with Daedelus to ask for a little bit of the backstory of this project. When asked about his personal connection to the music, the man also known as Alfred Darlington said:

Which makes perfect sense-- when you drill down into what makes a Daedelus track work, incongruity is a big part of it, along with friction. We also wondered if Alfred was involved in the LA rave scene in the 90's, he told us that

You can pre-order Wears House from Bandcamp here.