Googled “choral chiptune,” found a writeup of this other group’s basically similar track by fucking Warren Ellis, WRITTEN UP BY THE OLD US, and I don’t understand anything anymore…
[Video]
[6.40]
Alfred Soto: Here’s an original hybrid: choral charts, bass and garage programming. I can imagine Spring Heeled Jack trying to get to heaven this way. Still, only the 3:06 catches my ear.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: “Tiptoes” finds Daedalus going towards elegance while other big names in the Los Angeles electronic scene start trying to figure out ways how to cash in on EDM, crafting an extremely pretty track while still giving it a pulse. Turns out this is Daedelus being Daedelus: hard to pin down but great for it.
[7]
Iain Mew: Hymnal chiptune? The electronics have that vintage beepiness, but there’s a softness to them that suits the title and works a treat offset by the heavy bass. As the song progresses, Daedelus don’t bring many ideas past shoving all of that lot together, but making that sound so fitting is achievement enough.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Choral chiptune! I want to hijack one of my alma mater’s kitschy a cappella groups just so I can troll them with this. (“It’s… it’s like a 21st century madrigal! BASSES. I picked this out especially for you! Keep it grumbling. Soprano Is, fix the Nintendo descant — you’re like a bunch of N-Gages here. Altos and tenors, uh, you can probably just jingle these tambourines until your part comes in?”)
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: That choral overlay: If ever I wanted to relive the feeling of Christmas shopping, only with no chance whatsoever of being momentarily diverted by the mall’s sound system cueing up “All I Want for Christmas is You.”
[3]
Brad Shoup: I’ve seen the source text described as a hymn; it’s not. It’s a typical downcast Dowland composition, thoroughly secular. The high-flown sentiment is just a few branches from an explicitly religious composition, and the assembled singers imbue the words with a sense of self-possession. The trick seems to be making all that cohere to the bassy stomp of the intro. It does, but barely. In a nice touch, the twinkling programming echoes the woodwinds, but both are precious things. If you’re putting up the ornaments soon, toss this into the mix.
[7]
Mallory O’Donnell: It’s gonna be one of those weird Christmases this year, isn’t it?
[5]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Appropriately, “Tiptoes” steps around itself as nimbly as possible in building from a dark-tinged wriggling bass-synth to near-comedic pipings of ghostly vocals. It’s cartoon darkness and cartoon sunlight but effectively paced nonetheless, as the beat twinkles out of the dusk before then plummeting back down. But with nearly five minutes of dusk/light rotations, Daedelus could do with more wild abandon.
[6]
Will Adams: I like the way the choral counterpoint tames the fizzling arrangement that precedes it. “Tiptoes” balances gently between old and new, resulting in a perfectly pleasant piece that feels like rain tapping on a window.
[6]
Anthony Easton: I have been reading a lot of Arthur Danto of late, because he died last month and he was important to me, mostly because I thought he was wrong. In his 1995 book, Beauty and Morality, he talked about how the 20th century failed because it raised the abject to art when the abject and grotesque could never quite be art. Daedelus is not abject, but it has rough edges, and the feedback that bookends this is genuinely ugly. The rest has a contemporary electronic updating of the almost liturgical ornamentation found in Pentangle. I think that the current century’s gift is a way of interleaving the abject or the ugly or the grotesque with the contained or beautiful or romantic. Tis track might be an excellent rejoinder to Danto.
[10]