Light Brigade - Daedelus (2014)
Daedelus already had quite a catalog of mostly-electronic downtempo listening music by the time he started a trilogy he called “End Of Empire” that tried to make sense of the present by digging into history.
This is part 2, inspired by the 1850s Crimean War.
Tennyson’s famous poem, The Charge Of The Light Brigade, is inspired by a tragic series of decisions that send a British cavalry brigade into certain death. The poem gets recited at the beginning of the record here, and it leaves the same combination of awe and horror and anger that we deal with a lot in our modern wars.
The rest is mostly instrumental and features interplay between acoustic guitars and more electronic elements that are sometimes beautiful and sometimes grinding and disturbing.
While it might sound like a departure compared to Daedelus’ previous work, it’s really more a difference of degree than kind. The same downtempo rhythms are here, but they’re often sketched in the guitars rather than programmed in as drum tracks. The atmosphere is always what I listen to his records for, and there’s plenty of that here.
The other parts of the trilogy focus on The Boxer Rebellion and The Boer War, and are out there if you’re interested.
