On November 26th 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.

First single, ‘Standing In My Own Way (Part One)’ is a meditation on lost friendship, exposing the impact the supposed qualities that make “a man” can have on destroying even the strongest bonds. 

Joshua’s words step through a delicate landscape that feels almost like a patchwork of memories. Soft, melodic Rhodes, is accompanied with a heart-breaking string arrangement by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.

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’.

Miguel Atwood-Ferguson is a multi-instrumentalist, arranger, composer, producer and music director who carries a dizzying list of credits. His collaborative work includes Cinematic Orchestra, Jessie Ware, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Hiatus Kaiyote, Chaka Khan, Dr. Dre, Erykah Badu, Mary J Blige… The list goes on. Even so, possibly most notable is his historic live recording ‘Suite For Ma Dukes’, a generation defining album in tribute to the legendary J Dilla. 

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.

Standing In My Own Way (Part One) - Daedelus & Joshua Idehen feat. Miguel Atwood Ferguson

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