Daphni - JIAOLONG (Double vinyl LP, CD)

There’s something I don’t like in dance music and that’s heavily looped samples of soul singers (bar Pangaea’s Gladys Knight-filching ‘Memories’). If I want to hear a soul song I’d like to hear the whole original fucking thing sans a house beat and a cheap bass-line. I want to enjoy Aretha or Booker T and the MGs as they were, not just a favoured snippet ripped from the heart of the song ad-infinitum to satisfy sweaty gurning ravers who probably don’t know where the vocal was originally sourced. It just seems vacuous to me and has always got on my tits. Possibly the reason I favour austere techno or electro, haha.  Rant over.

So that’s the first track ruined for me here, I don’t know who it is sampled either but it’s a throaty raucous rasp of an edit that only just elevates it beyond Fatboy Slim. However, I absolutely adore the subsequent tune - an amazing deep, brooding, sensuous and low-slung remix of Cos-Ber-Zam’s ‘Ne Nyoa’ - an uber-rare Afrobeat classic from 1973. The vocal loop on here, like everything else, is nothing short of  hypnotic, just check those scintillating cosmic touches and that moody hi-hat slink. So minimal, yet effective and thoroughly exotic.

Danny S needs a house-style name for this project and there, I’ve just christened him. This Daphni album is totally coming alive for me, the track ‘Ye Ye’ that blew minds as a split twelve with Four Tet months ago is just rinsing my head through the medium of headphones. Lovely strut, cool groove, cymbals-come-alive and a cheeky bloopy circuit-loop make for another little epic that goes bang in the night (or any time really). Further on and deeper in we encounter experiments that take in pumping mischief-house with acid-like flecks and niggling tech-y arpeggios.