It's a project 24 years in the making, uniting Daze's sprawling sonic influences from twitchy IDM and twisted trip-hop to sub-swelling, Miami bass-inspired broken beats and swirling ambient. Its intricately detailed slivers of sound design are stitched together into a continuous 92-minute voyage intended to be experienced in one sitting.
Daze was inspired by albums he mindlessly snagged at Tower Records when he first discovered dance music in the late '90s. Roni Size & Reprazent's jazzy hip-hop and drum 'n' bass fusion on New Forms and Phoenecia's essential IDM classic Brownout were foundational to his sound and how he perceives the album's place.
"Nowadays, patience is not involved in anything," he says. "We're living in 15-second increments, and most people don't have — maybe not the time — they don't have the presence of mind to put their phone down and just try and fall into a piece of art." He adds, "This entire thing is a piece of art. It's not just about the songs. Because to be honest, if you listen to the songs by themselves, it doesn't represent what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was have people sit down and just listen to the whole thing as a piece of art. "
::Blue:: isn't Daze's first crack at an album. In 2013, he wrote one that he didn't feel was in line with the experience he wished to convey. Despite having released on some of dance music's most venerated labels, including Kompakt, Ultramajic, and Ellum, he never intended to write an album that directly referenced his well-trodden leanings toward Detroit techno and Miami bass. He says the 2013 project was too dance-oriented."In Miami, everything just blends together. There really isn't a genre that people stick to."
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The shelved project was still on an experimental tip. However, he felt it could be even more conceptual and representative of Miami's music culture.
"I just scrapped the entire thing to make sure that when the album does come out, I feel 100 percent with everything that was going on around me, the people that I can feature on it," Daze explains. "The fact that I was able to feature a lot of people from Miami on this album, all those little details mean something to me."
While ::Blue::'s slow-burning abstraction isn't explicitly made for the dance floor, it's still inspired by half a lifetime of Miami music. As a young break dancer and DJ, Daze absorbed a dance-floor culture as diverse as the city's demographic.
"In Miami, everything just blends together. There really isn't a genre that people stick to because you go from the car to the club," he says. "In the car, you're listening to salsa and meringue. When you get to the club, you're listening to some crazy banging electro, then you go back home, and then you're listening to some chill house. That's the way we've kind of always been. And that was normal, where I was very influenced by my father being an opera singer also playing in a salsa band."
A mélange of wall-vibrating sub-frequencies permeates the entire work. Some are so deep and resonant, like in "I'm Fallin'," that the only way to truly experience them is on a proper sound system. It's a purposeful call back to the car subwoofer competitions he used to attend at Tamiami Park. "When you put that inside a club or something like that, It's going to rearrange people's intestines, for sure," he quips.
::Blue:: is more than an experiment in immersive listening and intelligent sound design. It goes beyond Daze's ability to expose the connective tissue of a largely undocumented Miami electronic music scene through collaborations with architects like Push Button Objects and younger producers like Johnny From Space. Daze is engaging in visual storytelling as well.
"When I was making this album, I would put a lot of these tracks on loop, and I would just leave them running, sometimes for half an hour," he says. "And I would go sit down and meditate or do breath work to this, and I'd figure out what was needed. While I did that, I would see different shapes, angles, colors, or even just energy, the amount of energy that the song had, and I would write that down inside a composition book."
That composition book was the blueprint for a dazzling visual sojourn projected on planetarium screens worldwide, soundtracked by a truncated 33-minute edit of ::Blue::. A select few will experience the unique audio-visual journey at this year's III Points.
"Having a show [that] engulfs your peripheral, where you're not seeing doors to the left or to the right, it's like you're putting on a massive helmet," he explains.
::Blue:: is coming at an opportune time in dance-music culture. Dance music's overwhelming popularity has blessed the dance floor with new ravers who seek out bespoke underground experiences that swerve left of massive festivals and banal party tech. When Daze began his journey more than 20 years ago, breakdancing at full moon raves at Castle Park (AKA Malibu Grand Prix), that's all there was. He hopes that through his music, he can recapture that energy.
"To this day, I still think about that energy, and I still think about me break dancing and being like, damn, this is the best thing I've ever experienced in my entire life. And it wasn't because it was new. It was because it was real," he says. "I think artists need to take a risk when it comes to their artistry, which is what I'm doing with this album. I've funded this entire thing myself. It cost a nice year's salary worth of money. And that risk is something I don't necessarily care if it comes back to me monetarily. I care if it comes back to me as action. I care if it comes back to me as people saying, 'Damn, I see you, and I see the message that you're pushing.'"
III Points 2023. Friday, October 20, and Saturday, October 21, at Mana Wynwood, 2217 NW Fifth Ave., Miami; iiipoints.com. Tickets cost $169 to $599 iiipoints.frontgatetickets.com.
