Blue Daisy

Ask most musicians to describe their own sound, and you’ll most likely be met with a rueful smirk, some awkward non-committal mumblings if you’re lucky.

When I ask this particular producer the dreaded question, though, he takes a deep breath and hits me with this:

‘Imagine yourself in a box, a normal four-by-four box, and you’re sitting in there, and you’ve got little holes to breathe….and different atmospheres are coming in- you’ve got the cold air coming in, the hot air coming in, and it overwhelms you. You pass out and wake up again in the same box, but that box becomes a new world. So now, where you’re sitting, it’s not a box anymore, the box becomes what you want it to be- it becomes your world. And that’s what I try to do with my music; you’re listening to my music but I don’t want you to just listen to it, I want it to grab you and sit you in the middle of the track.’

Sitting across from me in a non-descript café, the man they call Blue Daisy has no qualms with dispatching such floridly visual answers to standard questions. Born and bred in Camden, north London, to ask this precocious talent about his music is to prompt a discussion that easily meanders between fashion, Christianity, travel and art. It becomes quickly obvious that Blue Daisy takes inspiration from everything around him, and it’s no surprise, then, that he has already been earmarked as a producer to watch. His only official release so far, the Martian soul number ‘Space Ex’, featured the sort of audacious over-compression and vertiginous delays that most 23 year-olds wouldn’t have the nerve to even mess with; unsurprisingly, it sold out.

‘That was a sound I’d been working on for a while,’ he laughs, ‘because you can do that it and it can just sound wrong. And there have been a couple of tunes where I have done that and it has been way too much. But I just felt her voice brought that sound with it. I just wanted to take you into an underwater world, bring that whole UFO thing. Music goes hand in hand with other artforms, it’s all one for me. I think as a musician you need to have that visual outlook when you’re making music’.

Not bad for a bedroom beatmaker who until a few months ago was unknown to the wider world, including his label, Black Acre. Having spent a few years grafting tirelessly at his art- ‘sleeping behind my computer, waking up and just getting on with it’- and making contacts through Myspace, Blue Daisy took the next step and sent one of his songs to Mary Anne Hobbs (the Fairy Godmother of electronic music), who, suitably impressed, played ‘Wolf’, all burbling bass and bleeps, on her Radio 1 show. The rest is history, but he’s far from satisfied and is working on his myriad projects with even more determination.

He also made his debut on the live circuit recently at a gig in an east London cellar; a delighted throng gave witness to him giving the sort of fervent performance not normally associated with electronic music. But there he was, shoulders swinging, punching the shit out of his equipment (as well as the surrounding walls), his face locked in an expression of elation and focus.

You’re going to have to work hard to keep up with Blue Daisy over the coming months. The rest of 2009 will see him release further material under his own name, material from his project La Fleur Bleue (a collaboration with French singer La Note) and an audio-visual collaboration, the format of which is yet undecided. Oh, and it turns out he is starting a degree in politics this autumn. How does he envisage fitting in his academic obligations around his music?

‘I’m just gonna try and get it out of the way’, he smiles, ‘because music, as everyone knows, is a fickle game. So I’m not gonna put my all into that, when six months down the line, I could be wiped out. Hopefully that’s not the case, hopefully I’m here for the long run, but you can’t be too certain. If the music doesn’t take me too far, I’ll get into political journalism.’

Somehow I don’t think music will be losing out to journalism anytime soon.

Blue Daisy’s ‘Strings Detached’ EP is scheduled for release on Black Acre at the end of September. See www.myspace.com/bluedaize for updates.

MP3 file: 

Listen to a snippet of Blue Daisy's remix of Callin'