I’ve written about him before. Daniele Baldelli is the King Of Cosmic.

The man basically invented the genre with his friend DJ Moz Art at the Baia Degli Angeli Disco on Italy’s Adriatic Coast. Here’s what music historian Tim Lawrence had to say about seeing Baldelli DJ last year in Manchester.

Baldelli kept on moving the music around, and was now bringing in full-on disco, rock ‘n’ roll, rock and techno-sounding dub. Even more impressive than the range of music was the way in which Baldelli connected the tracks together. I’ve heard truckloads of DJs play “mixed” sets, only for the records to sound like a jukebox is selecting them, with no intelligible connection (sonic, generic, linguistic, temporal…) between them. But with Baldelli, the barely traced links between disco, African music, dub and rock all became clear, just as they had done, at an earlier moment, with David Mancuso at the Loft and Larry Levan at the Garage. The experience of hearing this kind of programming was hallucinogenic.

I was awed by the mixing, to the point where I felt like I’d never heard anything like it. The combinations were extraordinarily complex and often quite surreal, but somehow or other they always worked. Harmonic cocktails that should have ended in catastrophe took us onto another plane, while impossibly bizarre rhythmic fusions took us higher and higher.

By about 10:30, a group of us were wondering where Baldelli came from, because it didn’t seem to be the Adriatic Coast in Italy, and it didn’t seem to be Planet Earth.

By the end of the night, it got a little out of hand. Baldelli was playing tracks that sounded like they were running backwards ? something he was famous for at Cosmic ? but weren’t. He also played some anthemic pop, the kind of stuff I normally hate, and I was yelling out words that might have been the chorus at the top of my lungs, as if this was my last chance to dance to music. Baldelli even convinced me that I should start to listen to prog rock. It was all too much. After each selection and each mix, we’d just turn to each other, shake our heads, and wonder where this guy had come from, and then dig deeper into the dance. At every point when it seemed he couldn’t get any better, he did.

I’m gasping for air just reading that!

Here are a couple new-ish tracks by Daniele Baldelli.

Daniele Baldelli - Cosmic Tune This first track uses the infamous sample, “Cosmic Cosmic Cosmic Cosmic…Melody”, that Baldelli first used in his sets at the Cosmic disco in Italy, way before sequencers were even invented. He made a tape loop that he would play on reel to reel and loop it around when he needed to drop it into the song. Genius.

Daniele Baldelli - Explore Pretty much classic Baldelli. Nice electronic intro that fades out, leaving you with african chanting and drums.

To read a fascinating interview with Daniele Baldelli, where he talks about his methods of speeding up and slowing down records and dropping Pink Floyd samples into Ravel’s Bolero at sunrise on the Italian coast, check out The Red Bull Music Academy site. It’s a must read for any Dj. Period.

Finally, I’m leaving you this Friday with a mix of some of the tracks from the last week. Download it. Get stoned after work, and take off. Enjoy.

The Cosmic Mix