Daedelus plays the Highland Inn Ballroom Lounge 9/12

Mutton-chopped sampler Daedelus looks like a Victorian-era pimp in the 19th-century garb he dons on the cover of the latest XLR8R. But you can’t blame him; it’s been a big year. From the magazine cover to his popular YouTube political party jam with hip-hoppers Sa-Ra, “Vote Obama,” to his new album, Love to Make Music To, it seems all ears are tuned into the Santa Monica, Calif., electronic artist.

“Doing things, like for the Obama campaign, it’s something I don’t think a lot of people expect their electronic music friends to do,” says Daedelus, aka Alfred Darlington. “But it was a joy and it’s getting more and more strange.”

Darlington studied classical music as a kid. He went to school for jazz when he grew bored with classical, but found that just as unsatisfying. Electronic music seemed much more limitless to him, so he jumped in while maintaining an element of his studied aesthetic. “Jazz – when you really get down to studying it – is a series of quoted lines,” he says. “People’s understanding of these musical idioms was pretty extreme during jazz’s heyday. I don’t feel that dissimilar from that concept.”

His third full-length for NinjaTune and 10th overall, Love to Make Music to employs several vocalists and a variety of tastes including burbling electro-pop, analogue lo-fi hip-hop, skittering breakbeats, IDM clatter and jaunty indie pop replete with hand claps. It’s a tour de force album showcasing his broad musical vocabulary.

The live show is also impressive thanks to his use of the Monome, a programmable mixer that looks a little like a toy Lite-Brite. Its flashing, 40-button grid interfaces with the laptop, allowing live manipulation of samples as he punches buttons like the front of an accordion. But it can be a little disconcerting, until the energy gets going.

“The fact that it lights up is no joke. It can be a little beguiling,” he says. “But it is funny when you’re trying to have a party and people are just staring at this machine.”