Dedekind Cut

Fred W. Warmsley III first gained attention by crafting beats for underground hip-hop MCs such as Joey Bada$$. After inking a deal with Ninja Tune and issuing two albums that largely discarded hip-hop in favor of experimental jungle and ambient textures, he retired the Lee Bannon alias and adopted the name Dedekind Cut. Releases under the new moniker deliver dark, volatile, jarring, and unpredictable soundscapes that recall the frenzied breakcore of Venetian Snares, the haunted U.K. garage of Burial, and elements of gabber/hardstyle, grime, ambient, and mutated Southern rap.

Dedekind Cut’s opening statement came with the self-issued tHot eNhançeR EP in September 2015. Early the following year he collaborated with Rabit on the blistering Ninja Tune EP R&D. A self-released single titled “Last” surfaced soon afterward, followed by the Black History Month-themed mix BHM/N3D on Non Worldwide. March brought the ambient drone tape American Zen via Dominick Fernow’s Hospital Productions. The full-length debut $uccessor, which fuses dark ambient with new age, arrived in November and was pressed on vinyl by Non Worldwide while Hospital Productions handled the cassette edition. Hallow Ground released the EP The Expanding Domain in 2017. That same year Dedekind Cut signed with Kranky, and the second album Tahoe appeared in 2018.