Demdike Stare

Demdike Stare

Passion

Modern Love

***Since the release of their album Wonderland (2016), DEMDIKE STARE have been recording material for this new double album Passion; an asymmetric re-imagining of UK club styles taking in frenzied drum trax, shortwave jungle, pinging dancehall and clipped, post-punk riddims. During this time they've been busy curating their DDS label (releases from Shinichi Atobe, Mica Levi, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, and Equiknoxx, among others) and have been commissioned by both the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and the surviving members of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to mine and rework their archives. Enlisting visual artist Michael England (Autechre, Gescom, Leila), they've created a cinematic accompaniment for their collaborative live shows, resulting in the image which adorns this cover—a hybrid/composite portrait exploring/questioning the current use of software in creating hyper reality and the manipulation of the self. The accompanying film includes documentary footage filmed at a Voguing event in NYC, a Blackpool promenade and a Newark, New Jersey roller rink, the end result smudging the lines between live performance, documentary and sonic cinema. It's an idea that's echoed on Passion, continuing a process Demdike began on their Testpressing series of dismantling lines between analog and digital realms, between urban realism and fantasy, between experimental, pop and soundsystem cultures. An outlandish configuration of avant-garde and ultimately functional club weapons designed and honed for the weightiest bassbins, it's also their most direct and fucked up record to date—a raucous, joyful 9-track smash that comes off like a night on a glamorous, neon-lit bender.

Demdike Stare

Wonderland

Modern Love

A project that came to life fuelled by collectors’ obsession and a lifelong willingness to dive head- first into unknown musical wormholes, Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have never been defined by a singular musical trajectory. Their opening salvo of releases dabbled with the aesthetic of the occult and provided an alternate, parallax view of the Italian Library records with which they were both obsessed at the time, but as their long running mixtape series and brilliantly curated DDS label attest, their interests extend far outside the crevices of early electronic music and into dance music, dancehall, roots, jungle, techno, industrial, noise and beyond. While 2013’s Testpressing series provided an outlet for mostly club-based productions shot from the hip, Wonderland has been constructed with a narrative in mind. From the clipped Hardstyle of the opening Curzon, through the jaunty Dancehall mutations of Animal Style and FullEdge, Exotica/House refractions on Hardnoise, the frankly ridiculous, bassbin destroying Jungle ructions on Sourcer, or the extended tease of Overstaying, it’s probably the most enjoyable and loose-limbed hour of music in their catalogue, or that you’ll likely hear in these weird, angst-ridden times.

Demdike Stare

Testpressing#007

Modern Love

*The seventh and final instalment in the Testpressing Series for the time being* Hands-down, #7 is the best Testpressing yet from Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty's Demdike Stare. Landing almost two years since the series began back in 2013, and six months on from their last raid, it's a dichotomy of dancefloor devilment, going hard for it on one side, and running ragged emotions on the other. A-side 'Rathe' opens the doors of perception to a show-stopping bloom of heavenly voices and halfstep jungle, ratcheting the levels to heart-in-mouth effect with panoramic harmonies and ricochet drums that sound like a fwwwd update of Windowlicker, all owing as much to Source Direct as Alice Coltrane. B-side, 'Patchwork' is a whole other madness. Shocking in a different style, it consolidates swirling, norish samples nodding to Italian concrète with the kind of 2-step swerve last heard on Artwork's 'Red’ EP - proper feral, swinging business. We seen and heard it go off in the dance and can safely confirm that it's one of the baddest joints in their now extensive catalogue...

Demdike Stare

Testpressing#006

Modern Love

Exactly one month on from TP#5, Demdike Stare unleash the 6th instalment in their ongoing tespressing series, a split session focusing on damaged dancefloor articulations on the a-side, and demented metal edits on the flip. ’40 Years Under The Cosh’ spans the A-side and finds Demdike in feisty form, re-framing the bare- boned floor-bound funk of classic Artwork and Anthony Shakir within more brutal parameters, complete with some seriously disorientating shenanigans halfway through proceedings. ‘Frontin’ on the flipside heads somewhere else entirely once again, unloading an agitated, freeze-framed metal loop and turning it into a barely contained bass-and-drums session that, unsurprisingly, sounds like nothing you’ll have heard from this lot before.

Demdike Stare

Testpressing#005

Modern Love

7 months on from TP#4, Demdike return with the 5th instalment in their ongoing research and development series - a double-headed monster split between gnarly reductions on the A-side, and industrial strength edits on the flip. ‘Procrastination’ edges through Grimey detritus and gunshot snares within a vast open space perfectly primed for that Demdike slow build. ‘Past Majesty’ on the flip offers up a feral take on some kind of cyber-industrial insanity, somewhere between Ministry and Powell - with a denouement which should probably come with a public health warning attached to it. All we’re saying is - watch yr eardrums.

Demdike Stare

Testpressing#004

Modern Love

Searing, tormented darkside f**kery from Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty’s Demdike Stare on their rinse and run Testpressing series. A-side ‘Fail’ is a slowly descending panic attack of pealing hi-end frequencies and impending bass doom reaching a pit of noisy no return. B-side ‘Null Results’ bruks loose with a scything jungle attack; frantic 16th note hi-hats and cone-crumpling subs laced with a rudeboy mentasm to incite warehouse capoeira. Come test.

Demdike Stare

Testpressing#001

Modern Love

Demdike Stare return to the lab with two extended new productions, inaugurating a series of untamed releases brought together under the Testpressing banner. 'Collision' was recorded in late 2012 and is pretty much unlike anything you'll have heard from Demdike before, an intense high-frequency re-arrangement of Jungle and Noise, like a more brutal variant of the Demdike-affiliated HATE project, fed through a bank of analogue boxes and pedals, left to spin uncontrollably for 10 minutes before fading to black. 'Misappropriation' on the flip feeds off a different noise altogether, perched precariously between the mangled percussion you'd most commonly associate with Muslimgauze and the metallic clank of industry, a proper sunstroke riddim: angry and unforgiving.

Demdike Stare

Testpressing#002

Modern Love

So here we are at part two in the series: "Grows Without Bound" on the A-side is a monster; a noisy analogue session resurrected from the burning embers of Industrial and Noise, harnessed into an unstable growl that slowly makes room for a barely-there percussive stumble - think somewhere between Vainio and Nate Young. Over on the flipside "Primitive Equations" takes for inspiration the bare-boned, hyper-tense production of Photek's still devastating "Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu", slugging out feral, steely noise and 'ardcore torque forged by calloused hands and burning minds to cruel, propulsive effect.

Demdike Stare

Testpressing#003

Modern Love

Proceeding missions into the no-mans-land of noise and jungle, Demdike Stare adopt a typically schizoid stance at House and Techno tempos on the 3rd Testpressing. Their A-side 'Eulogy' is a square bass devotional to the soul of deep Chicago and Detroit house, most notably the magic of Mr Fingers and Terrence Dixon. A constantly morphing, Escher-like bassline folds in and out of itself, accented with offset kicks and washed out with effervescent, barely-there synth strokes. It's lip-smacking sunset/sunrise gear and a perfect set-up for the flipside shocker. Destined to become a classic in Demdike's canon, 'Dyslogy' comes off like an early 'Waveform Transmission' or H&M bomb spanked by Anthony Shakir; an evil, droning intro ratchets the tension for martial kicks and darkcore chords before a feral breakbeat romps loose like the spirit of '93 unchained. They really don't make 'em like this any more…

Demdike Stare

Elemental

Modern Love

It's been almost a year since Demdike Stare finished their "Tryptych" of releases, and in the intervening months Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have been busy touring and gradually piecing together sounds for this new series: Elemental. After four limited edition vinyl installments, Elemental is now released as a digital album, including different versions of tracks that have appeared on the vinyl editions, plus extensive additional material - making for a two-hour trip through dark, post-industrial terrain.

Demdike Stare

Symbiosis

Modern Love

"Long awaited album collecting both limited vinyl editions from Demdike Stare, fusing elements of everything from fragmented dub to Turkish, Iranian and West Indian library records, through to Scandinavian drone, Chicago House and beyond..." Demdike Stare is a long-in-the-making hookup between two shady characters operating at the fringes of Manchester's fragmented music scene: Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty. Miles has been a longtime affiliate of Modern Love as one half of Pendle Coven and under his own MLZ alias, while Canty is one of the city's most recognisable vinyl collectors, carrying an obsession with everything from obscure Nordic Doom records to Anatolyan funk albums, fuelled by his dayjob helping out at the Finders Keepers label. The project is named after Pendle's most famous witch: Elizabeth Southerns, aka Demdike. The tracks on 'Symbiosis' are drawn from elements of Turkish, Indian, Iranian, African and West Indian film soundtracks alongside Norwegian drone records, classic House templates, punctured dub, modified techno and the arctic noise perfected by Mika Vainio. Original sources and dense analogue experiments weave around eachother with little care for convention or stylistic expectation, instead throwing the pair's extensive musical knowledge into a set of tracks that, quite brilliantly, defy categorisation. The album opens with 'Suspicious Drone', a dense 6 minute opening that chugs a long like a malfunctioning mechanical beast, honing in on Lancashire's dark industrial landscapes before moving onto more exotic, balmy territory. 'Haxan Dub' (named after the film narrated by william burroughs about witchcraft) deploys fragmented dub echoes infused...

Demdike Stare

Tryptych

Modern Love

"23 tracks/160 minute triple album bringing together the "Forest of Evil", "Liberation Through Hearing" and "Voices of Dust" albums, plus an extra 40 minutes of bonus material recorded during the same sessions - completely exclusive to this release* Demdike Stare is a project made up of two insatiable vinyl collectors based in the north of England: Sean Canty (who works for the esteemed Finders Keepers label) and Miles Whittaker (a longtime producer and DJ who has released music under the MLZ moniker and as part of Pendle Coven). The music Demdike Stare make is hard to pin down, based largely around archival musical sources ranging from obscure library records to long forgotten jazz, early electronic, and industrial recordings, alongside an array of Iranian, Pakistani, Turkish and Eastern European material largely unknown in the Western world. Demdike Stare absorb and re-align these found sounds via their ever-expanding array of analogue machinery, ending up with something that is in part Plunderphonic, but ultimately completely new. Their music has sometimes been lumped-in with the Hypnagogic, Hauntological and, most recently, ‘Witch House’ movements, but ultimately Demdike Stare should appeal to anyone with an interest in everything from classic KPM library records through to the music of Basic Channel and all the way to the smudged, altered-realities of James Ferraro and The Caretaker. That is, at least until the next record, when the frames of reference might just change up and take them somewhere completely different…"--Boomkat. Received an 8.3 rating from Pitchfork. Note: the tracks...