Demdike Stare

Demdike Stare, Manchester's duo of dj Sean Canty and dub producer Miles Whittaker (also in Pendle Coven, MLZ and Daughter of the Industrial Revolution), debuted with the brainy blend of dub, ethnic music and minimal techno of Symbiosis (Modern Love, 2009) that was basically a companion work to Pendle Coven's Self Assessment (2009) with the addition of Sean Canty's passion for exotic music (the swirling Turkish courtly dance of Jannisary, the percussive "African" ritualistic dance Conjoined) and a broader chromatic palette (the pagan dub-charleston orgy of Haxan, the pulsing surrealistic musique concrete of Extwhistle Hall, the fibrillating Morton Subotnick-ian Nothing But The Night). However, the real protagonist was the gloomy psychological depth of pieces like the gothic, glitchy, industrial Suspicious Drone the murky, subhuman, swampy, hypnotic Haxan Dub (and nonetheless contagiously danceable), the duet of sinister knocking and watery vibrations in Regressor, the acid electronica and childish android noises of All Hallows Eve, and the densely electrical Ghostly Hardware, basically a soundtrack for power lines. This album pushed the envelop of dubstep way into abstract soundpainting, expanding in multiple directions and sometimes within the same piece, while at the same time retaining an amazing degree of cohesiveness. In other words, this album belongs more to the history of avantgarde classical music than to the history of popular dance music.

The duo then delivered three mini-albums. Forest of Evil (Modern Love, 2010) contains two lengthy pieces: the 14-minute Dusk is a concerto for ethereal galactic drones, evoking celestial landscapes (alas the duo felt the need to turn it into a lame syncopated dance jam); while the the ten-minute Dawn is a polyrhythmic dance driven by booming tribal tom-toms that decays in the void of the beginning. Liberation Through Hearing (2010), their psychological peak, contains futuristic Brian Eno-esque vignettes. Caged In Stammheim sounds like an epic episode of android cinema. Eurydice is claustrophobic industrial music morphing into braindead vibrations. Regolith is a dissolute blend of crappy noise, metronymic beats and siren-like blares. The Stars Are Moving is the ultimate astronomical observatory soundtrack: a swarm of wasps and a muffled Wagnerian choir battle with a skittish beat sequence all the way into the black-hole apocalypse. The only drawback is the longest piece, Matilda's Dream, an oceanic tide that feels aimless. Voices of Dust (2010) is a more facile work, from the pan-ethnic collage Hashshashin Chant to the eleven-minute ambient techno of Repository Of Light, from the mindless dance Viento De Levante Alas, it also contains several pieces that are redundant. For example, not much happens in the ten-minute Filtered Through Prejudice and in the nine-minute Indian-tinged Past Is Past. The psychological zenith comes with the melancholy cacophony of Desert Ascetic, worthy of chamber electroacoustic music, and the foghorn sonata of Leptonic Matter.

The triple-disc Tryptych (2011) collects all three, adding to each a few bonus tracks, like the simple dance of Library of Solomon.

The double-disc Elemental (Modern Love, 2012) collects the four EPs Chrysanthe, Violetta, Rose and Iris, although many songs are offered in alternate versions. Overall they seem to form a progression towards a bleaker and bleaker vision. The double-disc album begins with the non-EP bubbling, looping overture New Use for Old Circuits. Chrysanthe contains: Mephisto's Lament, a piece of purely abstract electronica that builds a tragic tension and evokes the vision of abominable monsters; the ominous cavernous rumble evolving into cyclical factory music of Kommunion; and the ghostly vocal samples morphing into a deep funereal hissing of Unction; all of which exude a sense of impending doom within claustrophobic and catastrophic atmospheres. Classy expressionism.
Violetta is even more radical: the chaotic demented Middle-eastern dubstep Mnemosyne, the subliminal industrial music of In The Wake Of Chronos, the droning "deep-listening" minimalism of 10th Floor Stairwell, and the chamber piano sonata over skitting beats of Violetta seem to offer a panorama of avantgarde music of the last century. However, they feel like mere demonstrations, baroque replicas, cold didactic postmodernist essays; a fact confirmed by the way vocal samples are transformed into a techno pulsation in Metamorphosis and the way the multifaceted drone of All This is Ours expands into cosmic music. Fanatical form, but little substance.
Rose returns to the expressionism of Chrysanthe and with a vengeance: Erosion Of Mediocrity is a hammering whirling sufi dance with carpet bombins in the background, high-octane ceremonial dance music; Nuance, is a psychoanalytical nightmare, a throbbing heartbeat-like beat buried inside a volley of anguished electronic laments; Falling Off The Edge is a symphony of celestial "om"'s over primordial raga-like percussion and industrial metronomes.
Iris is the least coherent of the four, ranging from the electroacoustic psychedelia of Dauerlinie to the static choir of Dasein, and from the polyrhythmic loop of We Have Already Died to the pounding techno-dub of Ishmael's Intent, one of their most driving dancefloor creations.
Demdike Stare thrive at multiple levels. Erosion Of Mediocrity and Ishmael's Intent are there to prove that this is still dance-music, but Falling Off The Edge and Kommunion clearly scrape the metaphysical realm, and Nuance delves deep into the most disturbed psyche.

Anworth Kirk (Finders Keepers' Andy Votel and Sean Canty of Demdike) indulged in collages of found sounds bordering on a sociomusical form of musique concrete on Anworth Kirk (Pre-Cert, 2010), Avonwaith (Pre-Cert, 2011) and Shacklecross (Pre-Cert, 2012). Each has some intriguing sections but too much filler. The beginning of Avonwaith, after the spoken-word section, is particularly effective as slow martial beats creates an atmosphere of suspense that increases with tinkling keyboards and bells. The second side of the album begins in an austere and menacing mode but then turns too childish and erratic to hold one's attention.

Applehead, an Anworth Kirk side-project (the same duo), basically created a demented high-art mixtape of Italian disco-music of the 1970s on Applehead De Applehead (Pre-Cert, 2011).

Demdike Stare released six limited-edition EPs titled Test Pressings (Modern Love, 2013 & 2014) that explored a sort of "dancefloor" alter-ego. This time it was all about the rhythm. Rhythm does not exist from the beginning. Some of the pieces are documentaries about its organic growth out of nowhere. Collision is about lashing electronics turning into abrasive torture slowly revealing the beats and then being dwarfed by the increasing clangor of the metallic and wooden timbres. The ten-minute Dyslogy is initially just an ominous but shapeless raga-like drone. Its heartbeat comes to the surface forcefully and bends the drone to an industrial-grade hiss. The subdued bee-like buzzing that begins Fail grows into a pow-wow dance amid strident drones. Perhaps the most virtuoso demonstration comes from Primitive Equations, whose collage of found sounds segues naturally into a drum & bass jam. When the rhythm preexists the music, the results are less spectacular: Misappropriation toys with an African voodoo-style rhythm; the frenzied polyrhythm of Null Results does little to expand; 40 Years Under The Cosh simply shows how a simple groove can be amplified into a maelstrom of symphonic grandeur; the solemn Past Majesty sounds like a parody of doom-metal; and the elastic, bouncing Eulogy sounds like a remix of Giorgio Moroder's From Here to Eternity. One of the bleakest numbers, Frontin' is a duet between power-drill vibrations and a Martian martial beat. Equally nerve-wracking is Grows Without Bound, a sort of melody repeated by flaming electrical short-circuits. And Procrastination, another African-inspired piece, sums up the underlying neurosis with a march of howling industrial zombies.

Demdike Stare's Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott were also active as Millie & Andrea, a project documented on Drop the Vowels (2014).

The "Testpressing" series of singles reworked (deconstructed?) old compositions into neurotic dancefloor jams.

Wonderland (Modern Love, 2016) focused on the beat, but too little went into the rest. The result is trivial industrial dance music like Curzon The ten-minute Hardnoise toys with a random selection of ideas but find none worthy of more than a passing mention. Sourcer picks on drum & bass and hip hop but, again, fails to cohere. There are few moments of delight here. Animal Style sets in motion a deconstructed Jamaican fanfare but they don't know what to do with it after three minutes. Overstaying warps ambient house into an almost jazz jam, but doesn't have the courage (or inspiration) to elaborate and instead ends abruptly with twenty seconds of found street noise. Too little thinking (or, for that matter, rehearsing) went into this album.

Distracted by their own DDS label (that was releasing music from Shinichi Atobe, Mica Levi, and Equiknoxx), Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty continued the "deconstructionist" program of the "Testpressing" singles. with the patchy double-EP Passion (Modern Love, 2018). New Fakes is haunted by a hurricane cloud and drifts into expressionistic cosmic music. The distorted whirlwind of the seven-minute At It Again gives birth to a deformed drum'n'bass beat. You People Are Fucked is almost psychological horror with its mix of thumping heart, grating distortions and vicious voices. The twisted march of Caps Have Gone and the stuttering ballet for bulldozers Pile Up are moderately consumable, with a peak of danceability in the slippery polyrhythm of Cracked that even displays a ghost of a melody (in the hyperbass frequency). But mostly this feels like the lightweight soundtrack for an art installation rather than profound musical statements.