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.