New material from the duo has been eagerly anticipated, and over the course of 2010 the Modern Love label delivered in the form of three new blink-and-you’ve-missed them limited vinyl only albums.
[Listen | Purchase] Composed of Lancastrian friends Miles Whittaker (aka MLZ and one half of Pendle Coven) and Finders Keepers researcher Sean Canty, the enigmatic Demdike Stare had already made quite an impression in 2009 thanks to two self-released vinyl EPs that were later compiled onto CD by Modern Love as Symbiosis, effectively forming their debut album. New material from the duo had been eagerly anticipated ever since, and over the course of 2010 the Modern Love label delivered in the form of three new blink-and-you’ve-missed them limited vinyl only albums.
Listening to Symbiosis again now that all this new material is available it is abundantly clear that Demdike Stare are a constantly evolving outfit, entirely in keeping with the eclectic musical tastes and fervent record collecting of Canty and Whittaker. The logo that adorns the sleeves of all of their releases is an inverted triangle containing a rose and a skull, which sums up their sound quite neatly. There are few artists around today that are able to make music that is simultaneously as dark and alluring as this, avoiding the pitfalls of over-stuffing their music with horror drones, migraine inducing feedback and other crushing noise that make some records simply hard to listen to rather than challenging.
Now, in 2011, Modern Love will delight those that have been following Demdike Stare by pulling out all the stops for this triple CD release, Andy Votel’s creepy original and newly designed artwork adorning the same deluxe, eight-panel over-sized foldout wallet packaging as Type’s recent Thomas Köner set. More importantly, Tryptych offers up an additional forty minutes of previously unreleased material recorded during the same sessions across each disc.
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Forest of Evil ::
With a mere two tracks included on the initial vinyl release, Forest of Evil may have been the slightest of Demdike Stare’s Triptych, not to mention something of a tease, but true to its title is in many ways the most visually panoramic and painterly of the three. Canty and Whittaker have often pointed out that the records they themselves are listening to at the time significantly influence their own work and given their eclectic tastes and avid collecting habits this results in a distinctly different experience every time, yet still manages to remain uniquely Demdike Stare.
In the case of Forest of Evil these influences stem heavily from old sound library records – presumably dating all the way back to the sixties – that contain prepared sound effects and music for use in television and film. The release of Symbiosis had many categorizing Demdike Stare as hauntological or (more appropriately) part of the “witch house” movement, apparently accidental according to Whittaker but entirely understandable given Votel’s artwork and track titles like “Haxan,” “Ghostly Hardware,” “All Hallows Eve” etc, but whilst trace elements of this sound still exist on Forest of Evil there is a distinctly tribal, almost voodoo quality that subsequently takes over.
At over fourteen minutes, “Forest of Evil (Dusk)” consists of a number of stylistically different passages that paint upon a broad, shadowy canvas. Opening with a chilling sample of 60’s sound library record “here-be-spiders” piano zither that instantly conjure the eponymous forest, it leads into vaunted choral calls, dissolves into dub and then kicks up a storm of military marching band percussion, all to the felt-rather-than-heard sub-bass throb of some giant beating heart. A silence falls, something scurries through the shadows and between the tree-trunks, and consciousness suddenly slips away.
“Dawn” awakens us from this nightmare, dazed and confused by the chilly, strummed piano strings and shredded jazz riff dizziness of unconsciousness only to confront the even more spine-chilling reality of being dragged through cascading curtains of crystal rain to the sound of dark, pounding drums in preparation for some horrific ritual sacrifice. Consciousness doesn’t last long, and mid-way through “Dawn” the piece cuts away to looped classical strings and shadowy, mournful choral vocals, at this one moment genuinely reflecting the hauntological phantasmagoria of The Caretaker.
Bundling Forest of Evil as two long tracks certainly makes the album feel more substantial but “Quiet Sky” – the single additional track on this disc that at a modest thee and a half minutes does not over-extend what was already a successfully succinct experience – seamlessly picks up where the abruptly ending “Dawn” left off, providing a chilling, hiccuping coda to the ordeal.
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Liberation Through Hearing ::
The intriguing title Liberation Through Hearing refers to funerary texts such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead that are intended to help guide souls through the various states of consciousness experienced in the intermediate state between death and rebirth. If Forest of Evil describes the abduction and ritual sacrifice of some poor, unsuspecting soul and Voices of Dust a resurrection in some strange new world then Liberation Through Hearing is indeed that intermediate state between two worlds, superbly reflected by the dreamlike textures and atmospheres that resonate with the ambient records that Demdike Stare have said influenced it.
Distant, echoing grand choirs, machinery and vast drones abound on Liberation Through Hearing, be it in shimmering clouds above the throb and stomp of “Caged in Stammheim” or rising and falling amongst the ghostbox hum, desert winds and slashed percussion of “The Stars Are Moving.” The overpowering, grimy chug of dilapidated machinery in “Eurydice” plays out like the sinister sound experiments in Fritz Lang’s “The Testamant of Dr. Mabuse,” whirling, ghostly incantations in its closing minutes the spectral voice of the deceased criminal mastermind himself. This unsettling balance of the real and unreal is brilliantly followed up by the fog shrouded ghost train wails and construction site clonking of “Regolith.”
The keystone to the album would appear to be “Bardo Thodol” (thodol meaning “liberation” and bardo “liminality” or the subjective state of being on the threshold of two different planes) the Morrocan, warbling chants, eastern drums, tabla and percussion the actual event and incantation of the guiding funereal texts. The Bardo Thodol also mentions other states, the most obviously appropriate being dreaming, which explains the title and the looped, hypnotic nature of concluding track “Matilda’s Dream,” one of the most sublime, minimalist and utterly spellbinding tracks here. With little more than a dimly pulsing, subterranean glow at the core of this nine-minute channeled spell, the listener is first slowly drawn into the murky folds of the earth, then launched into the air and taken on a journey through wind and rain, icy clouds, over mountains and through forests.
Liberation Through Hearing gets an additional three previously unreleased tracks, “Nothing But The Night 2” breaking the spell slightly with a return to the more techno-edged, dub tones of Symbiosis whilst “Library of Solomon Book 1” slowly unleashes the hiss and thrum of strange devices in the confused, haphazard interior of some mad professor’s underground laboratory. The dusty tome “Library of Solomon Book 2” is easily the finest addition, however, resurrecting elements of “Bardo Thodol” as it reaches the end of its distended, murky thunk, a thumping dub techno groove that builds over the course of nine and a half minutes to the gentle hum of more unidentified machinery and crystalline chimes.
As consistently compelling as the three discs in this set are, Liberation Through Hearing is Demdike Stare’s piece-de-resistance. Every single sound and sample has been selected and meticulously engineered to perfection, making it sound as though the disparate elements that make up their musical collages have been natural partners for centuries.
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Voices of Dust ::
By the time we reach Voices of Dust the landscape has become almost completely alien, the journey altogether more disturbing, parched and caked in crumbling earth. Full of savage, tribal percussion, analog noise and distortion, Voices of Dust is somehow infused with the same shocking and unpleasant pornographic imagery, unflinchingly long, gritty cuts and deeply unsettling sound design as early 70’s cinema. There is no retreading of old ground here, Canty and Whittaker still exhibiting a staggering level of creativity, throwing ever more volatile ingredients into their smoking cauldron of ideas, and this final chapter is easily the most challenging, varied and darkly surreal of the three.
Where else than on a Demdike Stare album would you find a track like “Hashshashin Chant” that melds needle-stuck, glitching tribal jabber and chanting, midnight at the quarry clonking, Doctor Who theme tune referencing bass thrums, reversed whooshing noises and a looped sample of the background hum and opening doors of the TARDIS control room brushing up against the incandescently beautiful epic “Repository of Light”? Beginning in the shadows of a dank cave mouth, the heartbeat of the earth below and the drip of water into cool, stagnant pools above, “Repository of Light” soon emerges, blinking into dazzling beams of synth-light filtered through the cover of a leafy glade filled with the chatter and purr of animal life baking in heat of the sun. It’s a strangely uplifting moment on such a predominantly dark and savage album.
Much of Voices of Dust rises uncontrollably to the surface of consciousness like some horrific, unwanted race memory, from the nauseous experimental 70’s movie soundtrack aesthetic of “Desert Ascetic”‘s visceral, bone-cracking, clop-clopping percussion invoking disturbing imagery of rictus grinning masks and naked, ritual cavorting to the deadly pools of mist from which twisted spectres and visages emerge in roiled clouds of choking gas to envelop and consume the listener in “Rain and Shame.” After the chilly precipitation, relentless machine clanking and dark tribal celebrations of “Viento de Levante,” the album comes to a close with two more ambient pieces: the echo-chamber of distortion in “Leptonic Matter” leading to the finale, “A Tale of Sand” that seems to come full circle, chilling piano keys, crackly vinyl noise and haunted woodland a monochrome memory of the forest of evil.
The wildly eclectic mix of styles on Voices of Dust helps the extra tracks added by Tryptch blend in, extending and enhancing the experience immensely. The queasy “Filtered Through Prejudice” is indescribably strange whilst “Past is Past” acts as “Hashshashin Chant’s” ambient opposite number, brilliantly bookending the album with an evocative and completely spellbinding extended raga replete with soothing chants, looped sitars and trademark velvet-lined bass notes.
Forest of Evil, Liberation Through Hearing and Voices of Dust were three of the finest releases of 2010 and with the release of Tryptych now become one of the finest of 2011 as well. There is simply no repetition to be found anywhere across this twenty-three track, one hundred and seventy minute epic, Demdike Stare’s influences both boundlessly eclectic yet seemingly effortlessly absorbed into their uniquely dark yet alluringly beautiful sonic universe. Black magic has never been so enticing. Utterly essential listening.
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All releases are out now on Modern Love. [Listen | Purchase]
