Demdike Stare's music is concerned with opposing forces: decay and resurrection, loss and discovery, past and future, beauty and ugliness. It's almost inevitable, given that it's informed by the duo's previous work in two ostensibly opposite musical fields. Miles Whittaker has spent years making grainy and often abrasive techno as MLZ and one half of Pendle Coven, and more recently has been responsible for a series of hybrid dancefloor tracks that unite dubstep's sprawling sense of the urbane with dub-techno's rickety intensity; Sean Canty works for the Finders Keepers label, unearthing ancient and lost recordings and giving them a new lease of life. So while one half of the duo appears defiantly futurist, tapping into a lineage that began with Detroit techno's obsession with dystopian future worlds, the other's work is concerned with tunneling backwards into the past. Their records teem with the sounds of that apparent contraction, but reconcile its two halves into a form that's strikingly coherent.
On a number of levels, then, Demdike Stare practice a particularly potent form of modern witchcraft. As obsessive record collectors, they use acquisition of musical knowledge like weaponry, writing music by assembling it, layer upon layer, from samples and the rickety creak of hardware. This process of unearthing old recordings and reanimating them in new shapes carries with it an intrinsically arcane power; by passing the phantoms trapped in these records through a modern lens, Whittaker and Canty resurrect and re-contextualise the ghosts of the past. The results veer wildly from clouds of dense, almost impenetrably dark ambience to long-form tracks that could almost work on a dancefloor, powered by the incessant heartbeat thud of a bass drum.
Combined with their jet black, occult-referencing artwork and fearsome reputation of their namesake (Demdike was the most famous of the Pendle witches), the complete aesthetic the duo project is tied to a uniquely British sort of horror: all Wicker Man rituals, Shakespearian witches and wicked, sarcastic humour. In that sense, they're tightly bound to a host of other musicians, working across a range of different fields, who tap into the modern world's strong sense of political and social unease to reimagine the nervous dread of early post-punk and avant-funk. As with people like Shackleton, Actress, Raime, T++, Philip Jeck and Mordant Music, their music screams of different times and cultures colliding – thanks in part to their catch-all use of samples, from old psych-rock records to techno, through free jazz, dub and world musics – but twists them into forms that skillfully paste over cracks and tensions that might otherwise appear. The spiritual outcry of last year's 'Hashashin Chant' is a perfect example; one of Demdike Stare's finest moments, its incessantly looped voices trapped in perpetual motion depict a sort of abstract existential terror, as bleak as it is oddly beautiful.
