demdike stare: symbiosis

ltd repress. Demdike Stare is a long-in-the-making hook-up between two shady characters operating at the fringes of Manchester's fragmented music scene: Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty. Miles has been a long-time 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 recognizable vinyl collectors, carrying an obsession with everything from obscure Nordic Doom records to Anatolian funk albums, fuelled by his day job 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 analog experiments weave around each other 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 categorization. The album opens with "Suspicious Drone," a dense, 6-minute opening that chugs along 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 with displaced horns and African signatures, taking its time with one of the jerkiest rhythms you'll have the pleasure of hearing, before "Jannisary" tangles in and out of an Iranian hook and a squashed Congolese rhythm that creates an asymmetric, geniusly-constructed dancefloor killer. By the time the album comes to a close with "Ghostly Hardware" an hour later, the cycle is complete with a return to icy tundras and chugging machinations steeped in the traditions of Scandinavian machine music and pure analog frequencies, expertly handled by those masterful technicians over at Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering.