demdike stare: wonderland

A project that came to life fueled by collector's obsession and a life-long willingness to dive head-first into unknown musical wormholes, Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have never been defined by a singular musical trajectory. Their opening salvo of releases dabbled with the aesthetic of the occult and provided an alternate, parallax view of the Italian Library records with which they were both obsessed at the time, but as their long running mixtape series and brilliantly curated DDS label attest, their interests extend far outside the crevices of early electronic music and into dance music, dancehall, roots, jungle, techno, industrial, noise and beyond. While 2013's Testpressing series provided an outlet for mostly club-based productions shot from the hip, Wonderland, their first album since 2012's Elemental, has been constructed with a narrative in mind. From the clipped hard-style of the opening "Curzon", through the jaunty dancehall mutations of "Animal Style" and "FullEdge", exotica/house refractions on "Hardnoise", the frankly ridiculous, bass-bin destroying jungle ructions on "Sourcer", or the extended tease of "Overstaying", it's probably the most enjoyable and loose-limbed hour of music in their catalog, or that you'll likely hear in these weird, angst-ridden times. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.