Altered Zones

By Emilie Friedlander

Manchester’s Demdike Stare is the meeting of two characteristically 21st century imaginations: electronic music enthusiast Miles Whittaker-- aka MLZ, and one-half of dub-inflected minimal techno duo Pendle Coven-- and unstoppable local record collector Sean Canty, whose work with Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers label keeps him on steady diet of vintage oddities and psychedelic obscurities from all over the globe. Miles and Sean have been hanging out and sharing tips for long as they can remember, though they didn’t start playing music together until a few years ago, when Sean suggested they try their hand at a horror soundtrack (sans film). Like Pendle Coven, the duo borrows its name from the dark past of the Lancashire region: Pendle Hill was the site of England’s most infamous witch trials, and Demdike, an alleged “Pendle Witch.”

In a recent interview with Fact Magazine, Miles described their sound as a confluence of “specific moments of space and time derived from vinyl records, signposts to our tastes in music and film.” Demdike Stare’s almost entirely sample-based atmospheres may have originated in a romance with the occult, but the duo cast their net as far as the modern archival imagination can go. Liberation Through Hearing, the second installment of their 2010 LP trilogy on Modern Love, seems to quote everything ‘80s industrial and ‘90s house music to library records, Norwegian drone, musique concrète, and Arabasque film scores; in fact, it probably quotes a lot more. But Demdike Stare immediately struck us as more than just another 2010 electronic act “curating” taste in re-appropriated musical languages. Why? Because the duo actually treat them as languages, vehicles in a larger vision quest that speeds by without even a passing nod to collage or pastiche-- even if Sean cites DJ Shadow as one of his formative inspirations.

The odyssey is an unremittingly dark one, chock full of robotic pulses, mechanical whirrs, and cold ambience. As Andy from Raven Sings The Blues pointed out, the album’s title refers to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which describes the journey of the soul in the period death to rebirth. Hard to say if the moment of redemption ever really arrives, but our endless telescoping between breathtaking vistas and high-resolution detail makes purgatory feel like a haunted water ride.

MP3: Demdike Stare: "Caged in Stammheim"

Liberation Through Hearing LP is out now on Modern Love