Demdike Stare - Wonderland
Pitchfork 82
For the first few years of their career, Demdike Stare narrowed in on their chosen aesthetic with unswerving focus. They took their name from a 17th-century witch; they favored titles like “Suspicious Drone” and “All Hallows Eve” and “Forest of Evil (Dusk).” Drawing from horror soundtracks, Italian library music, African percussion records, and industrial acts like Nurse With Wound, they boiled down the mixture until it resembled the sticky black substance scraped from the bottom of an iron cauldron. At the same time, the proportions of their music sprawled, and they turned to increasingly ambitious formats—triple CDs, quadruple LPs—to suit their meandering, multi-part ambient suites.
In 2013, the duo turned from their habitual style to indulge themselves with a pair of gut-punching club tunes. Called simply Testpressing #001, the record was named in homage to the white-label platters used to check for errors in the vinyl manufacturing process, but the title also spoke to the tracks’ exploratory purpose: What would happen if they applied their doomy aesthetic to classic jungle and techno? (Total dancefloor mayhem, as it turned out.) Pursuing a grab-bag approach and pairing radically different tracks on each successive 12”, they kept the Testpressing series going for six more installments—only Demdike Stare would approach even one-offs in serial fashion—and although the music varied widely, from UK garage to chopped-and-screwed breakbeat hardcore, the records all shared the same questing nature.
Their new album, Wonderland, keeps up those beat-oriented experiments. Nearly all of its tracks are built around muscular rhythms: hardcore breaks, lurching dancehall cadences, overdriven techno. And despite the omnipresent shadowy hues and sandblasted textures, no two tunes sound alike; the eight full-length tracks here (the ninth is a minute-long ambient sketch) could easily have served as the next four records in the Testpressing series. That’s not to say that Wonderland sounds disjointed. Quite to the contrary: As wonderfully immersive as their first couple of albums could be, the new one makes for a far more engaging listening experience, one that shakes you forcefully by the lapels at regular intervals.
Where the Testpressing records were noxious and smoggy, so thick with static you could barely breathe, the new album frequently takes inspiration from dancehall reggae’s use of empty space. “Animal Style” loops breakbeats into a snapping groove that feels like a reggae 45 spun at 33, and “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix)” goes so far as to sample “Now Thing,” a 1998 Sly & Lenky riddim that became the centerpiece of an eponymous Mo Wax compilation of dancehall instrumentals. (It’s clearly a sound close to their hearts: Earlier this year, Demdike Stare’s DDS label released Equiknoxx’s Bird Sound Power, an album by a group of Jamaican producers deeply inspired by the kind of digital dancehall that Now Thing spotlighted.)
There are moments of real beauty, like the flickering loop of tone that sends the final track, “Overstaying,” soaring toward its 808-driven climax. But the musicians aren’t afraid to get messy, either. In “Sourcer,” a ragged ragga-jungle anthem, dubbed-out synths bob like fat globules in soapy water; “Hardnoise” delivers exactly what the title promises, at least until a trim 808 pattern ushers its metal-shop squeals toward a comparatively dulcet ambient close.
Something that elevates Wonderland above reams of color-by-numbers “dark” techno is Demdike Stare’s judicious sense of dynamics; the duo also clearly have a wicked sense of humor. They’re fond of fake-out beats that hiccup, stumble, and flip into totally different time signatures, and the switchbacking changes of “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix)” suggest a preference for hands-on recording and white-knuckled mixdowns, as opposed to meticulous, on-screen composition. The end of the song dissolves into a monstrous bit of noise, followed by a sharp guffaw from one of the musicians; suddenly, we’re eavesdropping on the duo in their studio. “Amazing,” says the other, clearly pleased with the madness they’ve cooked up.
My favorite moment on the album might be the spoken-word snippet that closes out the woozy synth sketch “Fridge Challenge.” It’s just a loudspeaker announcement inside an airport terminal—“TAP Flight 3814 to Brasilia now boarding gate 28”—but the announcer’s voice is so full of character, her diction so alien, that within the context of the album, it takes on a weird, almost paranormal resonance. You can imagine the two musicians staring slack-jawed at each other as they pulled out their phones to record the sound, marveling at what they’d stumbled upon. To make mood music out of already gloomy materials is easy; on Wonderland, Demdike Stare spin the most unexpected stuff into music for haunted dancehalls, and the results are wickedly compelling.
Tue Nov 29 06:00:00 GMT 2016Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Demdike Stare
Wonderland
[Modern Love; 2016]
Rating: 4/5
For Demdike Stare, Wonderland is an infinite loop. It’s a place, not of the boundless novelty and creation assumed to inspire wonder, but of the same materials — the electronic noises, samples, tones, and textures — recycled again and again. Replete with the minute inflections intended to give them an aura of evolution and progression, these regurgitated materials create the magical impression of movement through space, time, and history, when in actual fact space, time and history have ceased to exist in any meaningful sense.
This impression comes out most clearly in how Messrs. Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker actually build the nine tracks of their sixth album. Their primary M.O. essentially involves taking a very short sequence of sound, be it a single-bar bass line or a momentary bird squawk, and piling it with its own repetitions, which, rather than being subjected to “essential” changes of structure, generally witness only subtle manipulations of their inessential properties: volume, EQ, echo, reverb, tempo.
In opener “Curzon,” this amounts to the industrial-esque clicks of the beat, which rise in volume and deviate semi-imperceptibly in frequency, creating an unnervingly shifting floor of percussive sound that prepares the way for an ominous coda involving a cycling, four-chord synth riff. In the 10-minute “Hardnoise,” it amounts to a glitchy, atonal figure that clips its way through numerous rounds of sonic degradation, widening in amplitude and growing in distortion without having the decency to stop harassing the listener. Eventually, it fades into a clubbier passage of radiator drones and narrowly twitching hi-hats, yet these continue to maintain the same tight repetitions and the same fundamental feeling: of being helplessly trapped in a freeze-framed moment of time, which generates the illusion that it isn’t freeze-framed merely by doctoring its own image.
Today, it’s all-too easy to think of things that repeatedly doctor their own image so as to manufacture a false sense of change and forward movement. And while Demdike Stare certainly haven’t made any explicit profession of wanting to express the superficiality of modern history via Wonderland’s atomistic electronica, they have past form when it comes to social and political criticism. Last year, the Manchester duo provided the live score to showings of the 1922 Swedish-Danish documentary on witchcraft, Häxan. In an interview with self-titled, Miles Whittaker explained their attraction to the film by explaining that its witch metaphor is very “relevant to our times” and provides “a really good commentary,” particularly on “the Middle East” and “people being suspicious of other humans.” Of course, the mechanically shapeshifting claustrophobia of Wonderland doesn’t explicitly address suspicion or paranoia in this way, yet sinceHäxan furnishes evidence that they are politically minded, it becomes tempting to regard the album’s deceptively repeating micro-loops as some kind of veiled comment on the current complexion of our age.
Just listen to “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix),” which unfolds via a programmed beat that sounds like a half-second sample replayed indefinitely. Soon enough, a two-note digital squelching is added to mix, with its increasing “squelch” acting as a substitute for any more substantial change to its pitch or key. It’s as if its minor variations in timbre are working to disguise this absence of harmonic development, and as if the piece is underhandedly locked into the same fragmented groove, just as, say, American politics is arguably locked into the same media-disguised to-ing-and-fro-ing between mostly indistinguishable political parties.
And yet, this seemingly negative focus on disguised and doctored repetition isn’t to say that Wonderland isn’t an utterly transfixing record. In fact, taut IDM stompers such as “Sourcer” are positively thrilling, attacking as they do the listener with a barrage of syncopated percussion and pounding bass. There’s something about their compositional enclosed-ness that makes them edgier and more agitative than they would’ve been if Whittaker and Canty had given them more room to unfold and shift, as the duo did in 2013’s more spacious Elemental. Whether it be the metallic thudding of “Airborne Latency” or the concrete-jungle shuffling of “Animal Style,” the circling of the same break-beaten patterns generates the maddening suspicion of being caught on some kind of musical hamster wheel, where “forward motion” is little more than the product of the same moment being reproduced endlessly.
As such, this suspicion is also one of powerlessness, yet it’s the kind of powerless that Wonderland somehow makes pleasurable. The LP straps us into its cramped, jilted rhythms and harsh materiality, keeping us in its grips. And it’s successful in keeping us there precisely because we enjoy its confinement, we enjoy its power over us, and we enjoy the illusion that we aren’t confined and powerless. That’s ultimately what makes it a wonderland.