Description:	CD on Modern Love AKA MLZ of Pendle Coven and Finders Keepers chap
	Format:	CD
	Genre(s):	Electronic
	Label:	Modern Love
	Price:	£12.29
	Availability:	Dispatched within 2-5 days (on average).

4
...according to our Brett on 22 October 2009.

Demdike Stare is the new project from Miles Whitaker of Pendle Coven and Sean Canty of the Finders Keepers label, keeping the witchy theme of the former going with track titles like 'Haxan Dub' and 'All Hallow's Eve' (which features Danny Norbury guesting) and by naming themselves after one of the more famous sisters of Pendle. Soundwise things have taken a turn for the darker as far as comparisons with Miles' previous material is concerned, with a palette of forlorn decay, exotic mystery and industrial static wedded to his usual immaculately dubby production. Overt beats have, for the most part, been dropped in favour of pulsing rhythms (and when they do crop up they have a peculiarly Turkish feel which conjures up images of Tarkan painting pentagrams on his floor) and the whole thing is completely in service to the atmosphere, thick enough to cut with a knife. Symbiosis represents a really tidy bit of work.

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Sound clips for Symbiosis by Demdike Stare: on CD at Norman Records UK. CD, Modern Love, LOVE059, £12.29.

What their label says...

tracklisting:
01/. Suspicious Drone 02/. Haxan Dub 03/. Regressor 04/. All Hallows Eve (Featuring Danny Norbury) 05/. Jannisary
06/. Haxan 07/. Extwistle Hall 08/. Trapped Dervish 09/. Nothing But The Night 10/. Conjoined 11/. Ghostly Hardware

Demdike Stare is a long-in-the-making hookup between two shady characters operating at the fringes of Manchester’s fragmented music scene: Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty. Miles has been a longtime 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 recognisable vinyl collectors, carrying an obsession with everything from obscure Nordic Doom records to Anatolyan funk albums, fuelled by his dayjob 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 analogue experiments weave around eachother 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 categorisation.

The album opens with ‘Suspicious Drone’, a dense 6 minute opening that chugs a long like a malfunctioning mechanical beast, honing in on Lancashire’s dark industrial landscape 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 analogue frequencies, expertly handled by those masterful technicians over at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering.