Demdike Stare
Demdike Stare is a collaboration between Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, two childhood friends from the North of England with voracious appetites for record collecting. After years spent mining vinyl bins for source material, the pair started collaborating in earnest back in 2008, re-appropriating sounds they had spent a lifetime cataloguing into weird and immersive music of their own. The project went on to produce a string of albums: Symbiosis, Tryptych and Elemental that were largely guided by the occult and the strange symbolism their surroundings in Pendle provided, but as a number of intriguing DDS mixtapes released over the next couple of years indicated, the project was starting to head in unexpected directions.
In 2013 the first in an ongoing series of exploratory 12"s brought together under the 'Testpressing' banner appeared on Modern Love, finding Demdike heading into much more intense, brutal terrain. In 2016 these club experiments were refined for their "Wonderland" LP, which switched both their aesthetic, and sonic directions yet again. Their love for dance floor evolutions was taken a step further on 2018's Passion, and since 2020 a step sideways resulted in 3 long form releases with guitar maestro Jon Collin, which only further defied a categorisation of Demdike Stare, and has kept listeners guessing as to what comes next.
Inspired by everything from Industrial music to Noise, Library music to Free Jazz, House, Techno, Hip Hop and Jungle - Demdike Stare have refused to rest on their laurels or become overly familiar with their surroundings, creating an odd tension that's perhaps most evident when contrasting the sheer scale of the projects they have undertaken in recent years - from live-scoring films for the BFI to more commercial soundtrack work such as their input on Xan Cassavette’s Kiss Of The Damned, the Nicholas Cage drama Joe, and the post Breaking Bad Movie "El Camino”.
This forward momentum bridges over to their more multi-disciplinary projects such as their collaborations with filmmaker and video artist Michael England that resulted in the 'Concealed' productions featuring Krakow’s Sinfonietta Cracovia, also featured in Doug Aitkens Station To Station curation for the Barbican, and their critically acclaimed A/V show which debuted at Berlin's Atonal festival in 2017. Working alongside the contemporary artist Phil Collins also expanded their disciplinary experience on a variety of projects, culminating in remixes (My Heart's In My Hand, And My Hand Is Pierced, And My Hand's In The Bag, And The Bag Is Shut, And My Heart Is Caught), performances (Intervention), releases (Mica Levi's Delete Beach) and collaborations across different projects. They've also made an interactive sound installation for Geneva's La Batie Gallery, a recent collaboration with NY Fashion label Eckhaus Latta for their 2023 Summer Collection, and a slew of edit/mixtape style cassette releases that draw from every corner of the music spectrum.
If this isn't enough, they also curate their DDS label, which has seen music from as far afield sonically as their own output would suggest: Equiknoxx's Dancehall evolutions, Mica Levi & Tirzah's uniquely skewed Urban pop, classic melodics from Shinichi Atobe, or outer fringe experiments by Nate Young, Stephen O'Malley, Andy Votel and Jim O'Rourke to name but a few.
Booking Request: michelle@potnia-theron.de
