Friday 21 February 2020, 7.30pm
Two day residency from Demdike Stare, the occult project of Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty. After years spent mining vinyl bins for source material, the pair started working in earnest back in 2008, re-appropriating sounds they had spent a lifetime cataloguing into weird and immersive music of their own. Up until 2012 Demdike had produced a trio of albums (Symbiosis, Tryptych and Elemental) loosely themed around the occult and the rich heritage of Library music.
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 onto more intense, brutal terrain. Inspired by everything from Industrial music to Noise, Free Jazz to House, Techno and Concrète. Then in late 2016 they surprise released their 4th album Wonderland, shaking off the occult themes and further extending their own mutated forms of dancefloor rhythms.
Demdike Stare have refused to rest on their laurels or become too comfortable with their surroundings, something that’s perhaps most evident when evaluating the sheer scale of the projects they have undertaken in the last 18 months. From live-scoring films for the BFI to more commercial soundtrack work in Hollywood, from their ‘Concealed’ productions with Krakow’s Sinfonietta Cracovia and video artist Michael England, to the esoteric selections of their all-night DJ sessions, and searing late night club sets anyone lucky enough to have seen them play will no doubt have imprinted on their minds.
Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
Andy Votel is a musician, DJ, record producer, graphic designer and co-founder of Twisted Nerve Records and the reissuelabel Finders Keepers Records. Votel began making hip-hop music in the late 1980s as the youngest member of the group Violators of the English Language (from which the VOTEL stage name is derived). In 2000 Votel signed to XL Records. He recorded two albums for the label, Styles of the Unexpected (2000) and All Ten Fingers (2002). These albums featured original Can singer Malcolm Mooney, Guy Garvey, Gramme, and Jane Weaver. Votel's music is often released under a pseudonym. His aliases include Applehead, Anworth Kirk, Tandy Love, Xian Orphic, Slant Azymuth, Neotantrik, and Tony Deval.
Having built a reputation through Violators of the English Language, Votel began mixing psychedelic music with jazz and hip-hop records at clubs like The Hacienda and Home And South from the early 1990s. He is an internationally renowned DJ and has performed at events such as Sonar, All Tomorrow's Parties, and the Green Man Festival. Votel founded the B-Music DJ Collective alongside ex-Hacienda DJ and journalist John Maccready. Other B-Music collaborators include David Holmes, Belle And Sebastian, Edan, Bob Stanley, and Gruff Rhys. Votel has presented shows for Radio 4 such as 2011's Free Wales Harmony, which documented the history of Welsh protest music. He appears regularly alongside Stuart Maconie on The Freakier Zone show on BBC 6 Music.
