Saturday 22 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.
Elvin brandhi is an improvising lyricist, producer and sound artist from Bridgend, Wales making auto-tune blast beats from field recordings, tapes, instruments and voice. Live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation where her caustic stream of consciousness cavorts with restless, glitched out heaviness.
Her first E.P ‘Shelf life’ was released on ‘C.A.N.V.A.S’ in 2018. She one half of father / daughter noise-improv berserkers Yeah You who released on Alter, Slip, Opal, Psychik Dancehall and Good Food. She also performs in collaborations such as ‘Bad@Maths’ who also released on Slip, ‘INSIN’ who released their first E.P ‘Sadsun’ on Hizz, and unreleased projects such as ‘Gailvn Keiln’, ‘OCDC’ and ‘0n est Malade’.
https://canvas-index.bandcamp.com/album/shelf-life
Brought to you by Andy Votel and Demdike Stare's ephemeral label Pre-Cert Home Entertainment, Channelled Messages at the End of History began as a gift between friends, something not for mass production, but it's too good to keep to a corralled audience. The concept brings together samples of new age meditation, higher consciousness seekers and occult dwellers, all sourced from the bowels of YouTube's endless mind suck. On their own as an afternoon watch, experienced in full, they'd be grating or possibly just amusing; but when cut and assembled, padded with synth washes and ominous drone beds, they become something other. They achieve a psychedelic mantra, a through the television glass world of spectral freakishness.
It's new age sage for the ASMR generation, but instead of truly relaxing the listener with the subtle raindrop clop of fingernails and assured phrasing, the record winds up like a slow motion face-peel reveal of something glowing and gossamer beneath the surface. It never feels like a collage, the sampling here is so seamless that it just feels like the kind of lucid dream float that could only make sense in altered states, be your weapon of choice meditation or psychoactive toad. Pre-Cert is home to the types of records too weird and fractured for Modern Love or Finders Keepers, and this is definitely a kind of mission statement or high water mark for the label. For those with the right kind of ears, it's a welcome ride into the sweat-lodge nirvana of the mind.
