Highly Recommended

Demdike Stare - Symbiosis
(2009 / Modern Love)

experimental / ambient / dub

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. One of the years standout debuts - and an essential purchase! (boomkat.com)

My Rating: 4/5