Biography
Demdike Stare emerged in 2009 as a Manchester-based pair of relentless record collectors whose output encompasses eerie electronics across dark ambient, dub, and twisted variants of jungle alongside grime. The project draws its title from the notorious Lancashire witch trials of 1612 near Pendle Hill, where Elizabeth Southerns—known as Demdike—led the accused Pendle Witches. Their initial pressings, later gathered on the CDs Symbiosis (2009) and Tryptych (2011), fused dub textures with techno’s austere minimalism while incorporating exotic rhythms and sampled fragments that sometimes conveyed an unsettling, spectral atmosphere, as if arriving from beyond. Later works shifted toward U.K. club traditions, nowhere more clearly than on the 2016 album Wonderland, which foregrounded fractured breakbeats and distorted low-end frequencies.
The Manchester music community already knew the two founders well when they launched the project that year. Miles Whittaker, one half of the acclaimed dub-techno outfit Pendle Coven, had previously issued material as MLZ and Daughter of the Industrial Revolution. Sean Canty, celebrated for his vinyl fixation, had been employed by Finders Keepers and regularly hunted overlooked pressings in neighborhood shops. Within Demdike Stare, Canty’s passion for scarce Middle Eastern film scores and stark Scandinavian drone merged with Whittaker’s fifteen years of studio experience. Their debut, Symbiosis, first appeared as two separate, extremely limited vinyl EPs of three hundred copies apiece before receiving its CD edition just days prior to Halloween.
In 2010 the duo issued three restricted vinyl titles—Forest of Evil, Liberation Through Hearing, and Voices of Dust—which were assembled the next year into the triple-CD Tryptych, augmented by roughly forty minutes of additional music. December 2011 saw the start of the Elemental vinyl series, with the first two installments housed in a gatefold jacket that left room for the remaining parts; those arrived the following month, and a double-CD compilation followed in March, albeit with four tracks presented in alternate mixes. After Elemental came seven volumes of Testpressing 12-inch singles that delved further into jungle and grime, accompanied by assorted experimental mixtapes. Wonderland surfaced without warning as a double LP in late 2016 and remains their most floor-oriented album; its triple-CD edition incorporated the entire Testpressing catalog. Two years afterward they released Passion, another collection of abstract club reworkings.
The Manchester music community already knew the two founders well when they launched the project that year. Miles Whittaker, one half of the acclaimed dub-techno outfit Pendle Coven, had previously issued material as MLZ and Daughter of the Industrial Revolution. Sean Canty, celebrated for his vinyl fixation, had been employed by Finders Keepers and regularly hunted overlooked pressings in neighborhood shops. Within Demdike Stare, Canty’s passion for scarce Middle Eastern film scores and stark Scandinavian drone merged with Whittaker’s fifteen years of studio experience. Their debut, Symbiosis, first appeared as two separate, extremely limited vinyl EPs of three hundred copies apiece before receiving its CD edition just days prior to Halloween.
In 2010 the duo issued three restricted vinyl titles—Forest of Evil, Liberation Through Hearing, and Voices of Dust—which were assembled the next year into the triple-CD Tryptych, augmented by roughly forty minutes of additional music. December 2011 saw the start of the Elemental vinyl series, with the first two installments housed in a gatefold jacket that left room for the remaining parts; those arrived the following month, and a double-CD compilation followed in March, albeit with four tracks presented in alternate mixes. After Elemental came seven volumes of Testpressing 12-inch singles that delved further into jungle and grime, accompanied by assorted experimental mixtapes. Wonderland surfaced without warning as a double LP in late 2016 and remains their most floor-oriented album; its triple-CD edition incorporated the entire Testpressing catalog. Two years afterward they released Passion, another collection of abstract club reworkings.
Albums
