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, Triptych 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 last 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. 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 just the last couple of 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, and the Nicholas Cage drama Joe. This bridges over to their more multi-disciplinary projects such as their ‘Concealed’ productions with video artist Michael England and Krakow’s Sinfonietta Cracovia, which featured in Doug Aitkens Station To Station curation for the Barbican, and into the esoteric selections of their ‘Before My Eyes’ DJ nights with Raime/BEB and the searing late night sets anyone lucky enough to have seen them play at a club somewhere in the world will no doubt have imprinted in their minds.