The British duo Demdike Stare continue grimly spelunking through a dank, anxious netherworld on Elemental, their first new music in over a year. Their sound hasn't changed significantly in the interim: Dark, ambient drones tangle with scraps of post-punk and library music, while strains of dubstep and techno settle like pathogens in the bloodstream. If "dark" was the organizing principle of their last album, as Mike Powell said of Tryptych, then "darker" is their current M.O.-- murkier, more oppressive, and more intense.
Suffused in cavernous reverb and distortion, Demdike Stare's hammered pianos and grinding, stunted rhythms conjure a kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape. Samples of exotic drums and unfamiliar string instruments are pitched so low that the waveforms seem to fray about the edges. Whatever doesn't decompose is thrown into shuddering, mechanical motion; I'm left with the image of giant machines tilling toxic soil, spitting up shrapnel from battles long lost and forgotten.
Almost uniformly slow, sooty, and diffuse, the record can be disorienting; the more you listen, the more individual tracks blur together. Barring a few elegiac passages, there are few melodies to latch on to, and the record's structure feels almost labyrinthine. Tracks may meander through several distinct phases with little regard for a conventional narrative arc; some simply hover, digging in like a bad trip, until they break in a burst of chorus. Elements flit in and out of earshot according to inscrutable whim, and scattered lock grooves have the potential to fuck up your whole sense of time: I spent 10 minutes lost in a loop before I realized I needed to pick up the needle.
There are pieces of recognizable musical codes scattered throughout-- twanging strings lifted from dusty Ocora samplers, techno's steady kick drum, the uneasy rumble of Nurse With Wound and SPK. Ragged synthesizers strafe across the spectrum like strobe lights in a British field, ca. 1989. In its more harmonic passages, the record's trapped-in-a-submarine atmosphere sounds directly inspired by Seefeel's great 1995 album Succour. The hand-soldered experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop bubble up in squealing sine waves and erratic oscillations; those analog strokes are some of the freest sounds on the record, suggesting lines of flight up and away from a potter's field strewn with mouldering recordings of yore.
Two songs explicitly engage with current modes of club music: "Mnemosyne" follows Shackleton's experiments in fourth world dubstep, with ululations laid over square-wave bass blurts and cracking snares, while "Ishmael's Intent" taps into the ominous, ethno-techno vibe of William Bennett's Cut Hands project.
There's a lot of this kind of thing around at the moment-- in addition to Cut Hands, this particular field of gloomy, ethno-infected, post-industrial techno includes Demdike Stare's label-mates Andy Stott, G.H., Raime, and the rest of the Blackest Ever Black label, Ancient Methods, Ekoplekz, and the clockwork kalimba meltdowns of Harmonious Thelonious and the Durian Brothers-- and it's legitimate to ask what elevates Elemental above mere mannerism or fashion. (Now that Tiësto's peddling triangle t-shirts, we can probably agree that the isosceles' hipster moment is over, but the current fascination with esoteric, sepulchral music and imagery shows little sign of abating.)
Beyond the pervasive sense of doom, which is only reinforced by titles like "Mephisto's Lament" and "In the Wake of Chronos", the whole album package feels like a tribute to limited-edition fetish products of 1980s industrial music. While a 2xCD reissue featuring an altered tracklisting is due later in the year, the album is currently out as a lavish, quadruple-gatefold, 4xLP set, with the individual discs colored four different shades of purple: chrysanthemum, violet, rose, and iris. (The first two pieces were included with the gatefold cover, now sold out; the second will be available for purchase separately. It's blatant collector bait, but it's hard to deny that it's a stunning piece of work.)
The music itself, though, is plenty compelling all on its own. More focused than Tryptych, Elemental hones in on its mood and conveys a genuine sense of mystery that goes way beyond mere affect. Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that you never know quite what you're hearing. Is that a foghorn or a Moog? A chorus of reeds or a bees' nest? Where did those drums come from? Does it matter? The sound lingers in between the representational and the abstract, and that ambiguity-- that impurity-- only increases its expressive dimensions. At several points, Demdike Stare's album sounds uncannily like Chris Watson's recently released El Tren Fantasma, a sound portrait of a Mexican railway in its last month of operation. Blurring the lines between documentary, music, and noise, and between life and technology, Watson's chronicle turned the real phantasmal. Demdike Stare do the opposite, conjuring a vivid fantasy world out of audio salvage and crusty circuitry.
