For the first few years of their career, Demdike Stare narrowed in on their chosen aesthetic with unswerving focus. They took their name from a 17th-century witch; they favored titles like “Suspicious Drone” and “All Hallows Eve” and “Forest of Evil (Dusk).” Drawing from horror soundtracks, Italian library music, African percussion records, and industrial acts like Nurse With Wound, they boiled down the mixture until it resembled the sticky black substance scraped from the bottom of an iron cauldron. At the same time, the proportions of their music sprawled, and they turned to increasingly ambitious formats—triple CDs, quadruple LPs—to suit their meandering, multi-part ambient suites.
In 2013, the duo turned from their habitual style to indulge themselves with a pair of gut-punching club tunes. Called simply Testpressing #001, the record was named in homage to the white-label platters used to check for errors in the vinyl manufacturing process, but the title also spoke to the tracks’ exploratory purpose: What would happen if they applied their doomy aesthetic to classic jungle and techno? (Total dancefloor mayhem, as it turned out.) Pursuing a grab-bag approach and pairing radically different tracks on each successive 12”, they kept the Testpressing series going for six more installments—only Demdike Stare would approach even one-offs in serial fashion—and although the music varied widely, from UK garage to chopped-and-screwed breakbeat hardcore, the records all shared the same questing nature.
Their new album, Wonderland, keeps up those beat-oriented experiments. Nearly all of its tracks are built around muscular rhythms: hardcore breaks, lurching dancehall cadences, overdriven techno. And despite the omnipresent shadowy hues and sandblasted textures, no two tunes sound alike; the eight full-length tracks here (the ninth is a minute-long ambient sketch) could easily have served as the next four records in the Testpressing series. That’s not to say that Wonderland sounds disjointed. Quite to the contrary: As wonderfully immersive as their first couple of albums could be, the new one makes for a far more engaging listening experience, one that shakes you forcefully by the lapels at regular intervals.
Where the Testpressing records were noxious and smoggy, so thick with static you could barely breathe, the new album frequently takes inspiration from dancehall reggae’s use of empty space. “Animal Style” loops breakbeats into a snapping groove that feels like a reggae 45 spun at 33, and “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix)” goes so far as to sample “Now Thing,” a 1998 Sly & Lenky riddim that became the centerpiece of an eponymous Mo Wax compilation of dancehall instrumentals. (It’s clearly a sound close to their hearts: Earlier this year, Demdike Stare’s DDS label released Equiknoxx’s Bird Sound Power, an album by a group of Jamaican producers deeply inspired by the kind of digital dancehall that Now Thing spotlighted.)
There are moments of real beauty, like the flickering loop of tone that sends the final track, “Overstaying,” soaring toward its 808-driven climax. But the musicians aren’t afraid to get messy, either. In “Sourcer,” a ragged ragga-jungle anthem, dubbed-out synths bob like fat globules in soapy water; “Hardnoise” delivers exactly what the title promises, at least until a trim 808 pattern ushers its metal-shop squeals toward a comparatively dulcet ambient close.
Something that elevates *Wonderland *above reams of color-by-numbers “dark” techno is Demdike Stare’s judicious sense of dynamics; the duo also clearly have a wicked sense of humor. They’re fond of fake-out beats that hiccup, stumble, and flip into totally different time signatures, and the switchbacking changes of “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix)” suggest a preference for hands-on recording and white-knuckled mixdowns, as opposed to meticulous, on-screen composition. The end of the song dissolves into a monstrous bit of noise, followed by a sharp guffaw from one of the musicians; suddenly, we’re eavesdropping on the duo in their studio. “Amazing,” says the other, clearly pleased with the madness they’ve cooked up.
My favorite moment on the album might be the spoken-word snippet that closes out the woozy synth sketch “Fridge Challenge.” It’s just a loudspeaker announcement inside an airport terminal—“TAP Flight 3814 to Brasilia now boarding gate 28”—but the announcer’s voice is so full of character, her diction so alien, that within the context of the album, it takes on a weird, almost paranormal resonance. You can imagine the two musicians staring slack-jawed at each other as they pulled out their phones to record the sound, marveling at what they’d stumbled upon. To make mood music out of already gloomy materials is easy; on Wonderland, Demdike Stare spin the most unexpected stuff into music for haunted dancehalls, and the results are wickedly compelling.
