DEMDIKE STARE - SYMBIOSIS (Modern Love)

This studio project of the fairly notorious Miles Whittaker, together with Sean Canty, seems ambitious. Within these 11 tracks compiled from two 12s released on their eponymous imprint last year, fragments of what appear to be traditional Middle Eastern, Turkish and South Asian music vie with metallic ‘dark ambient’ drones and dub signatures.

There aren’t many recent comparable works like these I think. We might have to go as far back as Muslimgauze to find anything very similar. And this implies the first plus point here: there isn’t much stuff like this out there, in the shiny, polite world of ‘underground’ rhythmic, electronic music. I’m all for applauding any attempt to do something fairly unusual, whether those attempts are deemed to have been successful or not.

Beyond that, I feel the main remaining judgement to make is whether or not the attempted fusion works or not. And if a sense of lysergic foreboding was one objective, for me, there are certainly shards of that within these pieces; fierce enough to penetrate an over-familiarity with the ‘deliberately disorientating’ oeuvre that many of us like to visit. The opener ‘Suspicious Drone’, in particular, is one to check.

And sometimes, the source material of the found elements comes out fascinating enough in itself, to do much of the heavy lifting - like on ‘Jannisary’, with it’s clip-clopping percussion section for the skilled belly dancer only, Bollywood string stabs and discreet acid bass, all wrapped-up in a slow, slightly astringent flange. Much as I want to like it all though - and you can tell I really want to say ‘it’s excellent’, can’t you? - there isn’t enough here which proves visceral, idiopathic, and, dare I say it, adventurous enough, to impress me at a granular level.

It’s ‘different’ yes, but I found my attention drifting at times. That apparently ironic admiration of slightly kitsch styles of ‘Eastern’ music employed, ironically indeed, seems to come back to bite Demdike Stare on the behind. The problem is, whilst those styles might well be called ‘kitsch’, at least they are musicianly.
That music presumably wasn’t sequenced via midi, for instance, like the tracks here were. If there is repetition in fasil music, for example, no doubt it’s there because the band playing it, plays a refrain. In real time.

The repetition in the tracks on ‘Symbiosis’ seems more like the kind which comes from cutting and pasting midi parts. There are no moments of madness nor mistakes, deliberate or otherwise, and we end up with an album whose tracks only go where the machines say they should go. There is an air of predictability, in other words.

Overall, I feel Demdike Stare’s music is only superficially challenging even if it is enjoyable. But then, we are only two records in to the project, and from that perspective, what’s on offer here is obviously promising.

Ken Odeluga