Demdike Stare - Berlin 09-03-2019 (2019)

Demdike Stare plunge into an ocean of dense, analogue sound disruption on this new work commissioned by Hanno Leichtmann for the Letra-Tone festival, in which they were asked to interpret a score created by graphic designer Scott Massey out of salvaged Letrasets. The result is on a moody and futuristic Concrète tip, full of seething drones, industrial clangs and flute choruses coming in and out of view.

Featuring an hour of new and previously unreleased work, the material here extends as one continuous piece split into two sides, building from meticulously layered field recordings into sheets of drone that coalesce from barely audible murmurations into colossal, reverberant walls of sound. Through a wide and spacious stereo field, we’re led though highly disorientating, sometimes terrifying passages, with long atmospheric sections suddenly disrupted by clanging percussion and found sound panning across the spectrum, before falling back into a kind of deadly, tense fizz.

Almost entirely beatless - except for the odd percussive shudder - it’s a relentlessly moody hour of music that only lets in some light at the very end, where buried strings slowly emerge into a gloriously moving final sequence, where shapes and colour gradually thaw back into being.

Pure future-primitive brilliance.