Jon Collin & Demdike Stare - Sketches Of Everything (2020)

Ostensibly Demdike Stare's first proper full-length collaboration, 'Sketches Of Everything' weaves dark moorland ambient blues into guitarist Jon Collin’s windswept Americana. It's a highly evocative swing between porchside strums, sludge doom and weathered dub noise somewhere between Bruce Langhorne’s soundtrack for ‘The Hired Hand’, Neil Young's 'Dead Man', Loren Mazzacane Connors at his most swoonsome and a screwed Prince Jazzbo - proper stoner vistas.

Technically Demdike Stare’s first official collaboration, ‘Sketches Of Everything’ was recorded between Stockholm and Manchester and finds Miles Whittaker & Sean Canty inspired to create some of the most quietly expressive scapes of their career, feeding into Jon Collin's strung-out vibe with a mix of layered and smudged backdrops that usher us through ravines of feedback and unexpected midnight hallucinations.

Across two long, elliptical sides the results draw spectral parallels between the Pennine moors and ruined industry of Demdike’s native Lancashire, and the kind of moody Western Americana best described in ‘The Hired Hand’. Collin acts as lead protagonist with a lyrical form of guitar that sometimes takes the lead, and at others fades into mystic swirl, rendering naked strums into vapours redolent of Loren Mazzacane Connors or the loner Norwegian blues of Terje Rypdal.

In a sense it’s an album that applies dub mixing techniques to aesthetically dissonant source material, a sort of stream of consciousness flowing into the murkiest, most beautifully low lit interiors.