Demdike Stare - Union Chapel, London - 31st March 2012 (Live Review)
Tuesday, 10 April 2012
Written by Ben Bland
How do you describe a band like Demdike Stare? To say that their music is darkly atmospheric would be an understatement. To say that it is electronic would be misleading. To say that it is music, in the way that most people conceive of it, at all may be looking at things the wrong way around altogether. Their collation of otherworldly sampling and offbeat programming is the soundtrack to a horror movie that is happening not on the cinema screen but inside your head as the sounds this duo create drive you slowly insane as you lie next to your record player in a darkened room.
Why on earth then, many of you may be thinking, would you want to go and see Demdike Stare play live? Well, the answer to that is no less complicated. For some, music of this ilk is like the ultimate bad trip. I mean, the idea of this show in itself is faintly ridiculous. UK dark industrial pair Demdike Stare turning up at a chapel in Islington to unleash an unrelenting audio-visual current for just over an hour is less a gig than it some kind of bizarre cult event. This is a show all about the, unique and distinct, atmosphere that the pair create. It would barely make any difference if you could not see the protagonists, (or should that be antagonists?), Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty performing the music at all. Their presence, seated at tables behind Macs and a mass of wires just below the large projection screen, serves mostly just as the occasional welcome reminder that this is music being created by two perfectly ordinary looking human beings.
As the projected images, which are mostly fuzzy looking close-ups of things that could be almost anything, flicker across the screen and across the ornate ceiling of the Union Chapel, it only becomes less clear why Demdike Stare are such a uniquely fascinating musical journey. A show like this is only ever going to appeal to a small few, but for those few the rewards are huge. Demdike Stare provide music to get lost in…and if you are fortunate you may find that you really cannot get out.
'Elemental', the latest release from Demdike Stare is available now.
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