Demdike Stare doesn’t hide their influences. The Manchester-duo have a storied past as crate diggers of dance, hip-hop, soul and musique concrete obscurities. In their Testpressing series, Sean Canty and Mile Whittaker whittled themselves down to specific genres —such as jungle, harsh noise, and two-step—that they wanted to explore more deeply before recording 2016’s Eureka!-winning album, Wonderland.
Deep within the DNA of the duo is a little-known, although absolutely essentially strand dedicated to the Italian improvisation collective, Il Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Demdike’s early works are opaque soundscapes brimming with the clangs of wood,reconstruction of machinery and occult imagery, which have acted as a basis for the more solid tracks presented on Wonderland. It’s in these spaces that the Il Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza strand lives.
“Tasked by the Festival Nuova Consonanza for a live performance at their 53rd Edition, with the remaining Gruppo members in attendance, (Ennio Morricone, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Giovanni Piazza, Alessandro Sbordoni) we apprehensively dived into our collections for pieces by Gruppo and it’s members in order to create this homage.” The duo wrote in the press material for the album. “Using samplers, synths, and effects we looped and layered chosen sections to create new pieces which we had to then play in front of the mighty Il Gruppo, captured here for posterity.”
The Feed-back loop is Demdike’s grand homage to Il Gruppo Di. Named after the collectives most well-known record, The Feedback, this hour-long piece is a detailed edit of Il Gruppo Di’s work. Here, the collective’s influence on the duo is most easily heard. It’s best to bury your head in the mix, be patient and follow where it takes you. At first what starts as challenging listen later becomes a rewarding one. Each side has a distinct, although familiar aura and are worth exploring individually and as a whole. Demdike picks up on the patterns that the collective originally abandoned due to the nature of their unrelenting improvisations. Subtle clanks turn into a beat that repeats long enough for satisfaction and short enough to avoid a remix pit-fall, equating to gradual builds in intensity and design.
Listen to The Feed-back Loop below.