Azure

Arctis

Nachthorn

Infinite End

Doxa

Galaxy Crimewave

...it wasn't really me

SSIEGE - Virgo Oscura

Garbage

VLetrmx

Myuthafoo

Memory Leak

Taken from the new doublepack 'Passion', out October 26th 2018.

Since the release of their album Wonderland a couple of years ago, Demdike Stare have been recording material for a new doublepack 'Passion'; an asymmetric re-imagining of UK club styles taking in frenzied drum trax, shortwave jungle, pinging dancehall and clipped, post punk riddims.

During this time they’ve been busy curating their DDS label (inc releases from Shinichi Atobe, Mica Levi, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and Equiknoxx, among others) and have been commissioned by both the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and the surviving members of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to mine and rework their archives. Enlisting visual artist Michael England (Autechre, Gescom, Leila), they’ve created a cinematic accompaniment for their collaborative live shows, resulting in the image which adorns this cover - a hybrid/composite portrait exploring/questioning the current use of software in creating hyper reality and the manipulation of the self. The accompanying film Includes documentary footage filmed at a Voguing event in NYC, Blackpool promenade and a Newark, New Jersey roller rink, the end result smudgng the lines between live performance, documentary and sonic cinema.

It’s an idea that’s echoed on Passion, continuing a process Demdike began on their Testpressing series of dismantling lines between analogue and digital realms, between urban realism and fantasy, between experimental, pop and soundsystem cultures. An outlandish configuration of avant-garde and ultimately functional club weapons designed and honed for the weightiest bassbins, it’s also their most direct and fucked up record to date - a raucous, joyful 9-track smash that comes off like a night on a glamorous, neon-lit bender.

Passion

Demdike Stare - At It Again

A Fossil Begins To Bray

A Desire, Nameless

Following on from a pair of Extended Players released in 2011 ("Passed Me By" / "We Stay Together") Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with 'Luxury Problems', an 8 track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of Alison Skidmore, Andy's onetime Piano teacher whom he hadnt seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened - but after almost a year of studio work the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before. 'Numb' opens the album with Alison's voice; layered and looped but essentially left bare and exposed, tumbling into a dense shuffle, sort of somewhere between Theo Parrish and Sade, but more f*cked. 'Lost and Found' follows and deploys a growling rave bassline and a disturbed vocal, the beat assembling itself around a squashed Linndrum like a submerged Prince/Cameo production, haunted and impenetrable, but full of funk. 'Sleepless' started life as an African drum edit that sooner or later succumbed to Stott's intense rhythmic shifts. It's a sound that's been imitated countless times since the release of 'Passed Me By', here re-tooled and re-built for its next evolutionary phase. 'Hatch The Plan' ends the first half of the album with some heavily treated location recordings and a low end grind that probably doesnt quite prepare you for the vocal arrangements that follow - it's just a beautifuly inverted pop song. The second half opens with 'Expecting', the most recognisably 'Stott' moment on the album: a wrecked, deliriously knocked-out 4/4 shuffle deployed at halfspeed; those heavy kickdrums sucking in everything around them. 'Luxury Problems' is next and offers up the album's most quietly euphoric and open 5 minutes; conventional arrangements and drumloops disrupted by sharp disco bursts that mess with what you know: it's straight and beautiful and unbalanced and damaged, somehow all at once. "Up the box" switches up the narrative and goes somewhere else entirely, an extended intro that seems to build continuously for 3 minutes before breaking off into a slowed-down Amen edit, creating a kind of narcotic Jungle variant that fragments everything and ends just at the point you think it's going to go off, before "Leaving" finishes the album with an almost unbareably beautiful arrangement of voice and synth and a final key-change that takes you from joyful to forlorn in an instant.

06-Luxury problems

Two Autumns

The Invention of the Human

The Peach Tree Next Door Grew over Our Fence

'Doxa' out on @ad93rec

Available at https://venusexmachina.bandcamp.com/

Contact: contact@venusexmachina.com
Enquiries: j@pluralartistmanagement.com

Galaxy Crimewave

Venus Ex Machina

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