Demdike Stare @ The Planetarium

Thursday, May 3rd at the Planetarium!!! Doors 8:30pm, Show 9:00pm. Advance tickets available NOW at Red Cat, Zulu, Dandelion, Neptoon, and Beat Street Records. DEMDIKE STARE Demdike Stare is a long-in-the-making hookup between two shady characters operating at the fringes of Manchester’s fragmented music scene, Lancashire’s sons of occult darkness: Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty. Miles has been a longtime affiliate of Modern Love, as one half of Pendle Coven and under his own MLZ alias + with Andy Stott as duo Millie & Andrea; while Canty is one of the city’s most recognisable vinyl collectors, carrying an obsession with everything from obscure Nordic Doom records to Anatolyan funk albums, fuelled by his dayjob helping out at the Finders Keepers label. The project is named after looming alluvion Pendle Hill’s most famous 17th century witch: Elizabeth Southerns, aka Demdike, tried infamously for maleficium + petitioned for pardon nearly four centuries later. The music Demdike Stare make is hard to pin down, based largely around archival musical sources ranging from obscure library records to long forgotten jazz, early electronic, and industrial recordings, alongside an array of Iranian, Pakistani, Turkish and Eastern European material largely unknown in the Western world. Demdike Stare absorb and re-align these found sounds via their ever-expanding array of analogue machinery, ending up with something that is in part plunderphonic, but ultimately completely new. Elements of Turkish, Indian, Iranian, African and West Indian film soundtracks alongside Norwegian drone records; classic House templates, punctured dub, modified techno and the arctic noise perfected by Mika Vainio; direct references to the ‘Tibetan Book Of The Dead’, an ancient text intended to guide the reader through the experience of the consciousness occurring during the interval between death and the next rebirth; tentative strings with one eye on Alice Coltrane imbue an astral sense of wonderment before plunging us head first into the cold water of elliptical percussion; original sources and dense analogue experiments weave around each other with little care for convention or stylistic expectation, instead throwing the pair’s extensive musical knowledge into something that, quite brilliantly, defies categorization. Dark currents run deep, seeping from billowing sub-tones and heavenly choirs, through Köner-like spherical bell hum and grazed shellac textures before craftily phasing your sense of spatial perception, expanding to the five corners of audition; we’re deep into the session now, rendering those intermediary hours of the trip when we’re untethered from reality and deposited in the moment, an interzone of harrowing drones, acousmatic sampledelics and arcane intentions designed to create a state of psychedelic submission. Approach this when under the influence of magic potions for maximum rewards. THE SIGHT BELOW The music of The Sight Below conjures half-remembered dreams and soft-focus sentiments with elegiac beauty; like blurred snippets of film recognizable only as organic objects: black-and-white amoebas milling about, or a sunset rendered in grayscale. The resulting textured Gaussian curves are pinned to deep, propulsive bass tones and achingly subtle electronics. The carefully played, head-nodding hymns seem as effortless as natural phenomena. The Sight Below’s debut releases on Ghostly International were well-received, gaining plaudits from international publications and musicians, including Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, as well as remixes by Arctic techno pioneer Biosphere, Eluvium, and Simon Scott (ex-member of UK shoegaze icons Slowdive). The Sight Below has been described by AMG as "impeccably made ambient thump-and-drone", Pitchfork as "A beautifully bleak cloud of sound", and by XLR8R magazine as possessing "an astounding range of visceral sonic possibilities". The Sight Below has toured the world, playing DEMF (US), Interferenze (IT), MUTEK (CA), Unsound (PL), and Sonar (ES), collaborating with renowned Austrian guitarist Fennesz in a live setting + workingin the studio with the aforementioned Simon Scott, Tiny Vipers, and Benoit Pioulard + remixing School of Seven Bells, Detroit’s Echospace, and Germany’s Pantha Du Prince (with whom he was double-billed in his last Vancouver appearance). NO UFO's Last year Vancouver’s own No UFOs issued a self-released cassette limited to a mere 100 copies, 'Soft Coast': a short, yet potent string of collaged "cosmic trash" which gripped the underground tape scene + eventually bent the ear of everyone who heard it. Blogs caught on, WFMU started playing it and rave reviews began to pile up for the out-of-nowhere debut. Editons Mego and Spectrum Spools (a label run by John Elliott of Emeralds) teamed up to give the cassette a proper + beautifully mastered vinyl release, which found a place on many international best of 2011 year end lists, including electronic tastemakers Boomkat (UK) + drone heavyweight Keith Fullerton Whitman's esteemed Mimaroglu (US), which called Soft Coast "a strange and puzzling trip but one that will have you ceaselessly flipping the record to uncover its mysterious content". A follow-up cassette came soon after and was gobbled up just as quick + the same with a 12" on Warp sublabel Public Information. The No UFO's name (which shares initials with original label-of-issue, Nice Up) is cribbed from a classic track by Model 500, a.k.a. Detroit's finest, the godfather of techno, Juan Atkins. No UFO's seamlessly blends the disparate elements of kraut rock and classic Detroit, slowly and effortlessly morphing from crumbling electronics to Faust-inspired guitar work, weighted with heavy undercurrents of chilling ambience. This is truly inspired work from an artist that truly knows his musical history; it was said about the Swell Maps that their early output had been obviously crafted by true music lovers who were record collectors + it seems that Konrad Jandavs' debut as No UFO's was calculated and carefully pieced together to spawn a whole new universe from the omniverse of collective musics, a feat which many attempt, but in which few succeed. The vision is singular, a new perspective from looking at musics past and present. Seriously, probably the coolest show that will roll through Vancouver this year + it's in the Star Theatre at the Planetarium! And there'll be killer visuals from the artists coupled with in-house astral projections. Capacity is limited + the very occasional live performances held at this venue always sell out. We recommend planning ahead (while supporting one of our favourite local record stores) by purchasing advance tickets, which are available NOW at Red Cat, Zulu, Dandelion, Neptoon, and Beat Street Records. Presented by Twee Death, who've put together a number of really nice shows for you peeps over the past few years. Twee Death is presenting a number of other killer shows in 2012, including performances by notable artists from abroad at some very cool venues. We plan to make official announcements for a few more shows very soon, so "like" the Twee Death page already or follow us on Twitter! The poster features an original painting by Robert Ondzik.