The most unsettling part of UK duo Demdike Stare’s latest release, Elementals Part 1 & 2, has little to do with the shuffling industrial stomp that constitutes a majority of the record. Instead, it’s an untitled loop less than a minute long that precedes and subtly bleeds into standout track “Mnemosyne.” It’s a simple banjo riff, clipped and repeated with the faintest of percussive baking; it is jarring in its organic starkness, like a browning plant meekly peeking out from a crack in the sidewalk of some post-apocalyptic metropolis. The loop ends as suddenly as it began, but its folksy twang finds its way into the lurching, midtempo “Mnemosyne” in the form of banjos and what seems like a manipulated fiddle.
The reason why this untitled loop is so unnerving is because it contrasts so sharply with its surroundings. The cavernous, slightly sinister “In The Time Of Chronos,” the droning “Kommunion” that pulses like a shadowy take on Wolfgang Voigt’s dense, forestal work as Gas, the caffeinated crickets, foghorn blasts, and horror-movie “OMG she’s in the room with the crazed killer and doesn’t even realize it” strings of opener “Mephisto’s Lament”: there’s a palpable coldness to most of this album’s sounds that gives them a foreboding, tin-heart quality. Elementals Part 1 & 2 feels very post-something, though I can’t quite place my finger on what that “something” might be. It’s too dark to be post-electronica; too mechanized to be post-industrial; too challenging to be post-trance; too rhythmically oriented to be post-ambient. Post-civilization is probably a closer bet.
While this resolute darkness would fit in with Demdike Stare’s previous releases, Elementals is a much weirder album than anything Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have put out under this moniker. Forest of Evil was more unified by rhythmic patterns, amounting to a Gothic spin on Fuck Buttons’ brand of tribal-noise-techno (most evident on Tarot Sport). Meanwhile, Liberation Through Hearing and Voices of Dust more closely approached what we might call “gloomy party music,” appropriate for séance raves and marathon game of Bloody Mary.
But the dark patches of piano that fumes like thunder on “Violetta” or the aforementioned vintage heartland mystique of “Mnemosyne” are more difficult to categorize. This isn’t a bad thing; artistic experimentation ought to almost always be encouraged, especially when the results are this solid. That said, I’m still waiting for an unequivocally great release from these guys; while past releases have offered plenty of memorable and appreciable moments — and Elementals is no exception — they have yet to produce an album’s worth of music that transcends its “dark ambient” origins. Which is to say that despite the unusual terror that guides this album, as with previous Demdike efforts, I kept waiting for something to “happen” here, for a cathartic moment to break the tension that never quite arrived. And maybe that’s the point. But you know that old question about a tree falling in a forest? Well, Elementals Part 1 & 2 poses a similar question: if a killer lurks in the misty shadows but never actually strikes, was he ever really a threat in the first place?
