- Earlier this month, Demdike Stare attempted to exhume the dead movie stars buried at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. OK, that may not have been their intention, but entering the pitch black Masonic Lodge on the burial site, it sure seemed like that's what they were up to.
The show was presented by promoter and Highland Park record store Mount Analog. In recent months, Mount Analog have put on events with artists like Orphyx, Silent Servant and Alessandro Cortini—if there is one trend in their programming, it's the blackened aesthetic of labels like Downwards, Hospital and Modern Love. The Masonic Lodge is a 500-capacity concert hall that normally hosts acts like Sigur Rós and FKA twigs. It was the first underground electronic show on the property, and a coup for the organizers.
Upon entering, Demdike Stare was unleashing great peals of feedback, eventually dissolving into "Fail," a track that uses a ringing alarm as its sole melodic content. The duo of Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty are in the midst of their Test Pressing series, which finds them shaping white noise and harsh samples into mutant jungle forms. In the live setting, these beats proved to be sharp, imposing and gloriously oppressive—even the ambient sections sucked all the air out of the room. Past Demdike Stare performances were less powerful—the murky VHS-samples of their earlier work didn't transfer so well in the live setting. The Test Pressing material certainly does.
Following this onslaught, Andy Stott had his work cut out for him. The crowd seemed to sense this—the lights went up a bit as some of the audience filed out. Put simply, he was bringing a knife to a gunfight. New tracks like "Violence" sounded great live, but he was simply outmatched by the opening act in terms of vibe and raw sonics. This might say something about the lunatic fringe of music fans Mount Analog is cultivating. The store and its events are a lightning rod for uncompromising, experimental music, so their crowd may be more partial to full-on assault than Stott's gritty melodicism. That night in the graveyard, Demdike Stare were more aligned with the prince of darkness.