DDS

Prescient jazz-techno mutator Jamie Hodge (Conjoint, Studio Pankow) ushers a long overdue solo debut album, of sorts, with Demdike Stare’s DDS label; an archival harvest spanning his earliest experiments circa his Plus 8 debut thru to ’00s anomalies - hybrid ambient techno jazz and incredibly inventive forerunners of dubbed electronica - bookended by two Demdike Stare edits. Essential listening if yr into anything on the axis from Move D to Detroit Escalator Company, Jan Jelinek or Tortoise. Jamie Hodge grew up in Chicago in a jazz-loving family, first forming a band when he was a teenager, using drum machines and keyboards to rattle thru covers of Joy Division and Ministry tracks. His sound progressed into dubbier spaces when he befriended Ted Gray, a local record store clerk, and into off-kilter jazz when he ran into Bundy K. Brown and David Grubbs, who let Hodge watch rehearsals of the first Gastr del Sol recordings. But the transformational moment came when a friend (pictured on the "Diagonals" cover no less) played Hodge the 1991-released "From Our Minds To Yours Vol. 1", the first compilation on Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva's Plus 8 label. From here, Hodge took his growing obsession with dance music to early Chicago raves, and began to explore European techno and UK hardcore. Eventually he met Hawtin in person after convincing his mom to cut through Canada on the way back from visiting East Coast colleges, and released his Plus 8 debut by the time he'd moved into a college dorm in 1993, using the Born Under A Rhyming Planet moniker for the first time. Hodge was also immersed in Chicago’s famous experimental jazz scene of the ‘90s - later on establishing the short-lived but excellent Aestuarium label that brought the work of Philip Cohran And The Artistic Heritage Ensemble to wider attention. Hodge would release two more 12"s for Plus 8, heading to Germany to connect with David Moufang (Move D) and forming Conjoint, later Studio Pankow. The material presented on "Diagonals" takes us right back to Hodge's vintage era, when he was using a mutating spread of equipment - Korg MS-20, Atari ST, Nord Micro Modular, ARP Axxe, Yamaha TG77 and TX816, and Alesis HR-16B - to assemble tracks that reached through his wide range of musical interests. According to Hodge, more Plus 8 releases were planned but never materialised, so this long overdue set fills in the gaps between records like 2000's classic Conjoint plate "Earprints" and Studio Pankow's still-underrated 2005 slow-burner "Linienbusse”. ‘Diagonals’ sputters to life with a Demdike Stare edit of a track Hodge recorded in Brooklyn while he was on summer break from college and working at a local record distributor. Inspired by music he'd seen at that year's New Music Seminar, he used an Atari ST and Yamaha TG77, a glassy FM module, to conduct a mood that hovers between '80s new age DIY tapes and gaseous dub techno. ‘Handley' digs into the tranquil electrified jazz modalities over a swung drum machine rhythm, squeezing robotic soul from a modest arsenal of gear, lashing the hypermelodic post-Detroit sensitivity of The Black Dog/Plaid to Chicago-axis experiments from Tortoise and Gastr del Sol. The shorter interludes are just as engrossing: Hodge experiments FM spray on 'Trampoline' and dusty Jan Jelinek-esque electroid funk on 'Menthol', ducking further into jazz on 'Hot Nachos...', augmenting his electronics with fretless electric bass. Cherry-picked by DDS, the selection best portrays the mix of soulful depth and atmospheric effervescence that defined that elusive era in electronic music; spanning a late night spectrum of styles from dusty electro-acoustic ambient prisms to supple deep house pearls, with a special strain of gently frayed computer jazz touching on the outer limits of Detroit techno. It's exceptional material that reminds us of a time when electronic music was frothing over with hope, futurism and revolutionary spirit, so whether you're into the post-Artificial Intelligence era or the Jazz-looped investigations of Jan Jelinek and crew, "Diagonals" feels like stepping into a particularly good dream.

Demdike Stare zoom into the late 90’s sweetspot where jungle producers swang into UKG and R&B with a high grade mixtape spliced together with typical, obsessive knowledge and swerve - trust it’s one of their best. Mining one of their essential touchstones, ‘The Call’ highlights the ’97-’99 period in the UK when the likes of Steve Gurley, Anthill Mob and Sky Joose were key players in the phase shift from ruff to sweet club styles around needlepoint 2-step drum programming. Also spotlighting the irrevocable influence of US R&B at the time, the mix homes in on one of the hardcore ‘nuum’s most fascinating innovations, when original, leading producers reclaimed their music from the sweatier excesses of jungle/D&B, and ushered it back to sexier, slinkier styles primed for dressing up and showing off - not gurning your tits off and brukking the f uck out. Stitched together with subtle, patented sleight-of-hand edits and dial strafe smudges, the mix exerts exquisite control for one hour of dainty rudeboy shuffle and woodblock parry in honour of their innovative heroes. Without overstating it, they trace UKG’s flex from bumpty speed garage soul inflicted with syrupy R&B, to its four-to-da-floor variants, and the sparkier punctuation of 2-step, proper, emphasising the sound’s rhythmic and textural sensuality with triple deep and eternal cuts that find the sound crystallizing from a delicious flux of puckered US garage-house and R&B-soul aspects, and updating the memory banks of original UK rave. Like the post-factum UKG archaeology of Finn and Oneman, Demdike’s picks are educated and educational, but never academic - presenting an ideal primer on the way styles shifted quickly back then, exemplifying how the tussle of energies between the house traction of Grant Nelson, Dem 2’s dissection of Timbaland/The Neptunes’ mainstream R&B, and the restless bad foot of rave were factored by the adroit chops of early jungle DJs on radio stations such as Freak FM and Jason Kaye’s Sun City mixes.

The DDS 12” series follows that blink-n-miss Shinichi Atobe opener with this full curveball from Demdike Stare, finding the UK x US brukbeat axis twisting wildstyle thru the deadly first shots of a Demdike x Dolo Percussion hookup that’s been years in the making, set to dominate dancefloors for the foreseeable. Since 2019 Demdike Stare had been playing edits of Dolo Percussion’s bare-boned breaks in their DJ sets, eventually sharing them with Dolo’s Andrew Field-Pickering (Beautiful Swimmers, boss of Future Times) and fomenting a creative fusion that hits at the square root of their shared tastes for unruly, deadly rhythms. In a transatlantic back ’n forth - or what Kodwo Eshun termed a double refraction - they juggle the rudest aspects of UK hardcore, as derived from electro, breaks and garage-house - that would feed into Dolo’s pool of sound, and return to the UK via the likes of breakbeat wizard Karizma, who was a key touchstone for the whole late ‘90s broken beat movement key to Demdike’s tastes. Still following the thread? It’s not that tricky - both US and UK operators favour breakbeat music more than anywhere else, and this devilish hook-up is the epitome of a conversation ongoing for generations now. At each parry, the three cuts here are exemplary of the way DJs, producers and dancers on both sides of the pond have pushed each other to new heights in a feedback loop designed to make the dance throw the maddest shapes. ‘DOLO DS 1’ racks up a full clip of flintiest breakbeat hardcore, pivoting gasping samples inna dervish of ruffneck syncopation, ruggedly distinguished from the pitching, gritty drum machine chicanery of ‘DS DOLO EDIT 1’, and their super crafty sidestep into the offbeats, hingeing around ghost snares and practically spectral levels of percussive suss in ’DOLO DS 2’ which basically sounds like a prime Autechre tumbling thru dub. It’s fair to hear recent Demdike mixtapes such as ‘Physics’ as the testing ground for this steez, and if you love that one as much as we do, you’ll be snatching this one f a s t.

Pioneering Parisian weirdo and member of acclaimed, enigmatic collective Ssabæ, Iueke throws down his first “album” for Demdike Stare’s DDS label, following a trio of mixtapes with an hour of warped goo that defies easy categorisation. ​ Photogenic dandy Gwen Jamois, aka Iueke, returns with his queasiest, most lysergic release yet, featuring close to an hour of rubbery, rippling electronics, laconic cinematics and free-falling rhythms frozen somewhere between Autechre, Cluster and Rashad Becker. Gwen has been immersed in all sorts of fringe business for decades at this point, heading up the Antinote label, releasing on Ron Morelli's L.I.E.S, and contributing to those shadowy Ssabæ records we can't stop banging on about. His trio of mixtapes fully took us to the core of his psyche, all off-kilter blends that puzzled out the covalent bonds between tongue dissolving acid, folk music and discarded sonic debris. He follows that same frayed thread on this boundless, off-the-cuff performance, recorded last year at Saint-Étienne's Positive Education festival using a sparse setup of synths and drum machines, fine-tuned to gatecrash the pineal dimension. Plenty of pros have tried making this kind of trippy racket before, but trust that few have ever managed to get anywhere near the level of puckered lunacy you’ll find inside. Brain-combing ASMR oscillations and anxious strings draw us in, clouded by hissing white noise that obscures an unnatural rhythm lurking somewhere down there in the grot. There are palpable links to Cluster's earliest experiments and the muckiest basement club workouts, but Iueke focuses on pure texture, using seesawing rhythms to scrape out new neural pathways rather than lock into the grid. It all feels a bit mechanical too, bolting together elements that are as corporeal as a lead pipe - thick, rusty-edged and aggy in a way that sounds a bit like Einsturzende Neubauten on mushies. On the flip, unbalanced rhythms chase their own tail into a fizzing swamp of viscous bass and shepard tones like some imploding firework, eventually plonging off along impulse vectors only to collapse at half speed into the sort of acrid high-register business Whitehouse would be proud of. Prize yr third eye open for this, it’s a real one.

NTS DJ, label boss and fabled collector Howard Williams lands on DDS with an etheric communique under his Japan Blues moniker, inspired by early C.20th Min'yō folk and avant-dub, richly spirited with field recordings and ghostly ephemera. Six years since his debut Japan Blues album ‘Sells His Record Collection’, Williams is back - and it’s been worth the wait. Based around enka and minyo recordings made with London based singer Akari Mochizuki and Tsugaru shamisen master Hibiki Ichikawa at London’s Earthworks studio back in 2018, Williams adds field recordings made while traveling through Japan, inviting The Dengie Hundred to co-produce, bringing his own sound worlds into the mix. The two spent several months shuttling ideas back and forth, processing mixes and adding environmental recordings, like snatched penny whistle melodies or the familiar whirr of an extractor fan. Singer Tamami Pearl is the final piece of the puzzle, providing an almost imperceptibly breathy aura to proceedings. The obsessively researched archivist’s resolve is still very much present, but the processing style and overall sound here is more faded than the Japan Blues of yore, transmuting discernible sounds into magickal textures that boil and bubble until all that’s left is vapour. On 'Sazanka, Hokkai Bon Uta', Japanese vocals are dubbed into bare syllables, juxtaposed with flute improvisations and muddy whirrs. Eventually, the instrumental elements turn to noise, like some shortwave radio transmission slowly falling out of range. Environmental sounds become uneven, clunking percussive currents offer a sort of dream logic, morphing into faint choirs. In the final third, Williams pulls away the veil almost entirely. The album's most compelling section is the side-long 'Soran, AIzu Bandai-San, Shimabara Lullaby'. If you've heard Robert Turman's 1981 album "Flux" - a reel-to-reel recorded slo-mo kalimba and piano masterpiece - you'll have an idea of how this one rolls. Williams and The Dengie Hundred work into the source material like modelling clay, dubbing and distorting shamisen twangs and echoing vocals into half-speed, dissociated dream visions. It's not Ambient by any means, but there are undoubtedly traces of Brian Eno's earliest, most crucial experiments. It's not Folk music either, but Williams' deep obsession with Japanese traditions allows him to integrate sounds holistically, provoking a conversation rather than simply cherry picking aesthetic decorations. He works like a dedicated DJ, giving The Dengie Hundred room to tweak the spaces in-between. Together, they create an atmosphere that's fiendishly hard to put into words, and even harder to forget. If you're into tape-damaged industrial experiments (think Skaters, Spencer Clark, Aaron Dilloway et al), the surrealist global exploration of labels like Stroom, or simply after a new perspective on Japanese folkways, "Japan Blues Meets The Dengie Hundred" is unmissable.

Demdike Stare reunite with guitarist Jon Collin for a new album of concréte dreamweaving performed on tape, pedals and a homemade Swedish nyckelharpa - a type of keyed fiddle. More psychedelic than either of the trio's previous records, 'Minerals' drops the blues to dive headfirst into the smudged folk wellspring, touching on the pastoral ambience of Andrew Chalk via Loren Connors’ immersive drift and Tongue Depressor's subterranean drone expeditions. With the trio all hailing from the Pennine moorlands just above the manc sprawl, Jon Collin & Demdike Stare’s shared musical expression understandably reflects a parallax purview that follows leylines between lusher nooks of the inner city and windswept, barren landscapes. Never ones to play it straight, the Swedish Nyckelharpa - a sort of hybrid viola/hurdy gurdy - is deployed deep into a mix of oblique soundscaping, seeping into a swirl of field recordings, screwed spoken word and phosphorescent drones pinging with tape delay. Split into two distinct sides, the album opens with a scrape of wood and metal that introduces us to the nyckelharpa. Scratching its surface and strings, Collin reveals its peculiar tonality, while Demdike cut through its dissonant textures. Like ancient campfire rituals recorded to decaying 1/4" tape, the music on ‘Minerals’ feels as if it's in dialog with the past, shuttled into the present by abstract processes. By the side’s third act, resonant gongs billow around pitched wails that eventually collapse into silence. The second side is more spirited, opening with a thumbed kalimba cut through reverberant strings that recall Arthur Russell's iconic echo-drenched recordings. Through elaborate concréte techniques, Collin's ancient fiddle dissolves into a ferric gloop that’s slowly pulled apart like toffee, taking it to a place where you can no longer really tell what you’re listening to or how it was made. In fact, unlike pretty much everything we’ve heard from Demdike before, the material here feels mechanical rather than electronic, making for one of the most impactful, unusual releases in the vast sprawl of their catalogue thus far.

Cult north manc enigma Michael J. Blood provides the DDS 12” series with its latest instalment following aces by Shinichi Atobe and Demdike Stare x Dolo Percussion. From 170BPM ghetto tekkerz to bucking House, it's a full dose of fire if yr into Theo, Rezzet, H-Fusion, Marcellus Pittman... Michael J. Blood needs little introduction to followers of these pages; his misfit take on House at its broadest definition is a lowkey phenomenon, with each turn different to the previous, but all sharing a screwed passion for the rudest variegations that dovetail Demdike Stare’s own wayward instincts. Following up his outstanding recent Richie Culver link-up, on ‘Raven’ MJB plays with a custom-made trio of tracky blinders certain to set fire to yr floor. He boots right off with a searing title cut, starting up like a head-flapping nitrous oxide trip before locking into a 170BPM boot knocker imagining Howard Thomas’s H-Fusion via Rezzett at a free party. Flipside, he chills his beans in a more familiar style, wrapping warped chords around a wooden bassdrum synced to roving subs and offset claps for the loosey goosey crew, before tussling with the filters on ’TRGR’, a delicious section of insistent, Theo-ish loops woven with intuitive body geometry, liquifying limbs in a mode that also reminds us of Marcellus Pittman at his deadliest.

Eeeeeesh, Shinichi Atobe’s sixth album for DDS, another deployment of effortless and entirely inimitable club classics that connect the dots between effervescent dub house, deep techno and swirling beatdown, selected and compiled from a package of new productions sent from Japan with nothing but cryptic track titles for guidance. Love of Plastic - we talking aesthetic here pal? bit like comme de garçons' genius, subversive amplification of synthetics in perfume? Something like Mark Fell’s assertion that “House music is best when it does not aim to copy ‘real’ music”? Impossible to tell - and honestly part of the thrill is in not really fully grasping Atobe’s praxis. What we can say is that with every album there’s a shift - sometimes barely perceptible - in spirit and focus. On this one everything’s gone a bit heavier - bit deeper - once again refracted through Rashad Becker’s mastering prism. You really could be listening to music recorded decades, years or a few weeks ago - we’ll probably never know. But with the simplicity comes a kind of impenetrable code too. That fleeting diva vocal sample 4 minutes into 'Love of plastic 6’ - what’s it doing there? why does it work so well? Perhaps the reason Shinichi’s music resonates with so many is the impregnable sense of optimism buried in his DNA - there’s a breeze of warm air that takes over whenever his music is played, a promise of better days, blue skies, tingling skin, sultry evenings - all that hammy stuff. But also, entirely undeniable. Play this one and tell us you don’t feel it? Spring’s almost in the air.