Demdike Stare - Circulation (2017)

An hour-long mixtape/sketchbook of ideas and influences for Demdike Stare’s recent Wonderland album, contrasting its heavily rhythmic stylings with this largely ambient-affair comprising archival tracks, bespoke edits and re-contextualised classics.

Assembled with painstaking attention to detail, Circulation makes use of countless distilled parts for what is essentially a reflective companion to Wonderland. Pieced together from breakdowns, transitions, pitched-down intros and transposed versions of music the pair have been influenced by over the years, Demdike re-contextualise fragments of sound into a transformed new whole that is thematically close to Lee Gamble’s by-now classic Diversions album, and stylistically perhaps most reminiscent of Mark Leckey’s hugely influential Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.

The effect of weaving together so many elements is disorientating; hooks appear, subside and re-emerge transformed, sort of like an old mixtape that’s been chewed up and spliced back together, the ghosting effect of old recorded layers ebbing and flowing in and out of the mix like apparitions.

The diversity of the source material; from disfigured hits to dancefloor classics, early electronic, noise and drone pieces covering half a century+ of recorded music, jazz to r&b and so many spots in between, is hard to fathom refracted through this prism of Ambience, and for our money makes for the most engrossing instalment yet in this standardly brilliant, un-shazamable series of occasional mixtapes.