Clangers & bangers - two contrasting shades of intensely out-there otherworldliness from Modern Love cousins Daphne Oram (via sub-label Young Americans) & Demdike Stare.
Today's hand-crafted LMYE hack of a dozen extracts from Oram's deeply strange, faux-naif Oramics documents an extraordinary, pioneering journey through textures & tones. It seems to bear no relation to anything else being made at the time (nor much since) - though more classically-attuned ears than these could probably work up the odd link to musique concrete & other high-end experimentalists.
Stay with the hack all the way to the end to hear Daphne herself on "this intriguing equipment" (she sounds exactly as she looks...).
Meanwhile, Demdike's dense, dark Liberation Through Hearing draws from the same well as Forest of Evil & the more obviously exotic Symbiosis (especially the circling, rattling Bardo Thodol). But while the dubby deviance of Caged in Stammheim & Regolith is clearly in the post-Basic Channel lineage of their predecessors, the rest of the album - stream in full below - also features what feels like an even richer engagement with drone than before...
"The second of three Demdike Stare albums for 2010 is upon us. Its title ‘Liberation Through Hearing’ is a direct reference 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, a subject also hinted at in Western culture by the Skull Disco label and explored by psychonauts such as Timothy Leary. If ‘Forest Of Evil’ was the push-off, 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. The dark currents run deep..."
Previous coverage (& here; DS/ML).
