DDS / UK / 2025
"A decade in the making, Who Owns the Dark? is the long-awaited collaboration between London’s legendary polymath and world-class crate-digger Cherrystones and Manchester’s Demdike Stare. Far from a polite studio session, this is a purposefully unhinged descent into the outer limits of industrial, concrete, and 'grotty' electronics.
Recorded and edited between London and Manchester, the album features ten tracks of 'purposefully scorched' sound design, spanning hip-hop splintered sequences, occult incantations, and shadowy ECM-style atmospheres. The record features the haunting, ethereal vocal contributions of Laura Lippie (of Ssabae), providing a melodic but ghostly counterpoint to the raw, fragmented production.
From the reimagining of Terry Jacks’ 'Where Evil Grows' to the heavy, dubbed-out tension of 'Several Layers Shifting Form,' the album is a 'sonic séance' masterfully cut by Rashad Becker. It stands as a defiant artifact of outsider culture—a record that sounds like it was unearthed rather than recorded, bridging the gap between no-wave grit and high-end experimentalism."
FFO: Raime, Andy Stott, the Modern Love circle, and the darker, more industrial experiments of Aaron Dilloway or Muslimgauze