Audiopile Review: Demdike Stare is a perennial presence lurking in the left field of electronic music that is more-or-less danceable. But Manchester’s Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker appear to be coming into a particularly purple patch right now. And ‘Who Owns the Dark?’, a long-in-the-making collaboration with London-based cratedigger Cherrystones seems like a particularly confident statement of intent. ‘Who Owns the Dark?’ has been presented as an experimental electronic record inspired equally by ambient jazz and extreme metal. Weirdly, it’s not the first album we’ve seen described this way, so clearly something is in the air. Whatever that may be, Cherrystones and Demdike Stare certainly have a handle on it. This is Demdike Stare at its best, with Cherrystones’ eclectic sample selection pushing Sean and Miles to a whole new level of dark, glitchy intensity. Mastered by Rashad Becker, limited to 500 copies. Don’t sleep.

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Demdike Stare & Cherrystones unveil a long-in-the-making darkside fantasy weaving atmospheric and loose-limbed cuts recorded at labs in London and Manchester, brilliantly shaking a bush of ghostly trig points ranging from the Mars rehearsal tapes to Minimal Man, Randy Greif’s cut-ups, Conrad Schnitzler’s industrial prototypes and ‘70s ECM sides – with vocal contributions from Ssabae’s mesmerising Laura Lippie.

In dazed pursuit of styles heard on Cherrystones’ DDS tape ‘Peregrinations in SHQ (Super High Quality)’, the renowned London digger properly hexes sonic leylines with his label bosses on 10 wickedly grubby and hazed sound experiments. They tumble down the rabbit hole like some sixth sense-guided call-and-response, resulting in an exquisite unfolding of psychoacoustic spaces familiar to their mutually spirited sounds.

Honestly it’s some of the dirtiest and most esoteric gear we’ve heard from Demdike; you can sense a lifetime of incessant digging drip through every loop and crack; grotty no-wave, industrial noise, DIY psych, proto-techno and gnarled concrète, further bolstered by Cherrystones’ perpendicular, equally insatiable and fathoms-deep areas of interest. With a focus on scrappy, feral cuts and hastily recorded edits, the trio roughly re-draw wordless chants and hyper-compressed knocks over a vortex of found sounds that curdle in rhythmic heat. Never staying sill for long, the trio get drowned by watery ambience, then shredded loops, Technoid shrapnel and electric bass prangs dancing into the aether.

The crankiest spirit perfuses the whole thing, evoking states of unravel and psychic distress as they pit a near-peerless collective knowledge into the void. Laura Lippie acts as human ligature to sanity, a fleeting constant found smudged into the hip hop chops of ‘Familiar Unfamiliarity’, spectral incantations of ‘Prophet in View’, or a channelling of Ozzy in ‘Thee Oath’, among more deranged tongues on ‘Observing the Crux’.

It’s the missing link between ECM, Earth and Dilloway we didn’t know we needed – up there with some of the most satisfyingly deep and frazzled gear this century.