Demdike Stare & Kristen Pilon - To Cut and Shoot

Genuinely haunted electro-acoustic dub exorcisms and psychotrophic manglings from the master of such things, in partnership with NYC-based musician and filmmaker, Kristen Pilon and presented in accompaniment with an experimental short of the same name. Music videos regularly arrive long after the music itself is composed, less often does it occur the other way around with film. In this instance, Pilon's contributions were recorded months before she found inspiration to shoot following a chance encounter with a 65-year-old machinist and motorcyclist known as 'Bobbo' while in the unusually named Texan town of Cut and Shoot near to where she grew up. So far so Lynchian, and taken in isolation, the music does an effective job of imagining an appropriate sense of surrealist suburban discord, mixing wraith-like electronic manipulations and ectoplasmic sub-bass spools with surprisingly prettied piano figures and more DJ-tooled dancefloor eruptions. It's less on the witchy side of Demdike and more attuned to their psychedelic tendencies in its sprawl of left turns and rabbit holes. It's certainly a lot to take it, its sheer range impressive in itself, the ambition of which might well position To Cut and Shoot as a definitive statement of sorts, all of Demdike all at once. That's a whole lot of haunting.