Jon Collin & Demdike Stare - Sketches Of Everything

Three years in the making first time vinyl edition of Demdike Stare and Jon Collin's majestic collaboration originally issued on cassette in 2020. The attached press release's shorthand description is kinda funny and sorta gets it right - the 'Coil x Ry Cooder collab that never was'. Yep, as we know, Collin channels his powers from the desolate corners of the American Primitive tradition from which Cooder also stems, drawing, too, on the blues abstraction of Fahey, Connors and even Jandek. It's a style of playing front and centre of the opening side of Fragments of Nothing, a capacity stretching single piece that's a lot more obviously Collin than it is Demdike's Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, the latter's presence buried in the subtle ghostly hum like static footsteps around the house at night. As such, it feels more like a stage for Collin's playing than pure collaboration and no complaints here: we'd lie in the road for such things. The second side shifts gear a little, a still subtle but more evolved union of their respective qualities, minimal sub-bass interjections and white noise hiss colouring the space around Collin's six string torch song. As prominent as Collin's playing is, the overall effect actually feels very convincingly a part of Demdike's witchy world of in-between spaces and unknown terrain, feverish, mildly hallucinogenic, and if not Coil's Moon Phase, then a midnight desert era of their own. It gets cold out there once the sun sets.