Demdike Stare is a collaboration between Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, two childhood friends from the North of England with a shared appetite for record collecting. After years spent mining vinyl bins for source material, the pair began collaborating in earnest in 2008, re-appropriating sounds they'd spent a lifetime cataloguing into weird, immersive music of their own. The project produced a run of early albums — Symbiosis, Tryptych and Elemental — largely guided by the occult and the strange symbolism of their surroundings in Pendle. A number of intriguing DDS mixtapes released over the following years signaled the project was heading in unexpected directions.

In 2013, the first of an ongoing series of 12"s under the Testpressing banner appeared on Modern Love, finding Demdike moving into more intense, brutal terrain. These club experiments were refined for 2016's Wonderland, which shifted both their aesthetic and sonic direction again, and pushed further on 2018's Passion. Since 2020, three long-form releases with guitarist Jon Collin have taken the project sideways once more — further defying easy categorization and keeping listeners guessing.

Inspired by everything from industrial to noise, library music to free jazz, house, techno, hip hop and jungle, Demdike Stare has refused to settle into familiarity. That restlessness is most evident in the sheer scale of their recent work — from live-scoring films for the BFI to more commercial soundtrack contributions, including Xan Cassavetes' Kiss of the Damned, the Nicolas Cage drama Joe, and the post–Breaking Bad film El Camino.

That same momentum carries into their multi-disciplinary projects: collaborations with filmmaker and video artist Michael England produced the Concealed series featuring Kraków's Sinfonietta Cracovia, also featured in Doug Aitken's Station to Station curation for the Barbican, alongside a critically acclaimed A/V show that debuted at Berlin's Atonal festival in 2017. Working with contemporary artist Phil Collins further expanded their range across remixes (My Heart's In My Hand...), performances (Intervention), releases (Mica Levi's Delete Beach) and other collaborations. They've also built an interactive sound installation for Geneva's La Bâtie gallery, collaborated with NY fashion label Eckhaus Latta on their 2023 summer collection, and released a steady stream of edit- and mixtape-style cassettes drawing from every corner of the music spectrum.

On top of all this, they curate the DDS label — home to music as sonically far-reaching as their own output would suggest, from Equiknoxx's dancehall evolutions to Mica Levi & Tirzah's skewed urban pop, Shinichi Atobe's classic melodics, and outer-fringe experiments by Nate Young, Stephen O'Malley, Andy Votel and Jim O'Rourke, among others.