Baselines is Demdike Stare’s audiovisual journey into the material and cultural history of tape — an exploration of damaged archives, discarded formats and the strange afterlives of recorded images and sound.

Created by Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker and premiered at Berlin Atonal in 2024, the work takes physical tape culture as its point of departure: magnetic surfaces, degraded images, lost recordings and overlooked fragments are pulled apart and reassembled into a constantly shifting audiovisual environment. Rather than treating deterioration as something to be restored or concealed, Baselines amplifies its blemishes, distortions and traces of use, transforming them into compositional material.

Sonically, the performance draws together many of the currents that have defined Demdike Stare’s singular language — noise, dub, industrial music, techno, jungle, experimental electronics and the deeper histories of recorded music — moving between dense abstraction and powerful rhythmic passages. Against this, fragmented imagery, analogue interference and kaleidoscopic mutations of archival material create a visual language that feels simultaneously archaeological and fiercely contemporary.

At once cinematic, physical and distinctly punk in attitude, Baselines continues Demdike Stare’s long-standing fascination with forgotten and marginalised cultural material without turning the past into nostalgia. Instead, sound and image are treated as unstable matter: sampled, damaged, magnified and reorganised into something new.

The result is an immersive A/V performance in which the residue of obsolete media becomes intensely present — a collision of archive, rhythm, texture and distortion that could only belong to Demdike Stare.