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FriIn December, CTM's Polymorphism series returns with a night built around Manchester label Modern Love. Established in the early 2000s as an offshoot of Pelicanneck, the Mancunian record store that would later become online music retail megalith Boomkat, Modern Love began life as an outlet for dark electro, but is arguably most recognizable today as the home base of its two longest-standing contributors, Andy Stott and Miles Whittaker.
Using a range of technical processes, Andy Stott's skeletal techno and primordial dub is swaddled in static rifts and luminous, smoggy vocals. For CTM's Modern Love showcase, he performs live takes from his most recent album Faith in Strangers, the follow-up to 2012's celebrated Luxury Problems LP. Stott also appears alongside Miles Whittaker as Millie & Andrea, the pair's gender-bending, anything-goes side project responsible for releases like 2014's Drop the Vowels LP, a "the fun is in the making" mishmash of breakbeats, repurposed samples, and textural sludge.
Whittaker also makes a solo appearance, as does his partner in Demdike Stare and resident digger for Finders Keepers, Sean Canty. With roots in the 17th century Lancashire witch trials, Demdike Stare became a hallmark of bleak Northern English techno and a reference point for industrial, occultist, and avant-garde electronic acts in recent years. Joining them will be Mancunian duo Rainer Veil, whose seething, ambient techno—immortalized on two albums for Modern Love, New Brutalism and Struck – is haunted by the UK dance music tropes of jungle, rave, and garage.
Initiated in 2012, the Polymorphism concert series at Berghain takes shape as a crossbreed of club night, concert, and experimental laboratory, and explores the artistic possibilities of a contemporary moment in which everything counts as a viable source and no rules apply.