Haynes, Jim

Haynes, Jim

Inauspicious

Helen Scarsdale Agency

In a recent interview, the California artist Jim Haynes was asked to name his top five noise albums. In quick fashion, he listed off Kill The King, Send, Desnos, Persona, and Carcinosi. Since then, he's equivocated on which albums to choose, but the artists behind such works remain as the adjacent signposts and landmarks to his own constructions of industrial noise. How those records connect to the output from Haynes is found in their unique combination of smoldering dynamism and psychological inquest. For over twenty five years, Haynes has been an autodidactic clinician into the processes of corrosion, decay, and rust, turning his attention away from visual practices and more to the metaphoric crucible of noise and sound. By now, it seems like a cliche that the pandemic changed everything; but since that viral encroachment, there is a noticeable shift in Haynes' work post 2020. It's more aggressive and yet more controlled: a rarification and telescoping of the research into decay for more potent noise and more potent metaphor. The tools for Haynes' work remain limited: motors, electronics, shortwave radio, found objects, all applied with considerable pressure. Compositionally, Inauspicious is a very rough moire pattern from overlapping elliptical structures that can negate and obfuscate just as easily as they can compound and aggregate. The album surges and collapses upon the two twenty minute chunks of controlled noise that follow an internal logic that snakes from brooding power drones, spectral radio transmission, and an aktionist demolition cast upon metal, glass,...

Haynes, Jim

Inconclusive

Helen Scarsdale Agency / Audio Visuals Atmosphere

Inconclusive is the first album from Jim Haynes in over two years. During the intervening passage of time since 2017’s Electrical Injuries (Aussenraum) and Vane Dodson (Monorail Trespassing), the California based artist has studiously amplified and accelerated his electro-acoustic crucible to incorporated much of what he gleaned from a lengthy residency at Naut Humon’s Recombinant Media Labs. Here, the rudiments of sequenced based structures and control voltage rhythms snap into place amidst his smoldering noises from jagged frequencies.  The signature disruptions of jagged shortwave and misfiring turbines announce the beginning of Haynes’ Inconclusive with the chemically treated volatility of “Blotched.” An actual drum machine provides firmament to the battery of synthetic electronics, scalding distortion, and disembodied voice within the virulent “And Then, Theranos.” Oily pistons and arc-light dissonance lend a high-tension, industrial feel to “An Isolated Failure.” Inconclusive tightens the rhythmic proclivities that have run through Haynes recent live performances, reworking much of that material in a studio context. References to Le Syndicat, Pan Sonic, Daniel Menche, and Kevin Drumm all might be applicable.

Haynes, Jim

Flammable Materials From Foreign Lands

Elevator Bath

***Mostly composed, recorded, and sketched during an Estonian residency at MoKS for a program that was hosted by Simon Whetham and John Grzinich called Active Crossover, the goal of which was to bring together artists whose work pertained to environmental recordings. With the Estonian landscape pocked with abandoned buildings of considerable size and decay, and no electricity, JIM HAYNES relied on shortwave to capture any electro-magnetic disruptions. The radio reception was eerie and unsettled, producing a crackling, droning noise unlike what one hears in the United States. The A-side reflects an aestheticized paranoia through bursts of static, pulsed noise, and atonal sinews of sustained frequency. The B-side is more introspective, cutting up an Estonian radio broadcast into phonemes, disjointed phrases, and cryptic speech. What few words that can be recognized from the Estonian pertain to the forces of globalization. Clear vinyl. Edition of 300.

Haynes, Jim

Throttle And Calibration

Helen Scarsdale Agency

*** The first in a series of albums where Haynes digs through Simon Whetham’s Active Crossover archive — which includes field recordings of refuse from Soviet-era industrial farming complexes, the droned blur of Aeolian harps, massive oil tanks, and the torrent of noise from the Arctic wind ripping through an empty water tower — and grotesquely exaggerates the details into exploded compositions of volatile dynamics, nerve-exposed dissonance, caustic shortwave signal abuse, and a considerable amount of scarred metal. This discordant work finds company near the Schimpfluch Gruppe’s aktionist stains and the sour collages of 150 Murderous Passions. Includes an additional 20 minutes of material not included in Crónica’s previous digital release. C60

Haynes, Jim

Scarlet

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Jagged bursts of strobe lights. Cackling radio signals bristling with interference. Sawtooth patterns of tactile noise. Torn flesh. Scabbed wounds. These are some of the building blocks to Jim Haynes' Scarlet. This crucible of unkempt rhythm and noise-pulse turbulence was decomposed and sutured together from the various sources of electromagnetic and psychic detritus into an unstable mutation of sequential error. The eight tracks of Scarlet stand as vastly radical and obsessive variations on the theme of repetition through trauma. Each of the tracks may have begun with the same system of building blocks, but quickly spiral into disparate orbits, time-lag accumulation, tunnel-vision mania, schizoid detours, amplified seances, and teleological endgames. This strategy of rupture and release was first noted on Haynes' 2012 album The Wires Cracked, but has become all the more unhinged here on Scarlet. The analog tone generation and shambolic futurism harken to an earlier era of industrial immolation, with Haynes' echolalia of Le Syndicat, Mika Vainio, and Martin Rev stridently tracing and electrically bleaching the forms of those antecedents without the benefit of drum machine, sequencer, and whatnot. Bruitisme, indeed.

Haynes, Jim

The Decline Effect

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***The Decline Effect continues JIM HAYNES’ investigations of “rusting things” with electroacoustic decay through four bodies of evidence left behind from ephemeral aktions, shipwrecked electronics, re-engineered field recordings, and transmissions from the ether. Through a patient suturing of sympathetic elements, whether textural, tonal, visceral, heavenly, sodden, or monolithic, embers foretell a nuclear winter gently wafting upon industrial chorales amassed from an army of fidgeting motors; the sulfur-laden hiss from volcanic vents erupts from an organic thrum into boiling crescendos of environmental noise; Geiger counter palpitations stream along a leaden sea of modulated radio noise; a warm explosion of sun-bleached distortion caresses the evanescent halos from an undulating mesmerism inexplicably not sourced from a guitar and / or digital patch authored by Christian Fennesz. Gatefold jacket, with download coupon. Edition of 350.

Haynes, Jim

Sever

Intransitive

***AVAILABLE AGAIN!!! Evocative, highly visual drone music, layers upon organic layers in constant motion, and yet seem somehow still. On the third solo album by San Francisco-based composer JIM HAYNES, the process of decaying and wearing down materials is implied; its passages of rough clang and cyclic scraping metal seem implacably tangible, as if one is witnessing time-lapsed erosion in action. Past collaborators include Loren Chasse (as the duo Coelacanth), Keith Evans, Steve Stapleton (Nurse With Wound), and irr.app.(ext.).

Haynes, Jim

Eraldus / Eravaldus

Elevator Bath

"Eraldus" and "Eravaldus" are both shadowy concoctions built from agitated objects and amplified spaces (a lighthouse, some high-tension wires driven by wind, a very large pile of sand, etc.). These are subtly manipulated field recordings, rusted to perfection and fine-tuned into scraping and humming machinations.  The artwork comes from two corroded photographs, one of which was created especially for this release. Haynes has worked with this process for almost 15 years and, here, the resulting images are as beautiful and mysterious as the audio is nuanced and evocative.  In addition to his solo work, Jim Haynes has participated in a number of fruitful collaborations over the years with Loren Chasse (as Coelacanth), Keith Evans, Steven Stapleton/Nurse With Wound, and irr. app. (ext.)/M.S. Waldron. His recordings have been released by such labels as The Helen Scarsdale Agency, Editions Mego, Hooker Vision, Intransitive, and others. He currently resides in San Francisco.  These tracks were originally released by Elevator Bath as a limited edition picture disc LP.

Haynes, Jim

Telegraphy By The Sea

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***"I prefer to abstract recorded sounds to the point that I can't remember how I made them," says rust-tinged artist JIM HAYNES. "This way I can't go back and reverse engineer anything." The source material for Telegraphy by the Sea spans four years and several continents. During the time between conception and completion, Mr. Haynes perfected fragments of the album in numerous contexts, including an exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, a marathon six-hour performance at the Diapason Gallery in New York City, and a fortuitous encounter with a rainy stairwell. As a result of this process, Mr. Haynes has forged a breathtaking album of mangled field recordings and droning techniques perched at the allegorical intersection of electromagnetic landscapes and meteorological phenomena. Here, it is not uncommon to find exasperated blasts of air bellowing in harmony with a swarm of mechanical locusts and a tumbling landslide of jagged rock. Yet Mr. Haynes grounds the bulk of the album in a dynamic play of sinusoidal drones.

Haynes, Jim

Magnetic North

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Magnetospheric crackles, fractured hisses, and sustained, rattling drones by JIM HAYNES (COELACANTH, contributor to The Wire). Limited edition with individually rust-stained covers.