Himukalt

Himukalt

Torn Asunder : The Half Girl

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Power Electronics, for the most part, stays within its lanes of transgressive misanthropy, with a blackened explosiveness of tortured psyches and nightmarish reflections for the darkest facets of the human condition. Since Whitehouse introduced the phrase, concept, and framework to Power Electronics, its authorship has been primarily male. But within the past decade or so, a diverse web of voices - female, feminist, non-binary, queer - has thrust the PE aesthetic beyond that of the tortured male artist. As such, the notion that Power Electronics is synonymous with true crime worship, political ugliness, degraded sexual fantasies, and misogynistic perspectives has been somewhat dispelled (though many still pursue such ignoble agendas). Enter Ester Kärkkäinen. For close to a decade now, she has developed her own voice, tread her own path, and exorcised her own demons in her unique take on Power Electronics, recording as Himukalt. A Power Electronics album based on the collapse of a relationship is probably not as uncommon as one might think. The sexual violence portrayed through Power Electronics may very well have had its origins in the heartbroken, scorned, or otherwise romantically mistreated. Kärkkäinen gives us two very different perspectives on these themes through two rather different sounding records. There is Last Wish from the plague year of 2020, and there is Torn Asunder: The Half Girl, recorded in 2019. Where the 2020 record is a long-form fever dream of the erotic gone horribly wrong and turned morally questionable, Torn Asunder is the more fractured, yet more...

Himukalt

Between My Teeth

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Dark, psychosexual electronics lurk between the teeth of Ester Kärkkäinen, the Las Vegas based artist also known as Himukalt. For the past six years, she has tirelessly pursued an avenue of bleak industrial productions that parallel the extremist works of Genocide Organ and Atrax Morgue. She has built a considerable reputation for uncompromising, full-frontal noise, releasing albums on Total Black, Malignant Records, Found Remains, and Foul Prey, amongst others. Between My Teeth was originally a cassette which came out in 2018 as a tiny edition on the Greek imprint Several Minor Promises and sold out immediately upon release. Himukalt returns to The Helen Scarsdale Agency with the necessary reissue of Between My Teeth as a vinyl edition with expanded artwork.  The album is a maelstrom of ill-tempered noise and blackened frequencies, sutured to a foundation of primitive, raw rhythms. Kärkkäinen cuts up her own voice with the digital equivalent of a rusted razor blade through her proclamations of misery, rage, and desire. The albums' opening track "Cataclysm" a turgid industrial production with Kärkkäinen adopting two distinct voices that, while they remain mostly indecipherable in content, the context presumes an inevitable, catastrophic and emotionally violent collapse in the relationship between two people. A tense rhythm clicks below the full spectrum bursts of harsh noise on "She Went Mad" followed by the smoldering power electronic moves of "I No Longer Belong" and "Not Proper." And the death disco groove of "Mine" is far more hellish than danceable through its scalded distortion...

Himukalt

Conditions Of Acrimony

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Somewhere in the American Southwest may lie a pile of fetid cassettes, the scope and breadth of which might very well match that of the experiments with tape and electronics from Rozz Williams and Chuck Collison. In her terse exchanges with us, she once alluded to a past set of recordings without divulging them; and so for now we have this prolonged electrical cramp that marks the first published recording of HIMUKALT. The given name we know is ESTER KARKKAINN, and that's pretty much about her beyond the Nevada return address. This enigma is fitting for her work. exhaustive, claustrophobic, and cryptic, these lacerated (de)compositions address collapsed psychological states that dislocate the body, the self, and the spirit into horror, fear, doubt, hostility. Such have marked the acme for the most virulent strains of power electronics and industrial decay (e.g. Puce Mary, Anenzephalia, Maurizio Bianchi, Maria Zerfall, etc.), and this—hopefully the first of many transmissions from Himukalt—stands shoulder to shoulder next to those giants.