Helen Scarsdale Agency

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,...

False Maria

s/t

Helen Scarsdale Agency

If the white male hegemonic forces truly want to find a threat in queer, non-gender conforming art and music, that threat is manifest in False Maria. Heresies, transgressions, psychic self-immolation, and sexual deviance run amok with the litany of confessionals told by this unlikely proposition. According to False Maria, "this is the sound of addictions battled, abuse endured and lovers lost." Two entities exist with False Maria: the Los Angeles creature of the night Jhane P (she/her) and the mercurial Tomasz C (they/them) from the UK. For the past several years, their transcontinental conjurings have resulted in a steady stream of splits and self-released short-runs, all on cassette. Compositionally, False Maria leans into seasick tape loops and samples that ooze out of the more monstrous forms of Premature Ejaculation or even the Los Angeles Free Music Society (i.e. Solid Eye, Le Forte Four) with Jhane's vocal recitations of sex crimes and trauma leading the dance. With their eponymous debut for the Helen Scarsdale Agency, False Maria presents an opus of untidy, post-industrial malaise across this sprawling double cassette album. In comparison to their first fruits, this body of work shows a tremendous leap in production value with adventurous drum and synth programming that seeks to pull blood from the air with a sonic alchemy adjacent to Coil. The pulsing slink from "NHI : No Humans Involved" finds Jhane's vocals entwined with those of Himukalt's Ester Kärkkäinen, the Vegas death-industrialist cast from an equally tragic history of sexual anguish. By...

She Spread Sorrow

Orchid Seeds

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***She Spread Sorrow is the work of Italian industrialist Alice Kundalini. In her sparse and grimly atmospheric applications of noise, tone, and electronic sequencing, She Spread Sorrow expresses a volatile emotional core that speaks to abuse and repression with an unblinking candidness. Orchid Seeds was originally published as part of the instantly out of print On Corrosion—a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, an imprint founded in 2003 and dedicated to post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, existential vacancy and then some. Kundalini’s signature whispered vocals once again beckons her audience closer on Orchid Seeds. Kundalini states that the album, “is about 5 different women of my family. Each track is about one of them with their difficult story and strengths. My family is totally destroyed now, no relation between anyone, but in the past there was a strong tradition of women with interesting personalities” This sibilant allegorical history comes into focus amidst a claustrophobic and cinematic pall of dark ambient blight and death industrial torpor. The LP edition was mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin.

Hauras

Pervades

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Head to the western neighborhoods of San Francisco, and the city becomes a very quiet place after midnight. By 3am, one can almost hear the fog spilling past the sodium lights that illuminate a lonesome street corner at Judah and 15th. Whatever soundtracks that emerge from that time and that place inevitably embody that nocturnal atmosphere, a narcoleptic weariness, a waking dream of the insomniac. Such is the psychogeographical realm as channeled through sound for Hauras, the obliquely musical concern for San Franciscan Howard Ryan. In Pervades, Hauras returns to the fragments of guitar warbling through chains of echo and flange, his Basinski-esque loops of crushingly sad ambient melody, his EVP impressionistic vocals, and his curious interruptions from scanner radio. More than before, he expresses a confidence in his oblique craftsmanship that allows him to push the sounds to include a very compelling drum machine plus guitar noise track in "Stellaged." Richard Youngs, Gate, and Graham Lambkin all come to mind, as does the terminally obscure project Dial (Jacqui Ham's post-Ut band of similarly late nite expressionism). Pervades concludes a trilogy of recordings made during the pandemic era, that also includes In These Coming Days (2020) and The Glare of the Nave (2021). Inspired by Rinko Kawauchi and Audrey Szasz. Mastered by Brian Pyle

Vertonen

Einige Schadstoffe

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***In Einige Schadstoffe, we have quite the potent homage to the classic era of industrial noise. Think Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report, Come's I'm Jack, MB's Symphony For A Genocide, and even Nord's Ego Trip. The sentiment linking all of these records is a clinical detachment in the production and broadcast of scalding tone, sickly rhythm, and unclean readymades, emerging through the spectacle of the human conditions of alienation, paranoia, and cruelty. Ultimately, such works are intended as critiques by way of gonzo journalism, where the intent is not always what it seems. Vertonen, the longstanding project of veteran Chicago avant-noise technician Blake Edwards, masterfully recapitulates these strategies and affects, both aesthetically and materially. On Einige Schadstoffe, Edwards transmits feverish arppegiations cascading through nervous distortion, followed by plodding rhythms and dead-toned electronics that gird case studies on living monstrosities. There is also a rather clever, if oblique and almost Oulipian framework to the album. Plenty of breadcrumbs have been laid as to the nature of Edwards' puzzle, and we have already said too much about that.

Junk DNA

Kopk Kopa

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Junk DNA is the newly christened project from Brian Pyle, a man of many ongoing pursuits including Ensemble Economique, The Starving Weirdos, and RV Paintings. Born and raised in wilds of California, Pyle has recently been splitting his time in Vilnius, Lithuania, with his Junk DNA debut Kopk Kopa contemplating his time and place within Lithuania. It is true that much of Pyle’s works is reflective about the human condition responding to a particular environment. The slow burn of Humboldt fog, in particular, weighs heavy on much of the atmospheric compositions in his previous works, with his impassioned noir electronics deftly navigating references to giallo film scores, the classic 4AD ethos, shoegazing drift, and even overt nods to Spandau Ballet and The Sisters Of Mercy. Kopk Kopa translates from Lithuanian as a directive to “climb the dune,” and come from one who has resided on the dunes of Manilla Beach in Humboldt County, California, it is an apt metaphor as almost a Tarkovskian pursuit of a beleaguered existential goal. As Junk DNA, Pyle conjures a radiantly dark hypnosis of eerie tones that rasp, buzz, and shimmer within vertiginous orbits and arching crescendos. Obscured instrumentation and rupturing samples dilate and stretch towards an unattainable event horizon beyond the waters, beyond the sun, beyond the stars. Klaus Schulze seems an distant reference, especially the Wagnerian overtures within Cyborg, though Pyle has always followed his own courses of action. Cinematic in scope and bleeding with a somber, yet vaguely hopeful moodiness, Kopk...

Ekin Fil

Dora Agora

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Ekin Fil returns to the guitar on Dora Agora. Her earliest recordings, notably her debut on Root Strata, prominently featured guitar in this urgent expressions of a dreamy dreariness that immediately offered enthusiastic comparisons to Grouper. In her development as composer of ephemeral ghostliness for numerous albums as well as her scores to film soundtracks, that instrument has given way to keyboards, organs, synths, and various mood engineering devices, in her beautifully melancholy pursuits of an emotional emptiness through sound. Yet, the pandemic era gave Ekin pause to reflect on her creative process and she picked that instrument back up to create one of her greatest albums to date. As direct and urgent as these songs can be, Ekin swaddles her acoustic guitar chords in soft-focus reverb and polyphonous shadow, colored with a judicious amount of shoegazing drone and somber atmosphere that speaks to her continued development as a composer. "Ghost Boy" in particular is a bittersweet, wistful tune whose arrangement harkens to Johnny Marr at his peak of effortless downer simplicity. "Farba" and "Yo Feelings" turn the emotional screws with soul-crush crescendos of vocal melodies that build upon Ekin's lonely guitar chords. Again, Grouper emerges as one of Ekin's closest neighbors, alongside Carla Dal Forno, Slowdive's Pygmallion, and Movietone. "I really feel like I've gone back to a time when I was recording songs with a guitar and keyboard when I was very young. It's kind of li ke embracing Ekin from that period with my current ideas &...

Pinkcourtesyphone

Shouting At Nuance

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Pinkcourtesyphone is the pseudonym for the Los Angeles based minimalist Richard Chartier. Under this moniker, Chartier indulges in an emotional torpor through his hauntological compositions for forgotten dreams with an opiated grandeur and subtle application of certain nostalgic camp. Shouting At Nuance glances back to Chartier’s earliest works that were recorded onto tape, with allusions to decay as an unrecognizable reconstruction of past works, whereby his ghostly ambience becomes a dub of itself, echoing back a dispersion of drift and drone into a feedback loop of disintegrated memory. Shouting At Nuance was originally published as part of the instantly out of print On Corrosion—a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, an imprint founded in 2003 and dedicated to post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, existential vacancy and then some. This double LP edition, mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin, also contains the complementary material from Something You Are Or Something You Do, a cassette originally published by The Tapeworm in 2017.

Stelzer / Murray

Commit

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***The third production from the Stelzer/Murray project hits a sweet spot of slippery, industrial occultation that harkens back to an almost forgotten period of music from the late '80s and early '90s. Think Cranioclast, Arcane Device, Phauss, Small Cruel Party, Organum, and pretty much everything from the Quiet Artworks label. Exquisitely composed and overtly nocturnal without ever falling into the tropes of dark ambient and with plenty of gestures, signals, and threats that allude to any number of allegorically inclined processes (i.e. tape manipulation, time-delay accumulation, electro-acoustic minimalism, etc.). Mastered by James Plotkin.

Montgomerie, Jo

From Industry Home

Helen Scarsdale Agency

An elegant decay amassed from the sounds of detritus. That may be an apt introduction to the work of Jo Montgomerie. Of course, The Helen Scarsdale Agency has a long standing infatuation with disintegrated sound in various forms. So, it makes perfect sense we should publish her work! That said, Montgomerie has a fascinating strategy to her long- form smears of blackened mascara ambient and smoldered noise. As a teenager she was a classically trained musician with an eye towards a career as a concert pianist; but a bad audition may have closed that door yet it opened another in her career in sound design, foley work, and post-production. It may be of note to some, that she was an uncredited soul responsible for thousands upon thousands of audio clips rendered for Boomkat during a lengthy tenure at that institution. These forms of production and editing necessitate a flawlessness which also hides the process entirely; and Montgomerie began to ruminate on that which was left on the cutting room floor (or the digital version of such a space). And thus, she took these unwanted sounds, telescoped them into sinewy drones, forced them to collapse in a crucible of noise, and even rarified their essence into fluid harmonic tones. The source material to much of her work is the urban landscape of her Manchester home, but she also will recontextualize traditional instruments and even the creaks, groans, and snaps of her own body. Amidst the thickets of details, obfuscating noise, and...

Fosca, Ana

Poised At The Edge Of Structure

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Ana Fosca has emerged as presence to be reckoned with. Here stands a woman raging, wrestling, communing, and plainly preoccupied with the humanity's propensity for tragedy, violence, and blight. And it is with a particular strain of noise - one that is dour, miserable, frightening - through which she harnesses these conditions. While her catalogue of recordings is brief, Ana Fosca (born Linn Hvid) honed her craft by performing on a constant basis throughout Denmark, Sweden, and Germany, especially through the dynamic community of Mayhem in her native Copenhagen. The feral expressionism she developed in performance is matched by a numerous, existential and conceptual antecedents that inform Fosca's work. Kirkegaard. Plath. Tarkovsky. Hannah Arendt. Vienna Aktionism. Eliane Radigue's approach to listening. The films of Kurt Kren. The thoughts and writing of Simone de Beauvoir.  Poised at the Edge of Structure marks Fosca's debut for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, following a very limited cassette on the Russian imprint Nazlo and a collaboration with Vanity Productions on No Rent. On this recording, she evinces her gesamtkunstwerk as Ana Fosca in all of its harrowing portent. She composes along cyclonic patterns of oppositional forces, searing noise, and ominous drone. When employing her voice, Fosca bellows repetitive chants deep in the mix, a cathartic incantation where meaning can found within all of this agony and despair. The "mathematics of grief" is a phrase that Fosca uses in describing this album that amplifies her personal experiences with loss to expound upon the human condition...

Faulhaber, RK

Dugong Weeps

Helen Scarsdale Agency

It is true that RK Faulhaber’s discography of published work is ludicrously scant. It is also true that Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) and Matthew Waldron (irr. app. (ext.)) have both tried to pull Faulhaber out of obscurity, but have thus far been unsuccessful. And it is true that for 30 years, Faulhaber has toiled in his studio and pondered the ramifications of his theories on ‘texture music.’ Much of that audio material had been shelved or passed on to his friends and colleagues as ‘unfinished studies.’ The Helen Scarsdale Agency had the good fortune of publishing one of those few Faulhaber albums - The Sleeping Moustache from the collective mind of Waldron, Stapleton, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, J.B. Haynes, and Faulhaber - and The Agency has found itself some fifteen years later at the right place and time to extract another album from Faulhaber. Two conceptual frameworks overlap in the construction of Dugong Weeps. And if we can be honest, both read a bit dry; but the cerebral ju-jitsu belies an aestheticization of his digital synthesis that is both uncanny and sublime. So, there’s Faulhaber’s ideas on ‘texture music’ - which emphasizes “the intrinsic temporal, spectral, and spatial relationships of sound without relying on periodic, metric rhythms, or hierarchical cardinal pitch relationships to convey meaning.” And the specific tools at his disposal in the construction of Dugong Weeps are pure, digital synthesis. “No acoustic sounds were recorded or sampled, no musical instruments, electronic or otherwise, were used, and no external...

Hauras

The Glare Of The Nave

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Hauras returns to the Helen Scarsdale Agency for a second missive of blurred and broken song. The name translates from Finnish as ‘fragile,’ and that remains an apt psychological space for the construction and composition of The Glare Of The Nave. Howard Ryan, the San Francisco citizen behind the Hauras moniker, composed this album in seclusion during the second year of the pandemic. It’s a crumpled album from a crumpled time. Ryan conjures his fragments of guitar, keys, scanner, and voice as if they transmit from behind the radiator. His tone and dissonance appear amorphous at first, swollen with an emotional weariness; but through subtle variations on repetition, his songs dilate into existence. These remain adjacent to the rough-hewn smears of Michael Morley’s Gate and the idiosyncrasies of Graham Lambkin. In his own words, Ryan articulates the exact mood behind this album as such: “I have been interested lately in how our communities change during a time like this. Relationships that are forged because of the crisis and those that have been abandoned. My work as Hauras has always been focused on the psychology of society at the end of civilization, and now that the seams are not only loosened but tearing, this new music attempts to explore the sudden terror and extreme quiet that has become our every day.” Inspired by Lav Diaz and Cecilia Vicuña. Mastered by Bob Bellerue.

Krovopuskanie

Goner

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Bloodletting is how Krovopuskanie translates from Russian, the native tongue of the man behind this project of morose electronics and death-industrial gloom. He asked to remain “half anonymously,” and we’ll comply with that request, as he finds much of his personal life trivial when compared to the existential torpor his work speaks through: mental illness, self-destruction, suidical ideation, and emptiness. He is also a visual artist, working across a number of media, but often returning to thick chunks of paint and gauze with ghastly collage elements that all reference the human body torn asunder, all through a lens of clinical detachment. That experiential vacancy, that focus on our teleological demise is also central to Krovopuskanie’s sound design, first heard in 2020 on a small edition from Deathbed Tapes. Rumbling drones, static transmissions of synth noise, distant knockings in abandoned spaces, a lone drum machine, something growling, something lurking; all of these haunt the oppressive atmosphere to Krovopuskanie’s debut for Helen Scarsdale. A grim, bleak, and often sad recording, Goner should find favor alongside Yen Pox, Subklinik, Brighter Death Now, and Lustmord’s Paradise Disowned. Mastered by Grant Richardson.

Surak, Jeff

All Those Born Must Die

Helen Scarsdale Agency

The investigative sound artist Jeff Surak is quick to point out that this title should not be interpreted in a negative sense. Merely a neutral observation. In fact, themes of detached inquest about disintegration have been quite welcome here at The Helen Scarsdale Agency. Surak has been a fixture within the experimental community for many years, curating the Sonic Circuits festival, programming for RhizomeDC, and running his own Zeromoon label. His own work manifests non-linear narratives through lo-fi techniques and archaic technologies. For All Those Born Must Die, we are introduced to a quarrelsome transmission of distorted sine waves that rapidly descends and crashes into a splatter of retrograde drum programming, think Dome 3 or those highly fetishized synth work-outs from Vanity Records. Rhythms gallop surge forward amongst seering blast of mid-range white noise. This is an electronic album of analogue synthesis. Yes, it very much is; but to these ears, the impetus is a Dada deconstruction on post-punk. Radiantly neon tones, klanging electric ululations, stabs of jagged arpeggio, and mercurial ambience slide and slip through these off-kilter, radioactively unstable tracks, all of which belies Surak’s sophisticated application of recursive melody and rhythm. Consider Conrad Schnitzler ‘80s constructs, Bruce Gilbert’s divergent experimentation, those Tolerance records on Vanity, and then, John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape for a proper amount of radiophonic patina. Together such would land somewhere close to Jeff Surak’s All Those Born Must Die. Mastered by Bob Bellerue.

Kleistwahr

Winter

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Kleistwahr is the solo project of Gary Mundy, the legendary power electronic and noise-rock musician who is a founding member of Ramleh and runs the highly influential Broken Flag label. Solemn drones and elegiac long-form passages gird Kleistwahr’s Winter, which often chimes, glistens, and glows through a unhurried constructs for organ, synth, guitar, and electronics. Yet Mundy pivots throughout with triumphant explosions of shrill noise, redlined overload, and harrowingly anguished vocals from the great unknown. Quintessential Kleistwahr.  Winter was originally published as part of the instantly out of print On Corrosion - a 10 cassette anthology from 2019 that was housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and Himukalt. The collection also stood as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, an imprint founded in 2003 and dedicated to post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, existential vacancy and then some.  With the necessary reissue of Winter, The Helen Scarsdale Agency will embark upon the reissue of much of that material from On Corrosion.

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...

Meirino, Francisco

A New Instability

Helen Scarsdale Agency

In 2019, the power-acoustic musician Francisco Meirino presented A New Instability a commission for the venerable Ina-GRM in paris. Of course, this institution is the pre-eminent center for the research and study of electro-acoustic music dating back to founding of Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. To this day, Ina-GRM continues to be at the vangarde of the electro-acoustic composition, and it is quite an accomplishment and very appropriate for Meirino to receive such a commission.   This recording for A New Instability condenses the 32-channel original piece down to a still very active stereo version. here, Meirino continues to amplify and refine his compositions that walk a fine tightrope between raw expressivity of brutalist noise and conceptual rigor of more academic pursuits. Such a work ranks him in with the likes of Zbigniew Karkowski, Dave Phillips, Puce Mary, and Illusion Of Safety.   Field recordings from a kendo dojo in his hometown of Lausanne, Switzerland cast a pugilistic, combative arch to these recordings which snap, burst, explode, and erupt with utterances of men and women engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Searing frequencies build, swarm, and amass out of these episodes rise to psychologically tense crescendo that rupture at their heights, quickly turning attention towards a violence that originates from within. It is as if the objective observations of those martial arts recordings are sublimated within a subjective experience of psychic unease, disquiet, and imbalance.   A New Instability is another magnificent chapter in the...

Vertonen

Broken Air

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Vertonen is the work of Blake Edwards, a veteran of the Chicago noise and experimental scene. With close to 100 releases many of them published through his own Crippled Intellect Productions and Ballast imprints spread over several decades, Edwards has finetuned his craft of cryptically inclined, electronic invocations that might channel the raw brutality of industrial machinery or the existential claustrophobia of a submariner's voyage nearing its untimely end. There are numerous aesthetic facets to the Vertonen oeuvre - scabrously harsh noise, zoned-out isolationism, roughly tactile cacophonics, polished smooth harmonics. Yet, much of the work is tied to a conceptual precision that informs if not agitates his sounds to act.  Broken Air is the first album for Vertonen to produce for The Helen Scarsdale Agency. Edwards cites both Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau and Butoh icon Kazuo Ohno as profound influences to the construction of Broken Air, in Edwards' own words "to explore the boundaries between the limited and unlimited capabilities of 'communication' in its broadest definition." It is electricity itself that becomes the primary medium for Edwards on Broken Air, as he extracts the errata from outdated and damaged equipment. A particular brand of radio interference leaps out of the stereo field at the onset of the album, interjecting its signal across smoldering noise from Edwards' electronic instability, starved of voltage or succumbing to old age. A monochromatic dead-circuit tone flutters in various phased states as a gird to Edwards' investigations. What sounds like an abject mutation of a...

Hauras

In These Coming Days

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Hauras is the newly christened project for Howard Ryan, an idiosyncratic San Francisco musician who had previously operated under the Snickers moniker. This new name Hauras translates from the Finnish as ‘fragile,’ and a certain fragility exists as a dialectic condition to Ryan’s strange sounds. The argument could be made that Ryan is a deconstructionist of the archetypal ‘rock’ song, dissembling it into eerie echoes of guitar noise and narcoleptic vocals, something akin to Michael Morely’s work as Gate or a particular vein within Richard Youngs’ vast oeuvre (coincidentally, Ryan has collaborated with Youngs).  At the same time, one could easily defend the position that Ryan is an alchemist, assembling the base elements of tone and dissonance that always manage to self-manifest into the sonic equivalent of a homunculus, thus appearing similar to the perverse occlusions of Death & Beauty Foundation, one of the more enigmatic projects of England’s hidden reverse. From either position, the results from Hauras are peculiar, strange, and often uncanny. Once brought (into) existence, musical forms crumble and fall apart in real time through intransitive mantras of repetitive guitar strum and the occasionally whispered vocal incantation.  In These Coming Days is the debut recording for Hauras on the Helen Scarsdale Agency, and Ryan posits these songs concerning themselves with the psychology of a society at the end of civilization. Prescient for sure, as all of the music here was recorded well before the plague struck the globe. Ryan agitates this gilded decay further with...

Fossil Aerosol Mining Project / 400 Lonely Things

Nigths And Profecy

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Zombies lurk throughout the post-industrial abstractions and radiantly murky collages of Nigths and Profecy - an 80 minute split release from Fossil Aerosol Mining Project and 400 Lonely Things.  Fossil Aerosol has a long history with zombies. Or perhaps more specifically, with the contexts that fostered zombies during the 1970s and 1980s. Of particular interest was the imagined, and then realized, ruins of contemporary society - often populated with artificial corpses. One of the earliest artifacts to be employed in the Fossil Aerosol recordings was a segment of a 35mm Italian zombie film trailer, found on the floor of an abandoned drive-in theater projection booth in 1986.  Subsequently, if you enjoyed the dawn of the dead, an limited edition CD-R recorded in 2005, featured heavily processed segments from the classic George Romero trilogy of zombie films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead). That album fell out of distribution, but in 2008, the topic of synthesized corpses was revisited with The First 15 Minutes of the Second Sequel (2008), which was composed (mostly) of processed fragments from the first 15 minutes of the second unauthorized Italian sequel to Dawn of the Dead. Exploring the layers of fake-corpse fake-sequels.  Meanwhile, 400 Lonely Things released their album Tonight of the Living Dead in 2008. That project was composed entirely of loops and samples from the first modern zombie film, Romero’s aforementioned Night of the Living Dead. For obvious reasons, Fossil Aerosol and 400...

Ekin Fil

Coda

Helen Scarsdale Agency

In recent years, the Turkish drone-pop composer Ekin Fil (born Ekin Üzeltüzenci) has been refining her talents in the realm of the film score. Since her first recordings that were published by Root Strata and Students of Decay, she has always exhibited a preternatural ability to express the saddest of emotions through sound. Once channeled through the lens of a gauzy shoegazing smear of guitars and voice, she has peeling away layers of her ephemeral songs to reveal their emotional core. That compositional process that works so well for her award winning film scores informs the soft-focus tenebrous pieces of her 2020 album Coda.  It’s true that any number of these pieces on this album could announce the finale to an emotionally draining movie, but Ekin sculpts the entire album as a whole, dissolving one perfectly tempered piano motif, an impressionist ambient plume or a sibilant vocal melody into another. Just at the threshold of perception, she occasionally invokes cascades of distant noise that easily can be interpreted as the ominous premonitions for natural disasters - incoming storms, earthquakes, or tidal waves. This subtle disquiet amidst the introspective melancholy furthers the emotional weightiness of Coda. Her somber, blissful compositions have considerable gravity of their own in the constellation of Grouper, Felicia Atkinson, and Harold Budd. Mastered by James Plotkin.

Millis, Robert

Related Ephemera

Helen Scarsdale Agency

The globe-trotting Robert Millis returns to Helen Scarsdale for this beautifully fragile album of dissolved glass rendered as a collage of recontextualized minimalism. To astute listeners, Millis should be a household name due to his work in the unpredictably diverse Climax Golden Twins as well as his impeccable curations for Sublime Frequencies (collections include the Deben Bhattacharya: Men and Music on the Desert Road and Indian Talking Machine books). Hie previous solo work include Relief (released here on The Helen Scarsdale Agency in 2013) and The Lonesome High for the Sun City Girls’ Abduction Records in 2016. His scholarship into the hidden corners of music across the world has also earned him Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. Related Ephemera is an album composed mostly from the hiss, the crackle, the surface noise of 78rpm shellacs and wax cylinders. “Horrifying,” Millis explains “is the concept to record collectors that vinyl degrades and can be easily damaged. however, initially records were considered ephemeral, especially 78rpm records. They were novelties. Fleeting. Entertainment.” Millis intends for the album to be a feedback loop whereby the patina of handling, playing, living with the record will circle back to the original source material. Furthering that metaphor, Millis amplifies and dilates feedback tones generated from his collection of vintage gramophones. That said, Millis does cite the intrusion of exactly one field recording, a broken toy, and a few notes from a cello. But the construction of these rarified tones, crispy textures, ghostly rattles, and fluid resonance that ripples...

Junkie Flamingos

Lemegeton Party

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Lemegeton Party is the narcotic and occluded industrial-ambient debut for the Junkie Flamingos, a project conceived in 2017 by Luca Sigurtà, Alice Kundalini, and Daniele Delogu. Each of these musicians has their distinctive sounds: Sigurtà with his vertiginous electronica, Kundalini best known as the author behind the death industrial project She Spread Sorrow, and Delogu in the bombastic folk of the Barbarian Pipe Band. Their collective amalgamation shifts but does not denude each of these aesthetics in the construction of this oblique, sidereal album.  Inspired by Freidrich Holderlin’s Hyperion, Lemegeton Party is gilded with a neoclassical sheen that alludes to both the divine and the diabolical. Kundalini’s whispered invocations which have so creepily effective in addressing psychosexually abject conditions in She Spread Sorrow are immediately recognizable here. Yet, she shifts the content towards messages of power and strength, even if cast in the shadows of desolation and solitude.  The arrangements ebb and flow upon a rhythmic spine of drum machines and cybernetic sequences, laden with acoustic instrumentation bathed in effects and treatments that all serve to bolster Kundalini’s allegorical declarations. To think of Coil’s post-MDMA experiments in chill-out isolationism wouldn’t be far from the mark, with the Junkie Flamingos making a stark nod to the slow motion, proto-techno torpor of Elettronica Meccanica instead of ‘90s British rave culture.  Mastered by James Plotkin and photograph by Stefano Majno.

Cichocki, Christopher

Desert Drone Cycle

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Cristopher Cichocki is an interdisciplnary artist from the Coachella Valley, with an extensive body of work that examines transmorphic cycles of decay and renewal. His multi-faceted practice addresses environmental and socio-political disintegration above and beneath the surface of everyday perception.  Cichocki is as accomplished in maximalist, immersive composition as he is with painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and Land art interventions. Desert Drone Cycle returns from the Southern California desert and Salton Sea, a region which has long been a subject of his work as well as an integral source for his materials. Water recordings and windstorms are amplified and dilated into thrumming movements of ominous frequencies and hypnotic echo. Cichocki girds such sounds around a somatic rhythm akin to a heartbeat and frames the notion of the ‘drone’ both as the trance-inducing, keening sound, but also as the unnamed aircraft conducting infrared surveillance.  On one level, Cichocki’s sound research and experimental applications highlight the complexities around land use management when humanity encroaches upon sensitive environments. And on another, it stands as a harrowing document of isolationist composition paralleling that of Thomas Köner, Deathprod, Alan Lamb, and BJ Nilsen.

Bloom Offering

Episodes

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Bloom Offering is the synth-wave / blighted electronic project of Seattle’s Nicole Carr. Having released a handful of well-received cassettes through Clan Destine, Aught Void, and Sinneslöschen, Bloom Offering presents her debut LP Episodes through The Helen Scarsdale Agency.  In her development as an artist and technician, Carr has steadily honed her abilities in sculpting sharply cold electronics and declarative vocals set upon propulsive spines of whipcrack snares and throttled kick drums. Episodes strikes us as the refinement and culmination of those motifs into a compulsive communion with bleak noise, dark-eyed melody, controlled rhythm, cathartic release and emotional drainage. The opening track “Swallow Me Whole” is one of many pyrrhic anthems of resolute disdain for the current social order with its frantic rhythms complicating the moody arrangements. “Venus Shrugged” maintains a stately almost haughty sequence of synth stabs, evoking the sexual politics of the male gaze and any woman who choses to look for herself. The scornful “Out 2 Get U” was penned as a stark banger of unrelenting, industrial techno in the the wake of the panic and paranoia against the post-Weinstein groundswell of feminine rage; yet in the constant headlines of men behaving badly, Bloom Offering’s curse remains necessary. Episodes questions the positions of gendered power in mirroring back Carr’s existential anxiety through her roughly engineered body music and minimal wave shadowplay. For ancillary listening references, Chris & Cosey, Lebanon Hanover, DVA Damas, and the rhythmic facets of Janushoved might of use.

Ekin Fil

Maps

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***EKIN FIL continues her quietly complex dream-pop oeuvre on Maps. For many years now, this Istanbul musician has been writing mysterious and haunting songs, rich in heavy-reverb effects and an introspective torpor. With each successive album, her songwriting has blossomed through broader instrumentation and more intricate melodic phrasing, though the somber atmospherics and ghostly manifestations remain a judicious constant. Minor-key, tear-stained notes of piano, organ, and guitar veer along elliptical orbits as a soft-whisper lilt of Ekin’s voice narrates more by emotive decree than by literary couplet.   Maps addresses the distance and dislocation of the self from the bustling center of Istanbul, where Ekin FIl (neé Ekin Üzeltüzenci) had once called her home. Having spent her first winter on a relatively quiet island in the Sea of Marmara (while still in the greater metropolitan umbrella of Istanbul), Maps is “lonely, different, kind of isolated,” according to Ekin, who also noted that the island had “too much silence around. There is no other choice but to concentrate, I guess.” Her poetics of silence on her previous recordings had been noted as an antidote or a dream capsule of sound in response to Istanbul’s cauldron of politics, culture, and philosophy that has been boiling almost since the beginning of civilization. Maps bends that maritime silence into wind-swept smudges that complement her already spacious compositions.   The saddest songs of The Durutti Column excised of rhythm and those few plunges into sorrow by Harold Budd make for apt comparisons to...

Fosil Sangiran

Khayal Kuno

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Fosil Sangiran is the pseudonym for Seattle polymath Matt Shoemaker (1974-2017). The two recordings that have been uncovered from his archives under this moniker were recorded during a lengthy sabbatical in Java, Indonesia between 2012 and 2013. Though these works both operate very clearly within Shoemaker’s aesthetic, he choose to operate under this moniker to provide a clarifying distance from what he believed to be his commonplace birth name. Sangiran refers to the UNESCO world heritage site in Indonesia where numerous archeological discoveries have been made providing insight into the understanding of early human development. It’s an apt metaphor to his churning arrays of psychotropic sound design, which give the allusion of being distressed from aeons of jungle rot.  Khayal Kuno represents one of several detours that Shoemaker undertook over his career. Instead of the long-now drone mutations, Shoemaker turns his attention to an interplay between warbling cassettes and primitive rhythm-box sequencing. The minimal, proto- techno explorations suitably evolve slowly out an initial dispersion bloom from swarms of cassette splutter and insect mimesis. Cast within his slinkies-as-spring-reverb contraptions that provided a signature Kirlian glow to his work, Shoemaker’s foray into the realm of the rhythmic are masterful declarations of his under-recognized talents. Through his brilliant aptitude for cross-hatched ltering, spatialized modulation, and electro-magnetic tricknologies, his stark pulsations take on organic qualities through a surging uidity and a varispeed vortex of blank hypnosis. His motorik pulsations recall a rich if elusive vein of taut, industrially minded electronica sculpted by Monoton,...

Fosil Sangiran

Pasar Fosil

Helen Scarsdale Agency

Fosil Sangiran is the pseudonym for Seattle polymath Matt Shoemaker (1974-2017). The two recordings that have been uncovered from his archives under this moniker were recorded during a lengthy sabbatical in Java, Indonesia between 2012 and 2013. Though these works both operate very clearly within Shoemaker’s aesthetic, he choose to operate under this moniker to provide a clarifying distance from what he believed to be his commonplace birth name. Sangiran refers to the UNESCO world heritage site in Indonesia where numerous archeological discoveries have been made providing insight into the understanding of early human development. It’s an apt metaphor to his churning arrays of psychotropic sound design, which give the allusion of being distressed from aeons of jungle rot.  Pasar Fosil is classic Shoemaker. At the core to this album is an ur-drone sculpted from electro-acoustics, analog synthesis, and most probably a radically altered eld recording here or there. All of these accretions of sustained tone organize themselves with a rhizomatic logic of recombinant twists, folds, and mutations. Elegant harmonics with golden, clarion hues set the stage to this album, but Shoemaker would never allow for any his compositions to merely stand as polite ambient music. No. He deftly introduces sheared metallic timbres and rasping dissonance that tug with a gravitational heft. By the second half of the album, Shoemaker plunges into aural thickets that are openly hostile to the listener, articulated through allusions to a humid claustrophobia and radioactive toxicity. Even compared to the muscular minimalism of Organum,...

Fossil Aerosol Mining Project

August 53rd

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  THE FOSSIL AEROSOL MINING COMPANY continues their post-industrial dialectics through their "songs of enhanced decay and faked resurrection." This cryptic ensemble from the American Midwest has been quietly producing such works since the '80s, with a deep catalogue highlighting a uniform brilliance in the exquisite reconstruction of exhumed cassette tapes and moldering 35mm film stock. On August 53rd, Fossil Aerosol has collaged their reclamations of found sounds into an inquisitive, dynamic cinema of the ear. The tape loops and recombinant samples create elliptical orbits and vertiginous spirals. Down-pitched, disquieting rumbles form the foundations for much of Fossil Aerosol’s compositions, which mutate the fractured, crumbled, and mildewed artifacts into patterned yet shifting phrases. The result seems like hybrid, time-compressed mimicry of the evolution of our media-driven language.  The official statement from the ensemble reads as such: "This album, arranged specifically for Helen Scarsdale, might be considered a prequel to The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971, featuring the damaged remains of certain pop culture pleasantries in a less decomposed state than found on the previous vinyl release. August 53rd, a month extended to accommodate a changing climate, predates the day 1982 contaminated 1971."  Such inquiries characterize the many non/fictions that contextualize the work of Fossil Aerosol. Through the process of decoding lost melodies and dialog of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Fossil Aerosol intentionally or unintentionally deflates the vanity of consumerism while at the same time providing an archaeological view of contemporary culture.  ...

Ekin Fil

Inflame

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Istanbul's drone-pop producer EKIN FIL turns her sites to the big screen for the first soundtrack in her impressive catalogue of recordings. Inflame (2017) is a psychological thriller laced with paranoia and nightmares, directed by Ceylan Özgün Özçelik and was showcased at the Berlin International Film Festival and the SXSW Film Festival, amongst others. In making her cinematic debut, Ekil Fil turns synths and electronics, in building the score that in part is brimming with tension and claustrophobia through out all the blank spaces. Always known for her restrained compositions that float amidst ethereal pools of drone and whorl, Ekin Fil sets forth haunting minor-key melodies, monotone arppegiations and plenty of seance-fiction dread. Scattered bits of the film's sound design flicker at the edges of these tracks, as an aural hallucination that dissolves as quickly as it becomes evident. Dubbed electro rhythms creep through the recursive leitmotifs and variations on themes always cast in a dim, crepuscular light. Less informed by the retro-garde aesthetics of Carpenter and Argento, the spectral electronics of Inflame's soundtack finds its neighbors in the skeletal sprawl of Raime and the darker ambient propositions sponsored by Posh Isolation.

Stelzer / Murray

Connector

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***STELZER / MURRAY is the duo of BRENDAN MURRAY and HOWARD STELZER, two stalwarts of the Boston noise / experimental scene over the past two decades. Both artists have long been friends and both artists have never shied away from collaborating with avant-garde musicians hither and yon. Yet, this marks their first collaborative work together. Better late than never, we say. Stelzer brings to the table an array of mangled and partially demagnetized tape; and Murray brings his knack for compacted harmonics, obfuscated field recordings, and long-view compositional strategies. An irradiated, almost Kirlian glow permeates Connector through the duo's slow accretions and erosions amidst the soaring crescendos of compacted tone and vacant shadows of mechanical thrum. On occasion, rasping saw tooth frequencies and oblique synth-noise phrases stridently pop in a clinical opposition against the field of hiss. Screaming cascades from ice storms. Tape symphonies from urban blight. Life-support machines at the point of obsolescence.

Ekin Fil

Ghosts Inside

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***EKIN FIL is the acclaimed drone-pop chanteuse working with the sparest of materials in her ethereal, shoegaze deconstructions. Her sound developed out of a healthy obsession with Cranes, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive and many other bands that she discovered in the tattered back issues of NME and the home-dubbed tapes that were passed around when she was growing up in Turkey. Upon a fortuitous invitation to perform alongside Grouper in Istanbul in the late oughts, Ekin Fil (née Ekin Üzeltüzenci) began producing a series of hidden gems in the drone-rock underworld through releases on Root Strata, Students Of Decay, Bathetic and No Kings. Ghosts Inside continues to find Ekin coaxing somber melodies out of echo, shadow and whisper, even as she expands her arrangements to include piano and keyboards to accompany the guitar, voice and array of pedals that had been front and central on her previous recordings. Ghosts Inside stands as her most arresting recordings to date, written during a period of personal despair with an oblique poetry of sadness cascading through the songs. Her father battling cancer. The end of a romance. It’s an introspective sound, completely turned in on itself and tuning out the socio-political tumult of her native home in Istanbul. In confronting psychic distress, heartache and depression, Ekin Fil blocks out the rest of the world to concentrate on the immediate issues of human relationships and their many complications. Allusions to catharsis flicker through the sullen, narcotized beauty of Ghosts Inside, updating the mood found on...

Carr, Kate

The Story Surrounds Us

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***KATE CARR melds the exquisite details of her field recordings with an ephemeral approach to the song. This Australian has relocated herself to London after many trips around the globe. With each orbiting journey, she has collected innumerable sounds from the urbane to the aqueous and from the frenetic to the sublime, contextualizing all of these into compositions rippling with primordial melodies through guitar, piano, voice, and electronics. The Story Surrounds Us follows her highly acclaimed albums I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring (first released on her own Flaming Pines imprint in 2015) and Carr's debut for Helen Scarsdale in 2016, It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors. Emblematic of her work is a gentle dislocation between the environmental sounds and her drone-dub ellipses of somnambulant melody. The clatter of a frozen dock or a vibrational shimmer from rustled objects or the unintelligible whispers displaces the sense of self amidst a sea of disparate symbols and coded thought. More a travelogue in and out of one's own body than to any particular place. Carr suggests "In a way, it is about restlessness, an uncomfortable tossing and turning in all these many different places, a struggle somehow to forge a connection between my own internal world and all these places and persons I have encountered. I think this holds a sense of unease and strain, with both beautiful and failed moments of intimacy and connection which are made either possible or impossible in the difficult and distorted context of being away....

Fossil Aerosol Mining Project

The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***AVAILABLE AGAIN!!! Dissociated fragments from nearly lost genre films of the 1970s reconstituted, filtered by scratched celluloid, bad splices, dropouts, and damaged control tracks. Within piles of reversed tape loop miasma and time-lag accumulation, FOSSIL AEROSOL MINING PROJECT's mesmerizing and hypnogogic studies of uncanny dislocations magnify grit and errors. Re-assembly of the materials—often culled from 35mm film and quarter-inch magnetic tape found in abandoned drive-in movie theaters and warehouses—interweaves ready-mades with their own disintegration.

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

Relay For Death

Natural Incapacity

Helen Scarsdale Agency

*** The noise mantras of twin sisters Rachal and Roxann Spikula transcribe the harsh realities of urban blight that complicate and threaten their survival. As with Birth Of An Older, Much More Ugly Christ (Hanson 2010), Natural Incapacity sprouts from a similar research and development, manifesting from the sonic pollution that proliferates in their current residence of Richmond, California: the seamless, glacial accretion of locomotive grind, subharmonic environmental rumble, nocturnal street sweeping, and the quavering hum of toxic chemicals perpetually leached into the water table. By design, Natural Incapacity’s oil-stained drone is completely relentless, implying neither beginning nor end to this cycle of contamination. The duo’s industrial meditation recognizes abjection, horror, and defeat as the prevalent conditions to existence. Even as a declared rejection to those conditions, Natural Incapacity is engulfed in a bleak nihilism constantly churning back upon itself. Grizzled antecedents can be found in the apocalyptic works of Maurizio Bianchi, Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Distortion, and Organum’s Vacant Lights. Includes download of the composition in unedited form. Hand-rusted metal covers by the corrosion artist Jim Haynes. Edition of 150

Ekin Fil

Being Near

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Had the titular contest in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music In The World not been rigged from the onset, Turkey could have delivered an impeccable contestant in EKIN FIL. For many years now, her spectral dream-pop deconstructions hold a thousand-yard stare of an unconsolable melancholy; and she's drawn the highly favorable comparisons to Grouper and lovesliecrushing thanks to her understated yet beloved catalogue of releases on Root Strata, Students Of Decay, No Kings, and Sacred Phrases. Helen Scarsdale has long been a fan of Ekin Fil's work, and we are delighted to have her in our constellation of artists here at The Agency.   Born Ekin Üzeltüzenci and based in her native Istanbul, she cites the shoegazing classics (Cocteau Twins, Cranes, Slowdive, etc.) as her earliest influence, seeking out worn issues of Melody Maker or NME from second hand shops and trading cassettes with friends and fellow enthusiasts. This Proustian obsession with rainsoaked melodies from the British Isles blossomed into a foundation for her own art. Being Near stands as the pinnacle in her luminous career, with achingly beautiful and elegantly simple arrangements for guitar and electronics saturated in cavernous amounts of reverb, whose semi-mystical blur extends well into the vocal melodies. Ekin Fil's songs emote a timelessness of human desire and longing, albeit constrained to this plane of existence. For Üzeltüzenci, her music is not an escape valve from the patriarchal hammer of the dominant culture in Turkey, but a reflection through her own condition, in her own context,...

Meirino, Francisco

Surrender, Render, End

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***First and foremost, Surrender, Render, End is an electro-acoustic dialectic, unremittingly engaged in a pugilist conflict between art and accident. The Swiss noise-composer FRANCISCO MEIRINO began working on the skeleton for this piece in 2014 as a multi-channel, modular synth patch, which has been in an ongoing state of modification through public diffusions and private rumination. Meirino posits the album as a metaphysical puzzle of manipulated tape, atonal synthesis, and concrete sound. He is quick to point out that these are more than field recordings, better stated as an extreme amplification of natural phenomena. All of this twists and turns through a shifting of perspective, akin to the cinematic tropes of objectivity and subjectivity in the framing of the image; but here it is with hostile topography of sound interacting with the human mind, body, and spirit. The allusions within Surreneder, Render, End are numerous and for the most part are fleetingly abstract, like the fragments of a nightmare that linger days after. The research laboratory, abandoned with all of the instruments running after an experiment became toxic and started to metastasize. Nerve-endings rupturing from sensory overload. The residual psychic violence of a time and place that's forgotten history. The one recognizable human utterance: "I'll never know anything." Meirino's work has long been at the forefront of sonic exploration, with Surrender, Render, End being a masterful work built upon many years of dedication to his craft, with countless performances, residencies, collaborations, and publications. Think Luc Ferrari, Peter Tscherkassky, and the...

Carr, Kate

It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphores

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***The field recordist and lucid-dream composer KATE CARR conjures a liminal art, seeking to articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing the human interaction with the environment. Psychology, history, politics, geography, storytelling, fantasy, the notion of the self, and the disintegration of these rigors at their transect all come into play in her ongoing work. She has set herself on path to make these investigations, relocating herself from her native Australia to Northern Ireland, followed by innumerable detours. Hence, It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors. This album from Carr intertwines the lugubrious wash of environmental detail with the dissolved songwriting described in the distant past as 'rural psychedelia' rendering an aesthetic in the orbit of :zoviet*france: or as the dub of a dub of a dub abstractions from Dome. For example, a guitar swollen with ethereal blight cycles in soft whirlpools of drone and thrum as the gloom of an irish rainstorm pours down a sewer drain. Electricity proves a nobel tool as well, as she tapes into telephone wires to extract deadtones of unanswered calls. It is as if Carr is peeling back the layers of history to uncover the ghostly stains of human existence at a particular place. The dead may not be talking; but the soil and its occupiers still do.