Helen Scarsdale Agency   Page 2

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.

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.

Evans, Grant

Brittle

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Volatile coagulations and conflagrations abound with malaise at the beginning of the side-long works on Brittle—a vibrant landmark in GRANT EVANS' catalogue of harsh wall noise, kosmische explorations, and dronologist collage. Beacons of monochord guitar. Radiant dispersions of glare and trill. Compacted bowed metal resonance. Interstitial ecological sounds from water, bird, and tree. Exhumed cassette minimalism. And a gasping, pulsing, morphing drone that bends around each of these sound objects. Parallels to the meticulous and wondrous bricolage by this resident of northeast Georgia can be found in Chalk, Organum, Toniutti, and Grzinich. C40.

Garet, Richard

60' Cassette

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Crude electro-acoustic strategies are at work in this tape-on-tape monolith, where the murky surfaces are pricked and the bruises of multiple generations of recording are revealed. Rasping hiss, mud-gray compression, spluttering motors, rancorous textures of iron filing shards, flecked dried scabs, garbled noise, irradiated drones and thrumming bellows from the machine drown in heavy, elemental waveform crush. The forces of the grand architectural scores of minimalism are still at work on 60' Cassette, obfuscated in flurries of fetid noise and unspooled tape. Look to the crumbling roar of Kevin Drumm, Chop Shop, or more aptly Japanese obscurantist Toukaseibunshi for a likeminded approach.

Radioson

Radioson

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Through a Cold War lens of the paranoiac aesthetic where RADIOSON emerges. This eponymous release is the first full document for Radioson, the Russian engineer known as [S] who has operated as Five Elements Music and Exit in Grey over the past decade. Radioson maintains the representative compositional fluidity while presenting a darker, noisier, more malevolent disposition here. Disruptive interference, numbers station mechanization, various Russian military transmissions, and electrically charged currents of caustic drone are constructed from a position of clinical detachment over the psychic and physical detritus that spills forth in his homeland. The occasionally kosmiche turns for electronic sequencing are a unique take on the Schnitzler / Schulze strategies from the ’70s, though mapped out on antiquated Russian synthesizers, tape machines, and of course radios. But the exhumation of things past and the parapsychological aesthetics parallel the best work of Andrew Lagowski’s S.E.T.I. when he recorded for Ash International and the psychological dread of industrial ambient practitioners Schloss Tegal.

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.

Sigmarsson, Sigtryggur Berg

So Long

Helen Scarsdale Agency

A journey through time, perhaps, for a daydreamer floating in a small boat amidst the radiant hues of a midnight sun. That daydreamer in this instance is the Icelandic artist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, best known for his electro-surrealism in Stilluppsteypa. He has long been an artist of extremes and absurdities -- mania fueled performances, wildly scribbled drawings, and Haflerian audio shock-therapy, on one side; and on the other, a profound meditation on austere shape, form, and mood cast through similar media. Sigmarsson will intermingle these sentiments in slippery juxtaposition and assemblage, with beguiling, haunting, and / or charming results. So Long aligns itself firmly within that latter aesthetic of crypto-minimalism which began to germinate some 20 years ago. At that time, Stilluppsteypa was a trio who had recently eschewed their art-punk trappings, drunkenly scheming to corner the market at Documenta with deconstructivist drone and 21th century circuitry. Sigmarsson would find himself in his own studio, crafting sympathetic works to Stilluppsteypa; but these were directed inward as wounded, naked, and vulnerable concoctions reflective of Sigmarsson getting lost in his own little world. So Long quietly simmered in his head over the years; and with the completion of this album, we now have a sublime gesture of polar impressionism flecked with hallucinatory ambience, Vaseline-smeared crackle, and hauntological displacement. This album had originally been planned for release through the impeccably curated Intransitive Recordings, but that publishing house shuddered its doors before this could see the light of day. Sigmarsson self-released a condensed version...

Whetham, Simon

From The Mouths Of Clay

Helen Scarsdale Agency

For 3 months in early 2013, Simon Whetham had the space and opportunity to develop his work, ideas and methods, taking part in the inaugural residency of a lab project run collaboratively by the Museo Universitario de la Universidad de Antioquia and Casa Tres Patios in Medellín, Colombia. Combining and building on recording and playback methods and ideas with found objects, discarded technology and methods of his working practice and others such as Alvin Lucier and Nicholas Collins he investigated sonic, acoustic and phenomenological qualities of the gallery space and faulty or used equipment that was donated or found in nearby market La Cascada. Following on from a 'recreation' of “I am Sitting in a Room”, the process was applied to a selection of 3 prehispanic burial urns and 3 examples of more recent variations on this theme. The internal resonances were captured and then played back inside the urns utilising small speakers, or through them using transducers, the process repeated to uncover tones held within the clay and the space within. The result was demonstrated as an 8 channel installation, with each of the 6 vessels singing with it's own voice and 2 speakers playing lower tones created by the vessels using the same process, but using a microphone inside each and a larger speaker placed against the outside. This work combines sound material from the installation and further investigations carried out during the residency period, recorded in the space, from inside the vessels or reproduced inside and through them.

Rmillis

Relief

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Uncommon solo work by a CLIMAX GOLDEN TWIN and noted globe-trotting, time-traveling curator of esoterica. MILLIS’s fever dream of blurred harmonics and ethnomusicological spelunking repeatedly returns to variations on a peculiar yet beautifully serpentine drone, whose twinkling acoustic properties meld the hallucinatory mouth-music of the Bangladeshi Murung people and the curved air hypnosis of Terry Riley. Millis bookends and interrupts his mysterious miasma with comedic interludes snatched from antique 78s, maudlin piano tone-clusters, and teleported crescendos of spectral ballroom waltzes. This polyglot raga-drone of daytime somnambulism and psychedelic slipperiness speaks to the uneasy borders at psychological, cultural, and geophysical states of being. Oh, to be a human on this planet. Includes digital download card.

Slaves, The

Ocean On Ocean

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***“Hovering above the weighted disposition of doom and below the consolation of shoegaze,” waxes mystical drone-folklorist Jon Porras, BARBARA KINZIE and BIRCH COOPER’s “burdened grace… unfolds like a radiant mammal writhing in black water…. Lines of light swell and dissipate behind hushed lyrics. Feedback and white noise ebb and flow.… A staircase built from reflective feedback, extending horizontally into bliss. A bliss that is fleeting and simultaneously petrified in the present. A paradox realized by the duo’s distillations of urgent ambiance and luminescent melancholy. Conjuring environments that billow out from instrumental restraint, Ocean On Ocean is an exercise in disciplined abstraction. Previous releases have been favorably compared to Grouper, Slowdive, Earth, and Barn Owl. Includes free download. Edition to 400. 

Murmer

What Are The Roots That Clutch

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***PATRICK MCGINLEY’s first full album in nearly five years marks an elegant continuation of We Share A Shadow. Field recordings and abstractions overlap and crosshatch into acousmatic passages with ghostly, half-melodic qualities. Two unprocessed recordings are impossibly complex in their accretions of sound. McGinley’s composed pieces embrace lithe, mysterious drones whose mossy, damp atmosphere perfectly situate with tactile crunches and events, and signal noise generation. Eels and leaches would not be out of place in such an environment; but the subaquatic murk snaps into a hallowed manifestation of ritualized minimalism at the album’s finale—one that LaMonte Young and Angus Maclise might have conjured in 1968 with clattering percussive elements and a hypnotic blur of harmonic drone. Letterpress artwork. Edition of 400.

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.

Nilsen, Bj & Stilluppsteypa

Big Shadow Montana

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***After producing a frozen trilogy of intoxicated dronemuzik for the Agency, these Scandinavian gentlemen venture into fictionalized soundtracks for imagined Mondo films and science fiction serials. Slow-motion delirium manifests in occluded smears, nocturnal gasps, and arcane tones from a variety of analogue synthesizers. Flickered impressions flash in conjunction with Breton's Surrealism manifesto in the form of memories from happily drunk escapades in the heart of winter, the sidereal spells cast by innerspace travelers Klaus Schulze and Coil, and the nagging questions of existential portent: "Was that bassline from Goblin, or was it German Oak? Maybe something from Faust IV?" NILSEN, SIGMARSSON and THORSSON elegantly twist and bend fleeting images into a spiraling symphony of bubbling electronics and spectral drones that mutate into lugubrious yet carnivalesque waltzes. When this first appears, it is the echoing undercarriage of a simple melody, bobbing amid rattling chains and cascading cymbal crashes, only to dissolve into sequences of cold-war era tone beacons and empathic swaths of maudlin sound design. At the second occurrence, the melody washes ashore on the Iceland beach, where nude Viking men and women try in vain to get a tan with the sun just barely above the horizon line. It is a pyrrhic jubilation of calliope harmonies set down by organs and synths turning a pale-blue hue in the wake of all that white skin shivering underneath the arctic sky. Includes free download card.

Rv Paintings

Samoa Highway

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***The heavy-lidded psychedelia of brothers and co-pilots JON and BRIAN PYLE (STARVING WEIRDOS, ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE) constantly mines the metaphysical properties of their Humboldt County homeland. The brothers channel a psychotropic animism through sound in which drones and foggy ambience tangle. A swarm of drone guitars announces the opening of the record on "Millions," with a shoegaze wash collapsing into tone purity and bulging through a metallic buzz. Field recordings of airplane take-off and firework explosions punctuate the undulating, bleary smear of the Pyle brothers' guitars. The result is one of levitation, even as RV PAiNTINGS seem to be plugging their guitars and electronics directly into the moss, soil, and mycelia of the Humboldt forest. Echo-soaked flutes, maudlin strings, scabrous noises unearthed from the bottom of the Pacific, and a cinematic arcs of guitar shimmer complete the beautiful and haunted miasma somewhere between Taj Mahal Travellers, Organum, and The Caretaker. Previous releases on Trinity Rivers and Blackest Rainbow. Includes digital download card. Edition of 500.

Holterbach, Manu & Julia Eckhardt

Do-undo (in G Maze)

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Do-Undo emerged out of Q-O2 Werkplaats, a sound-art laboratory of sorts based in Brussels, where JULIA ECKHARDT, one of the artistic directors, has built an archive of recordings of long-form viola pieces played exclusively in G. Sound-artist, field recordist, and ingenious instrument builder MANU HOLTERBACH, who has taken part in several Q-O2 residencies, reconstitutes her recordings which, on their own, seek the rich if occasionally dissonant overtones central to the minimalist works of Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock, Eliane Radigue, and Ellen Fullman. Holterbach populates his compositions with field recordings, turbulent textures and bristling movements that sympathetically weave amid the rasping drones from the viola. On a technical level, Holterbach’s field recordings on his composition “Two stasis made out of electricity”—an arc lamp, the Parisian subways, an electric powerplant—all naturally buzz with the same G of Eckhardt’s viola, without the benefit of digital pitch shifting. The resulting drones transcend conceptualism and strategic intent, and instead make no differentiation between the environment (man-made or otherwise) and the academy. Limited edition with letter-pressed covers.

Spiracle

Ananta

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***HITOSHI KOJO (aka SPIRACLE) finds it difficult to fall asleep. Ananta urges the listener toward a dreamless sleep-state, while reflecting the glowing warmth of a blossoming sunrise. To finely tuned drones extracted from a Dilruba and a Sarangi, Kojo merges sympathetic field recordings and other tonal interferences alongside the instrumental sounds. The results are elliptically static drones that brightly shimmer with hues of gold, crimson, and aquamarine. One of the two variations of Ananta was released in 2006 as a micro-edition CDR through Mystery Sea; tiny churning textures stream along a linear path, nearly achieving infinity, which happens to be the translation from Sanskrit of "ananta." If you find Roland Kayn, Yoshi Wada, or Charlemagne hypnotic, you'll want to check this out. The Strato Version of Ananta is previously unreleased. It bends and undulates around a fundamental drone, while maintaining the sun-flecked glints magnified in the Mystery Sea version. Limited to 300 copies

Chasse, Loren & Michael Northam

Otolith

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***The well-documented wanderlust of sound artists LOREN CHASSE and MICHAEL NORTHAM is only part of the equation; arcane instruments such as autoharps, ouds, flutes, bells, gongs, bowed wires, harmonium, and Northam's magnetic table harp are prominent ingredients in the duo's alchemy. Their field recordings of wind, water, and stone intertwine and hybridize within private rituals of droning psychedelic ragas that return as a folklore reiterating the mystery of the natural world around us. Through his contributions to the JEWELLED ANTLER as well his solo work, Chasse has magnified and probed the surface of the Earth for a tactile grit that permeates all the sounds he generates. Inspired by vast geographies, microscopic detail, and severe weather, Northam explores what is between improvisation and acousmatic composition.

Nilsen, Bj & Stilluppsteypa

Passing Out

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***The final component to a trilogy -- thematically linked by the psychotropic effects of alcohol -- of isolationist compositions for barren field recordings and lumbering electric drones by these Nordic sound artists. With one singular track that spans 60 minutes, a nearly constant thrum and rumble of monochromatic low frequencies casts a grim pall upon the precisely dialed-in modulations and vibrations. Spectral guitars, maudlin tunes from haunted radios, angrily growling voices, and field recordings of wind-whipped snow and ice bury themselves deep amid these subharmonic drones. Letterpress and silkscreen artwork in an edition of 1000.

Murmer

We Share A Shadow

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***MURMER is the pseudonym for PATRICK, a man with several passports which have taken him to many a foreign land in search of found sounds of the unsettled, the forgotten, the mysterious, and the beautiful. His field recordings of activated environments (e.g. resonant industrial spaces, windswept telephone lines, bowed branches, gasping ventilator systems, etc.) originate from all of the locations where he has traveled; yet, the documentation of these sounds is the not the terminus of McGinley's work. He is far more interested in extracting a particular emotional, transcendent, or metaphysical kernel from those sounds, and then recontextualizing that germinated sound into sympathetic compositions of magnificent dronemusik. We Share A Shadow spirals his manipulated field recordings as a slow revelation of the environmental sonorities that undeservedly go unnoticed each and every day. Singing frequencies of a bowed piece of metal undulate against a gray tapestry of rain and rasping insects. Golden overtones from shimmering drones quell what agitated textures reside in McGinley's active field recordings, rendering the aggregate sound a nocturnal opiate with considerable potency. Strictly limited to 300 copies, featuring hand water-colored artwork and letterpress printing.

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.

Nilsen, Bj & Stilluppsteypa

Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***In Scandinavia, it's not uncommon to hear of someone's mother, grandfather, uncle, or plumber who drank him-or-herself to death at an early age; and the Swedish drone artist BJ NILSEN has felt the alcoholic pangs which may foreshadow his own demise. In recent years, Nilsen has turned to his Icelandic neighbors SIGTRYGGUR BERG SIGMARSSON and HELGI THORSSON (collectively known as STILLUPPSTEYPA) in existential sympathy over the problems of their collective lust for alcohol. Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna marks the second collaborative document of abject minimalism that these three have composed; and like its predecessor Vikinga Brennivin, this album is spiked with drunken thought. Any alcohol induced euphoria has been tempered by perturbing blackouts, moments of cruelty, and an all-consuming nihilism. Beyond their shared Scandinavian heritage, their expressionist urge for the frigid drone, and their penchant for drink, BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa intend this recording as an open ended experience, wandering through their sound without the burden of any exegetical text that may get in the way.

Waldron, M.s. / Steven Stapleton, Sigtrtyggur Berg Sigmarsson, Jim Haynes & R.k Faulhaber

Sleeping Moustache

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***M.S. WALDRON (aka IRR.APP.EXT), STEVEN STAPLETON (NURSE WITH WOUND), SIGTRYGGUR BERG SIGMARSSON (STILLUPPSTEYPA), JIM HAYNES, and R.K. FAULHABER team up for a new album. An epiphany of controlled disorder, a convulsion of beauty, a cascade of thought from delirious minds, The Sleeping Moustache is an exquisite manifestation of sound poetry scattered into a tortuous collage mired in an oblique melancholy. Magnetic tones extracted from the ether, mechanical sounds smeared into a lugubrious growls, horns trumpeting straight out of John's Book of Revelation, ululations sliced into information overload that Schwitters himself would be proud of. The Sleeping Moustache presents a psychically instable landscape, where dreams and nightmares wreak havoc upon the drudgery of daily life. The closest audible territory for The Sleeping Moustache might be the psychoactive constructions of Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie, although the characters in this drama happened upon an entirely different map of that terrain. First edition pressing features five letterpress prints from each of the artists with an edition of 1700. 

Nilsen, Bj & Stilluppsteypa

Vikinga Brennivin

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***BACK IN STOCK!!! For the Icelandic electro-absurdist outfit STILLUPPSTEYPA, the near-lethal alcoholic beverage brennivin oozes out of their terminal drones, sputtered rhythms, and atomic fractures. Their clinical minimalism reflects the introspection, headaches, and melancholia of the morning after. Swedish composer BJ NILSEN has rendered the commonplace sounds of wind, rain, and snow as stealthfully seductive and quietly menacing drifts of frozen sound. Their resultant collaboration is a drunken stumble in a Scandinavian winter night via extended soundfields that breathe with the majesty of distant fog horns and sparkle with the delicate light of countless stars cast down from the black heavens onto the frozen tundra below. Frightening and barren, yet hauntingly compelling, Vikinga Brennivin is an isolationist masterpiece.

Coelacanth

Mud Wall

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Audio speleologists LOREN CHASSE (JEWELLED ANTLER, THUJA, BLITHE SONS, FRANCISCAN HOBBES) and JIM HAYNES (The Wire) collaborate on their third album of "broken minimalism," an exploration of sound possibilities originating from traditionally non-musical materials (copper, stone, glass, sand, shortwave radio, rust, wind, water and mud). Sifting through viscous electrical fields, slumbering vibrations, and aerosolized pricklings, the duo invokes an aggregate of sustained harmonics, continuously evolving sound forms, and broad gestures of textural details. Monumental physicality somewhere between the quiet expressionism of recent AMM and John Duncan's psychological inquiries.

Coelacanth

Cronograph

Helen Scarsdale Agency

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.