Helen Scarsdale

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    Kate Carr – The Story Surrounds Us

    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. It is quite sad, really." Look to Carla dal Forno, Alan Lamb and those moments of clarity in the shapeshifting ethos from Jewelled Antler for neighboring sounds to Kate Carr's chimerical compositions. - HS
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    Himukalt – Conditions Of Acrimony

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    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 Kärkkäinen, 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.
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    Grant Evans – Brittle

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    With a detached curiosity, Grant Evans drops us into his petri dish of mud, bacteria, and fetid slop. At first, we have no roadmap to the drowning noise that slowly trickles down the throat and presses against the ear drums; but Evans is no sadist. Yes, volatile coagulations and conflagrations abound with malaise at the beginning to each of the side-long works to Brittle — itself a vibrant landmark in the Evans’ rhizomatic back catalogue that slips through harsh wall noise, kosmische explorations, dronologist collage, and the like. But upon the discharge of that initial shard of tooth and blood, Evans tempers the atmospheric pressures and illumines a path by which to proceed. 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. Such is the vivid unfurling of Brittle — a meticulous and wondrous bricolage of the exploded organic. Parallels to be found in Chalk, Organum,Toniutti, and Grzinich.
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    Jim Haynes – Scarlet

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    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.
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    Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson – So Long

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    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 of the album on the artbook / cassette If You Have Any Questions, Let Me Ask. The Helen Scarsdale Agency is delighted, honored, and humbled to publish this dronescaping threnody in its full radiance and blur.
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