★The Helen Scarsdale Agency
Grimorian Tapes
"Don't be scared by death," Alice Kundalini (aka She Spread Sorrow) calmly instructs at the beginning of her collaborative Grimorian Tapes with partner Luca Sigurta. Her words slithers from her lips with a subtle, sinister unease, compounded by the unsettling quality of her whisper. The fear of death, this most profound condition, has long been a subject of philosophical, spiritual, and existential inquiry. To fear death is undeniably human; to transcend that fear is often seen as reaching a hig…
Sleepwalkers
The drone-pop consternations of Ekin Fil emerge through vaporous tone and forlorn, distant song, as if plucked from a dream. These exist on their own accord, moving with their own internal logic of an emotion heaviness that belies any the passing observation of this as mere shoegazing ambience. Her songs, her compositions find themselves adjacent the fragmented etherealization of Elisabeth Fraser's voice from a forgotten scene of a particular David Lynch film, as a Asmr trigger for Proustian rec…
In These Coming Days
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…
Broken Air
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 face…
Inauspicious
*200 copies limited edition* 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…
Tether
Murmer is the long-standing project of American/Estonian field recordist and composer Patrick McGinley, and with Tether, The Helen Scarsdale Agency welcomes Murmer back to our roster, over a decade since he graced us with his last production for the Agency. His field recordings often center upon the amplification and activation of resonance from a particular space, landscape, or object. Such sounds emerge from a condition as being fleeting, inconsequential, or ephemeral and explode into that whi…
Einige Schadstoffe
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 sentimentlinking 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 intende…
Kopk Kopa
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…
Dora Agora
*In process of stocking* 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 beauti…
Poised at the Edge of Structure
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, especiall…
All Those Born Must Die
**Edition of 125** 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-lin…
The Glare of the Nave
**Edition of 125** 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, scan…
Goner
**Edition of 125** 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 oft…
Winter
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…
We Share a Shadow
Murmer is the pseudonym for Patrick McGinley, 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 not the terminus of McGinley…
Samoa Highway
**Edition of 500** RV Paintings were born in California. Humboldt County, to be exact. It is nearly impossible to imagine their origins being elsewhere since the brothers Brian and Jon Pyle, who currently pilot RV Paintings, constantly mine the metaphysical properties of their homeland through a heavy-lidded psychedelia. The redwood trees that majestically rise from the rugged terrain may have been one of the endemic objects that inspired RV Paintings to “jam nature”; but Humboldt County’s other…
So Long
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 th…
The Unlistening Place
The core tracks of The Unlistening Place were recorded in 2015. At the time, these were intended to be part of what was to be the final Fossil Aerosol album, scheduled for a distant release. But history circled back on itself and the result was a reworking of future tracks, alongside more new material. Historiography eating its own tail. Tradition, referents, and resolute nothing from the place that does not hear.
Scaath Catfish
Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approac…
Lemegeton Party
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 aest…