Browse by Label: HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY

Artist:	IRR.APP.(EXT.)
Title:	Ozeanische Gefühle
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	HMS 002CD

"irr. app. (ext) is the work of California-based sound artist Matt Waldron, whose collected body of work is far too important to continue to be forgotten. Had things gone differently, Ozeanische Gefühle would have been one of the lost irr. app. (ext.) recordings. That would have been a shame for Ozeanische Gefühle stands as an impeccable composition of post-surrealist dronescaping rivaling such masterpieces as The Hafler Trio's Kill The King, Jonathan Coleclough & Andrew Chalk's Sumac, and Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith. The album tumbles through a series of sympathetic dronings, field recordings, and performative gestures, continuously traversing the emotional polarities of psychological tension and externalized jouissance."

Artist:	NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ
Title:	Vikinga Brennivin
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	HMS 004CD

2nd edition (no longer available in copper sleeve). "Brennivin is an Icelandic liquor vulcanized from the humble potato and flavored with cumin, although you'd be hard pressed to taste much beyond the astringent burn that it leaves in your mouth. Bottled in matte black glass and stamped with ominously simple labels, brennivin appears less like something to imbibe and more like poison; and in that creeping slow death kind of way, it is. For the Icelandic electro-absurdist outfit Stilluppsteypa, brennivin has soaked into every fiber of their being; and as a result, oozes out of their terminal drones, sputtered rhythms, and atomic fractures. As much brennivin (and mind-altering chemicals in general have been a muse for Stilluppsteypa, they are also a curse; Stilluppsteypa's oblique Dada expressionism and devilish black humour erupt with megalomaniacal invincibility that comes with a few too many drinks; but at the same time, Stilluppsteypa has developed a parallel ethos of clinical minimalism the reflects the introspection, headaches, and melancholia of the morning after. In their poetically abject celebration of brennivin, Stilluppsteypa (comprised of Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson) accepted the invitation from Swedish composer BJ Nilsen to collaborate upon an album related to alcohol and its mind-numbing effects. Nilsen has been working in various constellations of experimental music, best known for his recordings as Hazard published through Touch and Ash International. Focusing the perception of natural sounds through a reconstruction of time and space, Nilsen has rendered the commonplace sounds of wind, rain, and snow as stealthily seductive and quietly menacing drifts of frozen sound. Their resultant collaboration is an existentialist allegory in which the three drunkenly stumble out in a Scandinavian winter night and spiral toward the inevitable point in which they blackout. Lest this be construed as a derelict piece of method acting, the craft that Nilsen, Sigmarsson, and Thorsson brought to Vikinga Brennivin is impeccable, as the extended soundfields breath 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."

Artist:	OMIT
Title:	Tracer
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	2CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	HMS 005CD

"Clinton Williams admits that he has never been particularly keen in marketing the obsessive electronic constructions he's produced under the moniker Omit over the past two decades. Williams once infamously quipped to Nick Cain that he should simply print a couple pages of zeros in lieu of the failing interview that Cain was conducting for his own Opprobrium magazine a little over a decade ago. While such actions may be confused with those of a curmudgeonly hermit, Williams is concerned with his impeccable battery of synthetic sounds intent on psychological dislocation. Having released the bulk of his work in tiny self-published editions of lathe-cut singles and hand-dubbed cassettes, Omit has enjoyed several high-profile releases thanks to the diligence of Corpus Hermeticum and Anomalous Records, who both rescued some of Omit's finest work from terminal obscurity. The Helen Scarsdale Agency is proud to announce the arrival of his latest recording Tracer, a double disc set. As with all of his previous work, Tracer is an antiquated behemoth, constructed from analogue synthesizers, primitive drum machines, homespun electronics, and numerous effects pedals. Simple wooden rhythms trot, trudge, and even glide along taut metric grids hotwired with bursts of mechanical splutter and the occasional creak from Pierre Henry's wooden door. An occasionally menacing, but more often melancholic orchestration of synthetic tones ripple, flex, and dissolve across the uniform structuralism, creating an ecstatic paranoia rarely heard with such splendor, rigor, and sublime blackness. If sonic references are required, then the Klaus Schulze masterpiece Cyborg remains the closest analogy to what may be found in Tracer. The Helen Scarsdale Agency offers Omit's latest opus in an edition of 750 copies, hand-printed through letterpress and silkscreen."

Artist:	SPOONBENDER 1.1.1.
Title:	Stereo Telepathy Academy
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	HMS 006CD

"In 1913, Marcel Duchamp dropped three pieces of string, each a meter long, from a height equal to their length. He then cut shapes into pieces of wood in order to document the rumpled line of his three fallen strings. In essence, Duchamp conceived his 3 Standard Stoppages as a preservation of chance, which he viewed as a means to combat logical reality. In addition to Duchamp's self-proclaimed antipathy to the rational world, he was quite particular in how he contextualized and executed his ideas through readymade objects, chance operations, and his notorious psycho-sexually charged dioramas. It is this dualism between the chance operation and an absolute intellectual/technical control which brings us to the present age, and to Spoonbender 1.1.1 in particular, where the acceptance and integration of opposites results in the 3rd option: everything. The San Francisco-based Spoonbender 1.1.1 outlines itself as the 'tele-ambient dream self' of the critically-acclaimed, 'populist avant-tronics and media group' I Am Spoonbender. Spoonbender 1.1.1's collision of artforms also employs the technique found in the William S. Burroughs/Brion Gyson classic The Third Mind. As the images of David Cronenberg's rarely seen film Crimes Of The Future flickered, Spoonbender 1.1.1 radiated an inverted telekinetic minimalism of undulating tones supporting the third piece of the puzzle: spoken text from Cronenberg's Stereo, a faux-documentary detailing a surgical procedure for the advancement of telepathic communication. The result is a sort of Wizard Of Oz / Dark Side Of The Moon for the mimetic engineering mindset. The same principles and elements apply for Stereo Telepathy Academy, the group's long-awaited debut studio recording (1.1.1 has existed solely as a live group for years)."

Artist:	M.S. WALDRON/STEVEN STAPLETON/SIGTRYGGUR BERG SIGMARSSON/JIM HAYNES/R.K. FAULHABER
Title:	The Sleeping Moustache
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	HMS 007CD

"Let's begin with the introductions. M.S. Waldron may be best known for his work as irr. app. (ext.), an unwieldy moniker that begets uncanny, hallucinatory sound. Steven Stapleton is the genius behind Nurse With Wound, the consistently unpredictable project that scrambles musical obsessions for Krautrock, surrealism, and avant-garde composition into a brash quest for expressionism through experimentation. Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson hails from the Icelandic electro-absurdist duo Stilluppsteypa, which continues to investigate the finer points of drunken minimalism. Jim Haynes prefers to merely state that he rusts things. R.K. Faulhaber is something of a mysterious figure, looming around Mr. Waldron's irr. app. (ext.) recordings and performances while keeping his own work a hermetic secret. Each with a peculiar understanding of the audio arts, these five artists came to the proverbial table and thought it a good idea to collaborate. Given the predilection for the surreal and the sidereal that each of these five employ in their many audio and visual projects, those agendas oozed from the recordings that became known as The Sleeping Moustache. 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."

Artist:	NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ
Title:	Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	HMS 008CD

"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. Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna resolves itself as a grim kaleidoscope, where the bleakness of the wintry Scandinavian landscape and the langour of a drunken escapade constantly mutate through the highly refined sensibility of dronescaping. Sonar pings announce the beginning of this album, with its echoes returning as an amorphous fog and locating little but a gloomy pall upon the event horizon. Clattering electronics scurry across the barren sounds like death-watch beetles upon the tundra; and creaking doors offer something much more foreboding than what Pierre Henry envisioned for musique concrete. Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna adheres to the psychological disquiet through sound design that Alan Splet provided for Eraserhead or that Nurse With Wound achieved on Salt Marie Celeste."

Artist:	HAYNES, JIM
Title:	Telegraphy by the Sea
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	HMS 009CD

"'I prefer 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. At times, these timbral flutterings waver into asymmetrical smears of holy-minimalist splendor; at others, monolithic grey slabs of drone collapse upon themselves into turbulent oceanic currents. If comparisons must be made, perhaps Telegraphy by the Sea parallels William Basinski at his most fortified or The Hafler Trio at his least arcane."

Artist:	SHOEMAKER, MATT
Title:	Spots In The Sun
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	HMS 010CD

"Matt Shoemaker pulled his chin away from his hand after several ponderous moments, positing that the title to this electrically-charged opus of encrypted drone holds at least two entry points. The most obvious reference for Spots In The Sun would be the astrophysical study of sunspots with all of the allusions to earthly disturbances triggered by events millions of miles away. Yet, on the other hand, Shoemaker also proposed an earthbound reference to regions of the world that only exist -- perhaps literally, perhaps psycho-geographically -- under the intense glare of sunlight. He then shrugged his shoulders, hoping for an ideal situation in which his audience will confront his work as a vacuum and allow personal references to be drawn from within. In simplest terms, Spots In The Sun is a grotesque, sonic landscape with details exaggerated out of proportion and narratives folded upon themselves in a magnificent abstraction of electro-acoustics, rarefied field recordings, and particulate matter plucked from the ether. Shoemaker works in monochrome, shaping his gray tonalities into rhizomes of shadow which occasionally erupt in brilliance of hyper-realized clarity. While the familiar sounds of encircling birds, turbulent weather, and temple bells litter Shoemaker's recordings, the sonic topography describes a vulgar and hostile landscape where fits of delirium and circadian arrhythmia are common human responses. Shoemaker achieves these complex metaphors through labyrinthine drones spiraling through irradiated fog and glassine vibrations, punctured by the scars of a landscape in perpetual revolt. In many ways, Shoemaker's Spots In The Sun could be mistaken for Bernard Parmegiani at his most focused or even John Duncan at his most gracefully brutal." 2nd edition, regular packaging.

Artist:	MURMER
Title:	We Share A Shadow
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	HMS 011CD

"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'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 continues where Murmer left off with the exceptional Husk album (in collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough), in spiraling 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 grey 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. As Murmer, Patrick McGinley has produced a handful of releases on ICR, Ground Fault, Drone Records, and Absurd. We Share A Shadow is strictly limited to 300 copies, featuring hand water-colored artwork and letterpress printing."

Artist:	OMIT
Title:	Interceptor
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	2CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	HMS 012CD

"Omit is the nom de plume for Clinton Williams, an electronic musician who has been quietly toiling in New Zealand for a good portion of the past two decades. His work has appeared alongside such luminaries of the NZ free noise community as Birchville Cat Motel, The Dead C, Flies Inside The Sun, Dean Roberts, Surface Of The Earth, etc.; however, Omit's home-spun constructs widely detour from the sculpted grit and mottled distortion found in the work of his countrymen and women. In listening to his masterful Quad (a 3CD opus released in 1998 through Corpus Hermeticum), one gets the very palpable sense of an artist in a contentious argument with his own unwieldy mousetrap of tape-loops, modular electronics, effects pedals, drum machines, and the creaking sounds of his house. That internal debate with himself through his machine exudes an existential melancholy, which could be applied to any number of grander metaphors of the dependency of electronics, cybernetics, and technology upon mankind. Interceptor is the result of an experiment whereby Williams worked with a portable studio away from his longtime home of Blenheim. He possessed two suitcases of drum machines, effects, and analog synths; and, Williams recalls being 'pissed off with myself wasting time recording this stuff when I was trying to find a job.' His frustrations stripped away much of the grandiose sweeps of ambience and shadow, leaving behind a life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. An undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms towards a crepuscular gloom. Williams has always been at odds with his own work, yet his self-doubt continues to deliver magnificent albums which thrive in a symbiotic struggle with mechanical disintegration. Interceptor conjures the best offered by Mika Vainio, Klaus Schulze, and the Throbbing Gristle tracks authored by Chris Carter. Always the pessimist, Williams grumbles, 'In many ways, it's a document of my failure to do the most simplest things in life.' If only all of our failures could be this brilliant. Interceptor is a double CD published in a edition of 600 copies."

Artist:	NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ
Title:	Passing Out
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	HMS 013CD

"The first chapter found the drink. The second came after a night of intoxicated shouting. The third chapter is inevitable: Passing Out. The Nordic sound artists BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa have authored the last component to a trilogy of isolationist compositions for barren field recordings and lumbering electric drones, thematically linked in the psychotropic effects of alcohol. In doing so, they have issued a brief statement in defense of their research: 'It's been four years and three studies, Passing Out being the final. Even in its most general, colloquial usage, Passing Out indicates the occurrence of a state that is incompatible with active behavior. It is possible that the individual could experience both consciousness and unconsciousness at the same time while encountering Passing Out.' Yes, Passing Out is a crepuscular recording, with the flickering of twilight further dimmed by the distant arctic sun in wintertime and the blackened numbness of too much drink. 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 amidst these subharmonic drones. All of these tease at the edge of perception, sculpting the narrative of the drone into a vehicle for unhinged expressionism of varying degrees of horror, melancholy, beauty, and oblivion. The Swedish born BJ Nilsen defines his work as 'focused upon the sound of nature and its effects on humans, and the perception of time and space as experienced through sound.' He has numerous recordings on Touch and has collaborated with the likes of Chris Watson, Christian Fennesz, and Z'ev. The Icelandic citizens Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson are Stilluppsteypa, whose electronic abstractions engage absurd theatrics that mar the pristine surface of minimalism. Passing Out features letterpress and silkscreen artwork in an edition of 1000."

Artist:	CHASSE & MICHAEL NORTHAM, LOREN
Title:	The Otolith
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	HMS 014CD

"The recordings of Loren Chasse and Michael Northam begin and end with the great outdoors. Yet, the well-documented wanderlust of these two kindred sound artists is only part of the equation. 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 numerous contributions to the multi-faceted Jewelled Antler as well his solo work, Chasse has long postulated the microphone as an extension of his ear, which magnifies and probes the surface of the earth for a tactile grit that permeates all of the sounds that he generates. Northam claims his inspiration from vast geographies, microscopic detail, and severe weather, which he compacts through various techniques to explore what is between improvisation and acousmatic composition. Both Chasse and Northam entertain such notions through an alchemy of arcane instruments: autoharps, ouds, flutes, bells, gongs, bowed wires, harmonium, and Northam's magnetic table harp. The Otolith is the result of several years of work, with sounds gathered collectively in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout Europe. The album speaks as a bramble of fence wire and chaparral scrub oak, acquiring an unkempt collection of rubbish, cobwebs, insects, and soil within its tangle. As the wind pushes in one direction, this mass emits a quiet, if scratchy melody, as of the ghost from a forgotten song; but when the wind changes directions, it bellows a rasping din of metal and vine cracking against itself. This sodden calliope tumbles into a miasma of droning atmospheres, softly rasped distortion, and very subtly rendered lullabies lurking deep within the overgrowth."

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