|
Recordings from The Helen Scarsdale Agency
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 073
Jim Haynes Inauspicious LP $24.00
The Agency's sole occupant Jim Haynes applies considerable pressure to his array of motors, electronics, shortwave radio, and found objects for an intense construction of brooding power drones and aktionist demolition. "Haynes’ ability to consign the concept of destruction to record is quite astounding. The use – and destruction – of materials plays with the concept of industrial music stripping it back to its most stark and literal form. This is no easy trip, but Haynes insists on taking us with him. As the piece continues with a strangely intoxicating electronic and high-pitched drone, the foreground noise builds – layer after layer and transitions into a Throbbing Gristle like denouement." - Musique Machine...
more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 072
False Maria s/t Double Cassette
Uncomfortable Electronics is how False Maria self-describes their work which runs adjacent to post-industrial expression, transgressive threat, and the complications of noise culture. Heresies, transgressions, psychic self-immolation, and sexual deviance run amok with the litany of confessionals told by this unlikely proposition. Compositionally, False Maria leans into seasick tape loops and samples that ooze out of the more monstrous forms of Premature Ejaculation coupled with the majesty of the moon musick of Coil and Johanna Went's feral performance art...
more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 050J
She Spread Sorrow Orchid Seeds LP $24.00
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. Here, Kundalini's allegories come into focus amidst a claustrophobic and cinematic pall of dark ambient blight and death industrial torpor...
more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 071
Murmer Tether LP $24.00
The field recordings of Murmer (aka Patrick McGinley) often center upon the amplification and activation of resonance from a particular space, landscape, or object. Here on Tether - his first album in many years - deep throbbing pulsations from arctic wind generating subharmonic patterns upon thick high-tension wires. Elsewhere the subtle dissonance from a rasping cooling fan blooms into a brooding ambience that is sublimely rich in its metallic timbres and complex reverberations.... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 070
Hauras Pervades Cassette $10.00
In Pervades, Hauras reprises his signature for 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. 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)... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 069
Vertonen Einige Schadstoffe Cassette $10.00
Chicago's veteran noise technician Vertonen presents a potent homage to the classic era of industrial noise through 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 068
Junk DNA Kopk Kopa CD $14.00 / Double Cassette $18.00
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. Pyle conjures a radiantly dark hypnosis of eerie tones that rasp, buzz, and shimmer within vertiginous orbits and arching crescendos. Cinematic in scope and bleeding with a somber, yet vaguely hopeful moodiness, Kopk Kopa is another mighty and majestic album from Brian Pyle... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 067
Ekin Fil Dora Agora LP $24.00
Ekin Fil returns to the guitar on Dora Agora. Through these urgent and direct songs, 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 050C
Pinkcourtesyphone Shouting At Nuance 2LP $30.00
Pinkcourtesyphone (aka Richard Chartier) indulges in an emotional torpor through his hauntological compositions for forgotten dreams with an opiated grandeur and subtle application of certain nostalgic camp. Originally released as part of the On Corrosion boxset, and contains all of the contents from the complementary album Something You Are Or Something You Do originally released on The Tapeworm in 2017... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 064
Stelzer/Murray Commit LP $22.00
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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 066
Jo Montgomerie From Industry Home Cassette $8.00
Jo Montgomerie is a Scottish field recordist who thoroughly abstracts her distressed environmental noise into sodden compositions that run parallel to much of the drone-on phonographers on Touch (Jana Winderen, Simon Scott, BJ NIlsen, etc.). 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 thrumming din, the original sounds are dissolved with new layers and accretions become audible. They still address a heavy melancholy augmented through a dilated sense of time... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 065
Ana Fosca Poised At The Edge Of Structure CD $12.00
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. Poised At The Edge Of Structure never settles into the tropes of power electronics, dark ambient, death industrial, or studied electro-acoustic practices, but absorbs the most impactful facets to all these aesthetics. Coming out of the Danish underground scene, her work finds common ground with the early, savage sounds of Posh Isolation, adjacent to Puce Mary in terms of similarly fraught psychological proclamations, but leaning into the violent miasma of Maeror Tri / Troum at their most industrial... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 063
Jeff Surak All Those Born Must Die Cassette $8.00
A fixture within the experimental community for many years, Jeff Surak presents his debut for The Helen Scarsdale Agency in All Those Born Must Die. On these radioactively unstable tracks, Surak's impetus is an electric Dada deconstruction on post-punk. 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 062
RKFaulhaber Dugong Weeps Cassette
A rare recording from the brilliant mind of RKFaulhaber, Dugong Weeps is marked by a mercurial liquidity and a science-fiction expressionism that engender very anthropomorphic responses to these radically reworked bits of coded tone, noise, and silence. Faulhaber's spatialization and polychromatic constellations recall the classic works from Francois Bayle or Bernard Parmegiani, but with an emphasis on the teethclinching frequencies and psychological disturbances from the Nurse With Wound / Hafler Trio axis of post-industrial collage... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 061
Hauras The Glare of the Nave Cassette $8.00
Hauras returns to the Helen Scarsdale Agency for a second missive of blurred and broken song. 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 060
Krovopuskanie Goner Cassette
Bloodletting is how Krovopuskanie translates from Russian, the native tongue of the man behind this project of morose electronics and death-industrial gloom. 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... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 050B
Kleistwahr Winter LP $18.00
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, originally released as part of the On Corrosion boxset. 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 059
Himukalt Between My Teeth LP
Here stands the necessary reissue of Himukalt's 2018 Between My Teeth. Dark, psychosexual electronics and full-frontal noise have been the hallmarks of Himukalt's catalogue that parallels the extremist works of Genocide Organ and Atrax Morgue. Between My Teeth is a maelstrom of ill-tempered noise and blackened frequencies, sutured to a foundation of primitive, raw rhythms... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 057
Francisco Meirino A New Instability LP $18.00
A New Instability is a variation on Francisco Meirino's Ina-GRM commission from 2019. 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 058
Vertonen Broken Air Cassette
It is electricity itself that becomes the primary medium for Blake Edwards (aka Vertonen) 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, as a monochromatic dead-circuit tone flutters in various phased states as a gird to Edwards' investigations...
more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 054
Ekin Fil Coda LP $18.00
The Turkish drone-pop composer Ekin Fil (born Ekin Üzeltüzenci) 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...
more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 053
Hauras In These Coming Days Cassette $7.00
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)... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 056
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project / 400 Lonely Things Nigths and Profecy Cassette
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. Recommended for fans of the hauntological electronics of :zoviet*france:, the caretaker, and even the sublime retrograde ambience from Boards of Canada. And yes, the misspelling in the title is very intentional... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 055
Robert Millis Related Ephemera LP
The globe-trotting Robert Millis returns to Helen Scarsdale for this beautifully fragile album of dissolved glass rendered as a collage of recontextualized minimalism. Much of the construction of the rarified tones, crispy textures, ghostly rattles, and fluid resonance that ripples through all of Related Ephemera has its origins in the tactile nature of the vinyl medium. Akin to Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith, Philip Jeck's more languid collages, and even some of Harry Bertoia's sculptural atmospherics... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
ADM 023
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project Scaath Catfish CD
Sibilant mutations from Fossil Aerosol's multiple sources (field recordings, found sounds, etc.) spill forth as dilated tones, mesmerizing echos, clattering loops, and harmonic distortions. Floods of dense sonic accretion give way to languid mirages with human intervention complicating matters. Fossil Aerosol gives a preternatural language to the river, one that parallels their occasional collaborators in :zoviet*france: as well as the environmental ruminations of Biospshere and the practitioners of power ambient (Rafael Anton Irisarri, Fennesz, Tim Hecker, etc.)... more.
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 052
Cristopher Cichocki Desert Drone Cycle Cassette
Cristopher Cichocki is an interdisciplinary artist from the Coachella Valley, with an extensive body of work that examines transmorphic cycles of decay and renewal. Desert Drone Cycle highlights the complexities around land use management when humanity encroaches upon sensitive environments, standing as a harrowing document of isolationist composition paralleling that of Thomas Köner, Deathprod, Alan Lamb, and BJ Nilsen... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 051
Junkie Flamingos Lemegeton Party LP $19.00
Lemegeton Party is the narcotic and occluded industrial-ambient debut for the Junkie Flamingos, a project conceived in 2017 by Alice Kundalini (She Spreads Sorrow), Luca Sigurtà, and Daniele Delogu. Kundalini's signature whispered incantations address the diabolical and the divine along a cold rhythmic spine of drum machines and cybernetic sequences, laden with acoustic instrumentation. To think of Coil's post-MDMA experiments in chill-out isolationism wouldn't be far from the mark... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 050
various On Corrosion 10 Cassette Boxset
On Corrosion is a 10 cassette anthology housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring:
Kleistwahr, Neutral,
Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp,
She Spread Sorrow,
G*Park,
Relay For Death,
Francisco Meirino,
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, and
Himukalt.
The collection stands as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, plunging through the depths of post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, and existential vacancy... more.
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 049
Bloom Offering Episodes LP $18.00
Bloom Offering is the synth-wave / blighted electronic project of Seattle's Nicole Carr, conjuring her debut LP Episodes for The Helen Scarsdale Agency. 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
ADM 022
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project The Recounting Of Night Time CD
Culling snippets of audio found from abandoned drive-in theaters, mangled VHS tapes, and discarded cassettes, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project studiously pieces together empathic, haunted abstractions of their original source material. It makes for a beautifully corroded smear of sound, recalling William Basinski and zoviet*france:. more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 048
Ekin Fil Maps LP $18.00
With each successive album, Ekin Fil's 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 047
Fosil Sangiran Pasar Fosil Cassette
From the archives of Matt Shoemaker
Fosil Sangiran is the pseudonym for Seattle polymath Matt Shoemaker (1974-2017). 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 field recording here or there. All of these accretions of sustained tone organize themselves with a rhizomatic logic of recombinant twists, folds, and mutations.. more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 046
Fosil Sangiran Khayal Kuno Cassette
From the archives of Matt Shoemaker
Fosil Sangiran is the pseudonym for Seattle polymath Matt Shoemaker (1974-2017). 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. His motorik pulsations recall a rich if elusive vein of taut, industrially minded electronica sculpted by Monoton, Nord, Omit, and Conrad Schnitzler at his most laser focused... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 043
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project August 53rd LP
The Fossil Aerosol Mining Project 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 uniform brilliance in the exquisite reconstruction of exhumed cassette tapes and moldering 35mm film stock. August 53rd harbors the rich enigmas of distressed sound collages found in the work of likeminded artists such as Philip Jeck, Felicia Atkinson, and of course Fossil Aerosol's occasional collaborators :zoviet*france:... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 045
Stelzer/Murray Connector Cassette
Stelzer/Murray is the duo of Brendan Murray and Howard Stelzer, two stalwarts of the Boston noise / experimental scene over the past two decades. Through destroyed tape and long-view compositional strategies, the two manifest an irradiated, almost Kirlian glow through Connector's slow accretions and erosions amidst the soaring crescendos of compacted tone and vacant shadows of mechanical thrum... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 044
Ekin Fil Inflame OST Cassette
Istanbul's drone-pop producer Ekin Fil turns her sites to the big screen for the first soundtrack in her impressive catalogue of recordings. 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... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
ADM 020
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project The Unlistening Place CD $13.00
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project are an enigmatic lot, comprised of sonic archeologists residing the American Midwest. Their work spans several decades and is almost always in flux through the variable states of contextual re-investigation and technological degradation. Aesthetically, FAMP align with the post-industrial research of :zoviet*france:, Cranioclast and Robert Turman. Mildew damaged tape loops, ghostly time-lag accumulation and the excavation of mediated sound from suburbia's failures are key components to the Fossil Aerosol's working process... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 042
Ekin Fil Ghosts Inside LP
Ekin Fil is the acclaimed drone-pop chanteuse working with the sparest of materials in her ethereal, shoegaze deconstructions. 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. 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... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 041
Kate Carr The Story Surrounds Us Cassette
Australian Kate Carr melds the exquisite details of her field recordings with an ephemeral approach to the song. Emblematic of her work is a gentle dislocation between the environmental sounds and her drone-dub ellipses of somnambulant melody. Look to Carla dal Forno, Alan Lamb and those moments of clarity in the shapeshifting ethos from Jewelled Antler for neighboring sounds to Carr's chimerical compositions... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 040
Jim Haynes Throttle & Calibration Cassette
Throttle and Calibration finds Jim Haynes digging through the Active Crossover archive of field recordings from Soviet ruins in Estonia and grotesquely exaggerating the details into exploded compositions of volatile dynamics, nerve-exposed dissonance, caustic shortwave signal abuse, and a considerable amount of scarred metal. Marked as one of the more discordant works to date in Haynes' career, Throttle and Calibration finds company near the atonal compositions from Hermann Nitsch and the sour, industrial collages that pock the Nurse With Wound catalogue... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 039
Relay For Death Natural Incapacity 2CD
Relay For Death are the twin sisters Rachal and Roxann Spikula, whose noise mantras transcribe the harsh realities of urban blight that complicate and threaten their own survival. Their 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... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 038
Ekin Fil Being Near LP $18.00
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 aches with 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 037
Francisco Meirino Surrender, Render, End CD
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 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. Think Luc Ferrari, Peter Tscherkassky, and the aktions of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
ADM 019
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project Revisionist History CD+DL
In the observation of three decades of obscure, faked resurrection, we are pleased to announce the release of Fossil Aerosol Mining Project's Revisionist History. The recordings on this album are hybrids, created by the grafting of old artifacts onto new material using recently devised studio processes. New sounds of the past, articulated through the devices of an unimagined future... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 036
Himukalt Conditions Of Acrimony Cassette
This prolonged electrical cramp marks the first published recording of Himukalt aka Ester Kärkkäinen. Her work is exhaustive, claustrophobic, and cryptic, with 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.)... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 035
Kate Carr It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors Cassette
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. 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... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 034
Grant Evans Brittle Cassette
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. 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. Grant Evans hails from the northeast corner of Georgia, from where he has produced an impressive array of works under various aliases and in collaboration with his wife Rachel... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 033
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971 LP
Over the years, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project has collaborated with :zoviet*france: -- the semi-anonymous cabal of pseudo-ethnomusicologists into our pre-apocalyptic past that could easily be seen as Fossil Aerosol's British counterpart. With The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project reconstitutes dissociated fragments from nearly-lost genre films of the 1970s, filtered by scratched celluloid, bad splices, dropouts, and damaged control tracks... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 032
Radioson радиосон Cassette
Electrically charged currents of caustic drone from Radioson, a project operated by the same Russian engineer behind Five Elements Muisc and Exit In Grey. The sound harken 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. and Schloss Tegal... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 031
Richard Garet 60' Minute Cassette Cassette
Crude electro-acoustic strategies are at work in the tape-on-tape monolith that is Richard Garet's 60' Cassette, with the artist declaring his intentions as such: "100% treated audio cassette material. some blank. some erased. some demagnetized. etc." The conceptualization of this work as a reframing of one particular medium through its applied / accelerated disintegration is only the album's beginning... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 030
Jim Haynes Scarlet Cassette
The analog tone generation and shambolic futurism harken to an earlier era of industrial immolation on Scarlet, 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... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 027
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson So Long CD $13.00
So Long quietly simmered in his head of the Icelandic artist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, best known for his electro-surrealism in Stilluppsteypa; 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 029
Simon Whetham From The Mouths Of Clay Cassette
Following on from a 'recreation' of “I am Sitting in a Room”, British sound-artist Simon Whetham applied this technique 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... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 026
Taiga Remains Works for Cassette LP $18.00
Here be the final drone / hypnogogic statement from Taiga Remains. The man behind Taiga Remains has now shelved this moniker; but he's far from hanging up his hat, as he now works under his given name Alex Cobb -- also known as the philosopher king who benevolently reigns over his Students Of Decay. There are those at the Agency who can claim to speak with the poetics of corrosion, and we have long admired the sympathetic aesthetic in Cobb's gorgeously elegant compositions for guitar, bells, tape hiss, and whatnot... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 025
R Millis Relief LP
Our man Millis is a Climax Golden Twin and a noted curator of globe trotting / time traveling esoterica, amongst other accolades. A fever dream of blurred harmonics and ethnomusicological spelunking, Relief is a polyglot raga-drone of daytime somnambulism and psychedelic slipperiness that speaks to the uneasy borders at psychological, cultural, and geophysical states of being... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 023
The Slaves Ocean On Ocean 2LP $22.00
The luminous sound of The Slaves made evident on their double LP opus Oceans On Oceans of radiant shoegazing heaviness that have earned them numerous comparisons to Earth, Slowdive, Grouper, and Barn Owl, whose Jon Porras opined on this album: "Hovering above the weighted disposition of Doom and below the consolation of Shoegaze, the duo transmit a burdened grace that unfolds like a radiant mammal writhing in black water..." more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 022
Murmer What Are The Roots That Clutch CD $10.00
Patrick McGinley aka Murmer overlaps and crosshatches his field recordings and abstractions into acousmatic passages with ghostly, half-melodic qualities. McGinley's composed pieces embrace lithe, mysterious drones whose mossy, damp atmosphere perfectly situate with tactile crunches, tactile 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 021
Jim Haynes The Decline Effect 2LP $20.00
Parapsychology introduced the notion of the decline effect as a statistical phenomenon of diminishing results whilst investigating extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. This ontological disappearing act stands in allegorical parallel to the entropic art of Jim Haynes and frames his 2011 opus of the corroded drone and a compacted disintegration of sound. On The Decline Effect, Haynes' broken minimalism orbits somewhere near the work Joe Colley, The Hafler Trio, and Tim Hecker... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 020
BJ Nilsen & Stilluppstepa Big Shadow Montana LP $18.00
The fourth brilliant collaboration for Helen Scarsdale between BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteupe, Big Shadow Montana cycles through several sonic themes and leitmotifs, displayed in varying states of clarity... as if it were the aftermath from a protracted bout of metaphysical channel surfing. Flickered impressions flash in conjunction with Breton's manifesto of Surrealism in the form of the memories from happily drunk escapades in the heart of winter, the sidereal spells cast by the innerspace travelers Klaus Schulze and Coil... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 019
RV Paintings Samoa Highway LP $15.00
Brothers Jon and Bryan Pyle are RV Paintings. The latter known best for his ongoing work as Ensemble Economique and his mythic presence in the Starving Weirdos. Here, the brothers 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 of Samoa Highway that falls somewhere between Taj Mahal Travellers, Organum, and The Caretaker... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 018
M. Holterbach & Julia Eckhardt Do Undo (in G Maze) CD
Belgian composer Julia Eckhardt has been building an archive of recordings, comprised of long-form viola pieces played exclusively in G. Her recordings seek the rich if occasionally dissonant overtones that have been central to the minimalist works of Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock, Eliane Radigue, and Ellen Fullman. And in his reconstitution of her recordings, French sound-artist Manu Holterbach populates his compositions with field recordings whose turbulent textures and bristling movements sympathetically weave amidst the rasping drones from the viola. more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 017
Spiracle Ananta 2CD $15.00
In constructing the two variations of Ananta, Hitosji Kojo (aka Spiracle) began with finely tuned drones extracted from a Dilruba and a Sarangi, and applied a process of merging sympathetic field recordings and other tonal interferences alongside those instrumental sounds. The resulting pieces are elliptically static drone compositions that brightly shimmer with hues of gold, crimson, and aquamarine following the tradition of the Roland Kayn, Yoshi Wada, and Charlemagne Palestine in constructing pieces which require endurance... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 016
irr. app. (ext.) Kreiselwelle CD $10.00
irr. app. (ext.) is piloted by one M.S. Waldron, whose liminal slippages and detourned croons are featured within the recent incarnations of Nurse With Wound. Kreiselwelle is the third and final installment to a body of works that irr. app. (ext.) has composed under the influence of Wilhelm Reich. The resulting recording develops as an organic sublimation of one sound transforming from one state into another and then another... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 015
Matt Shoemaker Erosion of the Analogous Eye CD
For Erosion of the Analogous Eye, Matt Shoemaker waves his hands about his laboratory to construct an ever-evolving album for mutant dronemuzik. His electrical seas of synthetic bristling undulate with placid regularity, only to find Shoemaker contorting these brain-melting psychedelics into cancerous, atonal bellows. Out of his allotropic shifts, one can find swells of irradiated static transform into the graceful chime of temple bells; and electrical phase patterns slip into deep forest murmurings dotted with narcoleptic birds calls. A brilliant album, prescient of the revival for progressive electronics currently underway in the flood of US post-noise projects.... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 014
Loren Chasse & Michael Northam The Otolith CD $10.00
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. The Otolith speaks as a bramble of fence wire and chaparral scrub oak, acquiring an unkempt collection of rubbish, cobwebs, insects, and soil within its tangle... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 013
BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa Passing Out CD
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. 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... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 012
Omit Interceptor 2CD $14.00
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 around NZ free noise community. However, Omit's home-spun constructs widely detour as an unwieldy mousetrap of tape-loops, modular electronics, anddrum machines. Interceptor is the result of an experiment whereby Williams worked with a portable studio in building this life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. An undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms towards a crepuscular gloom. Orbiting the likes of Mika Vainio, Klaus Schulze, and Chris Carter... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 011
Murmer We Share A Shadow CD $10.00
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. 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 010
Matt Shoemaker Spots In The Sun CD
Matt Shoemaker's 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, rarified field recordings, and particulate matter plucked from ether.
In light of the death of Matt Shoemaker, The second edition of Spots in the Sun is available at no cost. Customers merely have to pay for shipping on this item, or it will be shipped free of charge when bundled with other titles... more
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 009
Jim Haynes Telegraphy By The Sea CD
Haynes has forged this 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. 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.... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 008
BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa Drykkjuvísur Óhljódanna CD $10.00
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. Drykkjuvísur Óhljódanna adheres to the psychological dis-quiet through sound design that Alan Splet provided for Eraserhead or that Nurse With Wound achieved on Salt Marie Celeste. Yet for all of their tendencies for brooding and desolation, BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa retain a compulsion for a glacial beauty through their intoxicated visions of the sublime... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 007
M.S. Waldron, Steven Stapleton, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Jim Haynes, and R.K. Faulhaber The Sleeping Moustache CD $10.00
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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 006
Spoonbender 1.1.1 Stereo Telepathy Academy CD
"…governed by chance operations and the 'third mind' technique. Spoken text was taken from one film, overlayed onto images from another film, and the score was composed while viewing a third (and secret) film source. The synchronistic results appear to be intentional." Spoonbender 1.1.1's collision of artforms mirror that of William S. Burroughs / Brion Gyson classic The Third Mind. Spoonbender 1.1.1 radiate an inverted telekinetic minimalism of undulating tones buttressing spoken text from Cronenberg's Stereo, a faux-documentary detailing a surgical procedure for the advancement of telepathic communication... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 005
Omit Tracer 2CD
As with the previous work from New Zealand's Omit for Corpus Hermeticum and Anomalous, 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...more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 004
BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa Víkinga Brennivín CD
The first outing between BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa results 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... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 003
Coelacanth Mud Wall CD
As Coelacanth, Loren Chasse and Jim Haynes operate the
tools of an imagined science to explore the various
possibilities for sound to originate from traditionally
non-musical materials. Alchemy, as a systematic if impossible
attempt to transform base metals into noble ones, is
an adequate parallel to Coelacanth's arena of research.
Chasse and Haynes encourage sympathetic relationships
between carefully chosen materials and sounds, and push
them in ways that they might transcend their purposefulness.... more
sold out
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 002
irr. app. (ext.) Ozeanische Gefühle CD $10.00
irr. app. (ext) is the work of sound artist Matt Waldron, whose collected body of work
is far too important to continue to be forgotten. Following Dust Pincher
Appliances (2003 on Crouton) and An Uncertain Animal,
Ruptured; Tissue Expanding in Conversation (1997 on
Fire, Inc.), 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... more
|
|
|
|
|
HMS 001
Jim Haynes Magentic North CD
Enter Jim Haynes. In a field crowded with laptop jockeys
and people in love with their DSP factories, his music
has a refreshingly handmade, approachable feel. In a
subgenre (one without a good name) full of field recordings
and drones that border on New Age saccharine and sound
as if they were untouched by a human hand, Magnetic
North is rough and full of character... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
HMS 000 / P|1
Coelacanth The Chronograph CD
The Chronograph is the debut release from Coelacanth.
The album opens with an lengthy passage of creakingly
creepy submariner ambience as if the oxidization process
itself had been amplified within the realm of the audible.
Spiked electrical surges and controlled feedback oscillations
build the intensity of the album, until Coelacanth unleashes
their symphony of tiny whirring machines, gritty textual
striations, and clattering pulsations. The Chronograph then descends into a blissful tone float of dense bell
reverberations and oceanic washes of shortwave... more
sold out |
|
|
|
Also available from the Helen Scarsdale Agency
|
|
|
|
|
Coelacanth & Keith Evans Wrack Light In CopperRuin CD+DVD $10.00
Like an abandoned aquarium in which an accidental and
incongruous microcosm takes hape, Coelacanth's sound illustrates
a constant evolution of decay, encroachment, and repossession
of the border space between the natural and the man-made.
With Wrack Light In Copper Ruin, Coelacanth also meditates
on the space of performance, the tactile nature of the
creation of sound, and its ephemeral, elusive and entirely
subjective character. The visuals of Keith Evans further
the exploration with their organic, nocturnal energy... more
|
|
|
|
|
John Duncan & CM von Hausswolff Our Telluric Conversation CD $12.00
Our Telluric Conversation is the second collaborative album from John Duncan and Carl Michael von Hausswolff. The tools that the two employed for Our Telluric Conversation are common to their respective catalogues of recordings, with Duncan bringing his shortwave, data streams, and uncanny use of the human voice while Hausswolff employed oscillators, sonar, and wire tapping microphones... more
|
|
|
|
|
G*Park Sub 2CD $12.00
The most enigmatic of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Marc Zeier in the man behind G*Park; and here, he presents his first major album since the acclaimed 2008 album of cryptic electro-acoustics entitled Reuters. Many years in the making, Sub is a sprawling masterpiece of modern day musique concrete, reflecting the early pioneers' use of razor cut tape with a grandiose revelation of an existential horror... more
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Haynes Flammable Materials From Foreign Lands LP $20.00
Flammable Materials From A Foreign Land is a haunted and provocative endeavor, rust-covered and mysterious. It is the result of an immersive listening/recording process through which Haynes' singular techniques intersected with an unfamiliar, disquieting landscape. Released by Elevator Bath in 2016... more
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Haynes Turbulence LP
Turbulence is a prequel of sorts, with two twenty minute studies in smoldering noise and concretized electricity, as evinced through shortwave radio, corroded metal-on-metal, and glass being vibrating just shy of the point for shattering. Thick, fluttering, heated rays of sound building a slow tension of rhythmic, oppressive structures. Piercing, crackling tones increase and decrease, layered with icy cold precision. Muffled segments of bass pressure enters and are abruptly cut short, leaving just enough room to breathe inside the mechanical stasis. Released by Verlautbarung...more
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Haynes Insomnia CD $14.00
An album inextricably linked to a war and a plague, the long-delayed Insomnia from Jim Haynes explores the volatility of noise in all of its dynamics, expressed through frustration, exhaustion, failure, sickness, and sorrow. Published by the Ukrainian imprint Sentimental Productions... more
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Haynes Electrical Injuries LP
"Jim Haynes' latest LP is the kind of noise record that everyone ought to hear — maybe 'noise' isn't even the right word for it. It is delicate and subtle in ways that most 'noise music' is not; listening to it feels like holding communion with malfunctioning electronics. Despite the occasional harsh bit, this record is very easy to listen to (for me, at least), and remarkably beautiful at times." - Chris Zaldua / The Medium... more
sold out |
|
|
|
|
Sentiment 20
Tomorrow Is A Big Distance CD
Curated by Edward Sol, featuring work from Lasse Marhaug, Jim Haynes, Norbert Moslang, Joachim Nordwall, Alter Of Flies, Howard Stelzer, Francisco Meirino, Mark Vernon, Modelbau, and Edward Sol himself. Proceeds from the album go towards aiding the abandoned animals and pets who are suffering due to the unjust war in Ukraine...
more
sold out
|
|
|
|