★Helen Scarsdale Agency
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…
Pervades
Head to the western neighborhoods of San Francisco, and the city becomes a very quiet place after midnight. By 3am,one can almost hear the fog spilling past the sodium lights that illuminate a lonesome street corner at Judah and15th. Whatever soundtracks that emerge from that time and that place inevitably embody that nocturnal atmosphere, anarcoleptic weariness, a waking dream of the insomniac. Such is the psychogeographical realm as channeled throughsound for Hauras, the obliquely musical conc…
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…
Between My Teeth
*2022 stock. Includes a 16-page booklet.* Dark psychosexual electronics lurk between the teeth of ester Kärkkäinen, the Las Vegas based artist also known as Himukalt. For the past six years, she has tirelessly pursued an avenue of bleak industrial productions that parallel the extremist works of Genocide Organ and Atrax Morgue. She has built a considerable reputation for uncompromising, full-frontal noise, releasing albums on Total Black, Malignant Records, Found Remains, and Foul Prey, amongs…
Shouting At Nuance
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 300 copies.* Pinkcourtesyphone is the pseudonym for the Los Angeles based minimalist Richard Chartier. Under this moniker, Chartier indulges in an emotional torpor through his hauntological compositions for forgotten dreams with an opiated grandeur and subtle application of certain nostalgic camp. Shouting At Nuance glances back to Chartier’s earliest works that were recorded onto tape, with allusions to decay as an unrecognizable reconstruction of pas…
From Industry Home
An elegant decay amassed from the sounds of detritus. That may be an apt introduction to the work of Jo Montgomerie. Of course, The Helen Scarsdale Agency has a long standing infatuation with disintegrated sound in various forms. So, it makes perfect sense we should publish her work! That said, Montgomerie has a fascinating strategy to her long-form smears of blackened mascara ambient and smoldered noise. As a teenager she was a classically trained musician with an eye towards a career as a conc…
Commit
The third production from the Stelzer/Murray project hits a sweet spot of slippery, industrial occultation that harkensback 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…
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…
Dugong Weeps
**Edition of 125** It is true that Richard Karl Faulhaber's discography of published work is ludicrously scant. it is also true that Steven Stapleton (nurse with wound) and Matthew Waldron (irr. app. (ext.)) have both tried to pull faulhaber out of obscurity, but have thus far been unsuccessful. And it is true that for 30 years, faulhaber has toiled in his studio and pondered the ramifications of his theories on 'texture music.' much of that audio material had been shelved or passed on to his fr…
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…
Related Ephemera
An album that aligns itself aesthetically with Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith, Philip Jeck’s more languid collages, and even some of Harry Bertoia’s sculptural atmospherics
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…