Helm is Luke Younger - a sound artist and experimental musician based in London, working with a vast array of revolving instrumentation and abstract sound sources. Younger's compositions build a dense aural landscape that touches on musique concrete, uncomfortable sound poetry, noise, and hallucinatory drones. His last LP Cryptography, presented a five-part suite of expertly rendered electro-acoustic study. Younger creates a world where these instruments morph into spectral rust, a shimmering klang swims alongside passive noise and the relationship between acoustic and electronic derived sounds forms a solid foundation. The sound is steered through a melange of fringe territories: glacial drone meditations, reconfigured gamelan clusters, and howling walls of organized feedback, all coalesced in a post-industrial fashion with a commitment to homemade exploratory zeal. For the past ten years, Younger has performed extensively in Europe and the US with Steven Warwick as pioneering avant-drone duo Birds of Delay. He also runs a small record label, Alter, with which he has produced artists such as Hieroglyphic Being and Richard Youngs.
Helm’s Live follows and is related to the recent release -for PAN- of his third album, ImpossibleSymmetry, acclaimed as one of the surprises of the electronic experimentalism of 2012. A methodical work acting on a controlled chaos, working partially on muted rhythm tracks in an obsessed sonic texture; a slow lava flow consisting of a mass of indecipherable acousmatic sources and environmental recordings. The effect, in listening, is that of a continuous suspension, a disorientation in respect to the direction of provenance and the spatial placement of the individual sound elements. Only recently breaking a certain reluctance to perform live, having concentrated primarily on finding a personal solution for composition and arrangement, he went on to mature a thoughtful approach on stage as well, able to balance the inclusion of recognizable, pre-recorded elements from his repertoire, with improvisational aspects, in a process of real-time remix of his materials. We are, in any case, before another rare example of careful and highly articulated manipulation techniques and appreciation of sound phenomena arising from the history of noise music, of field recordings, of acousmatics, in-between traditional acoustic and electronic music.