The Helen Scarsdale Agency

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The Helen Scarsdale Agency post-industrial research, surrealist collage, refined minimalism, caustic electro-acoustics, sublima app.

The Helen Scarsdale Agency is a small publishing house with releases by BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa, irr. (ext.), Jim Haynes, Matt Shoemaker, Steven Stapleton, Omit, RV Paintings, Coelacanth, Murmer, and more. Most of the recordings are packaged with hand-fabricated artwork (e.g. letterpress, silkscreen, monoprinting, corrosion, etc.), necessitating small runs.

inauspicious // a new LP out at the end of this weeki released this through helen scarsdale and there's a fancy 8 page b...
04/12/2023

inauspicious // a new LP out at the end of this week

i released this through helen scarsdale and there's a fancy 8 page booklet as well.

https://helenscarsdale.bandcamp.com/
https://www.helenscarsdale.com/published/haynes-inauspicious.htm

note the LP is a few bucks cheaper through my website, and all orders come with bandcamp DL codes.

here's some drivel i wrote about my record in the third person. many thanks to white centipede noise for the interview in question:

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 dynamism and psychological inquest. for over twenty five years, haynes has been an autodidactic clinician into the processes of corrosion, decay, and rust, turning his attention away from visual practices and more to the metaphoric crucible of noise and sound. by now, it seems like a cliche that the pandemic changed everything; but since that viral encroachment, there is a noticeable shift in haynes' work post 2020. it's more aggressive and yet more controlled: a rarification and telescoping of the research into decay for more potent noise and more potent metaphor.

the tools for haynes' work remain limited: motors, electronics, shortwave radio, found objects, all applied with considerable pressure. compositionally, inauspicious is a very rough moire pattern from overlapping elliptical structures that can negate and obfuscate just as easily as they can compound and aggregate. the album surges and collapses upon the two twenty minute chunks of controlled noise that follow an internal logic that snakes from brooding power drones, spectral radio transmission, and an aktionist demolition cast upon metal, glass, and unfortunate wooden objects. rupture and release. purge and pulse.

ekin fil's 'dora agora' LP is out this week at the helen scarsdale agency! https://www.helenscarsdale.com/published/ekin...
03/10/2022

ekin fil's 'dora agora' LP is out this week at the helen scarsdale agency!

https://www.helenscarsdale.com/published/ekinfil-doraagora.htm

https://helenscarsdale.bandcamp.com/album/dora-agora

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 beautifully melancholy pursuits of an emotional emptiness through sound. yet, the pandemic era gave ekin pause to reflect on her creative process and she picked that instrument back up to create one of her greatest albums to date.

as direct and urgent as these songs can be, 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. "ghost boy" in particular is a bittersweet, wistful tune whose arrangement harkens to johnny marr at his peak of effortless downer simplicity. "farba" and "yo feelings" turn the emotional screws with soul-crush crescendos of vocal melodies that build upon ekin's lonely guitar chords. again, grouper emerges as one of ekin's closest neighbors, alongside carla dal forno, slowdive's pygmallion, and movietone.

"i really feel like i've gone back to a time when i was recording songs with a guitar and keyboard when i was very young. it's kind of like embracing ekin from that period with my current ideas & mood. it's an homage, it's a wave, a hug from my present to my past…" (ekin fil, august 2022)

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