★The Helen Scarsdale Agency

*300 copies limited eidtion* Power Electronics, for the most part, stays within its lanes of transgressive misanthropy, with a blackened explosiveness of tortured psyches and nightmarish reflections for the darkest facets of the human condition. Since Whitehouse introduced the phrase, concept, and framework to Power Electronics, its authorship has been primarily male. But within the past decade or so, a diverse web of voices - female, feminist, non-binary, queer - has thrust the PE aesthetic bey…

On Chaos Is A Law, Bob Bellerue treats feedback and rupture as a kind of secular mysticism. Macrotonal drones, rasping noise and inharmonic vortices surge, implode and re-form, turning piano wires, metal and amplifiers into a single, volatile organism where chaos becomes both method and mantra.

Alice Kemp is a British artist working with noise, performance, fetish objects, installation and many other forms of media. Throughout her work, she articulates a broken and illogical syntax of the subconscious through trance states, dreams, and disturbances. She has performed extensively, occasionally as an associate to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe of Swiss extreme aktionists. It is a rarified violence that the Kemp invokes on her 9 Dreams In Erotic Mourning. Something disfigured. Something fucked. S…

Cindytalk has remained a majestic proposition over the decades, one marked by a continued process of disintegration and regeneration. Change has been a constant for Cindytalk, as has been the presence of the Scottish musician Cinder, who has fronted the project since the early '80s. The first Cindytalk albums embraced a dark theatricality of post-punk dissonance and abject rock deconstruction that coupled industrial dirges with Cinder's beatific vocals, these same vocals that were once plied to …

"Don't be scared by death," Alice Kundalini (aka She Spread Sorrow) calmly instructs at the beginning of her collaborative Grimorian Tapes with partner Luca Sigurta. Her words slithers from her lips with a subtle, sinister unease, compounded by the unsettling quality of her whisper. The fear of death, this most profound condition, has long been a subject of philosophical, spiritual, and existential inquiry. To fear death is undeniably human; to transcend that fear is often seen as reaching a hig…

Jo Montgomerie doesn't want to pull back the veil too much on her source materials, but she's becoming more declarative and emphatic in how she works with her crucible of tempered noise. The opening clatter to Ephemeral Rituals sounds to these ears like the repetitive strike of a typewriter; though she asserts, without showing her hand, that is not the case. Out of this, a hallowed, radiant black glow emerges, nearly engulfing the acoustic clack with a sublime grandeur. Based in Manchester, Mont…

Relay For Death is the noise project of the twin sisters Roxann and Rachal Spikula. Their hermetic works consistently reflect a bleak nihilism, all the while carving an autonomous space for survival as the rest of the existence crumbles. Previous works have been published by Hanson, No Rent, Total Black, and RRRecords.   The twins offered the consideration that "Mutual Consuming comes from a concept in the philosophies that underpin traditional Chinese medicine theory, where the two opposing sta…

Neutral is the no wave / anti-rock duo of Dan Johansson (Sewer Election, Ättestupa, Amateur Hour, etc.) and Sofie Herner (Leda, Enhet För Fri Musik), both with deep connections to the Swedish noise scene. As Neutral, the two smear voice, guitar, organ, and smoldering noise into narcoleptic songs that rewire the strategies of Dome by way of Gate and Mars. Lågliv translates to ‘lowlife,’ an apt metaphor for neutral’s subterranean murk and shambolic discontent that they languidly manifest as a punk…

The intrepid composer and field recordist Jacob Kirkegaard is no stranger to perilous and hostile regions of the world. His 4 Rooms invoked the radioactive decay through the amplification of architectural resonance in Chernobyl, Ukraine; and he has ventured to the arctic environments of Greenland on a number of occasions to document that barren, icy territory. His recurrent use of shadow and mystery through his work both as metaphor and as extended sonic technique reflects the complex, existenti…

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…

*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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

*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…

*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…

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…

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…

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…

**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…

**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…

**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…

**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…

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…

*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…

In 2019, the power-acoustic musician Francisco Meirino presented A New Instability, a commission for the venerable Ina-GRM in Paris. Of course, this institution is the pre-eminent center for the research and study of electro-acoustic music dating back to the founding of Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. To this day, Ina-GRM continues to be at the vangarde of the electro-acoustic composition, and it is quite an accomplishment and very appropriate for Meirino to receive s…

**Edition of 200** 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. Fossil Aerosol has a long history with zombies. Or perhaps more specifically, with the contexts that fostered zombies during the 1970s and 1980s. Of particular interest was the imagined, and then realized, ruins of contemporary society - often populated with artificial corpses. One of …

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

In recent years, the Turkish drone-pop composer Ekin Fil (born Ekin Üzeltüzenci) has been refining her talents in the realm of the film score. Since her first recordings that were published by Root Strata and Students of Decay, she 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 com…

Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approac…

Edition of 200 copies, a 10 cassette anthology housed in an handcrafted wooden box and featuring full albums from 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.Curation and fabrication by J…

Lemegeton Party is the narcotic and occluded industrial-ambient debut for the Junkie Flamingos, a project conceived in 2017 by Luca Sigurtà, Alice Kundalini, and Daniele Delogu. Each of these musicians has their distinctive sounds: Sigurtà with his vertiginous electronica, Kundalini best known as the author behind the death industrial project She Spread Sorrow, and Delogu in the bombastic folk of the Barbarian Pipe Band. Their collective amalgamation shifts but does not denude each of these aest…

**125 copies** Cristopher Cichocki is an interdisciplinary artist from the Coachella Valley, with an extensive body of work that examines transmorphic cycles of decay and renewal. His multi-faceted practice addresses environmental and socio-political disintegration above and beneath the surface of everyday perception. Cichocki is as accomplished in maximalist, immersive composition as he is with painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and Land art interventions. Desert Drone Cycle …

Edition of 300 copies, comes with riso printed insert featuring an interview with bloom offering. Bloom Offering is the synth-wave / blighted electronic project of seattle’s Nicole Carr. having released a handful of well-received cassettes through clan destine, aught void, and sinneslöschen, bloom offering presents her debut lp episodes through the helen scarsdale agency.In her development as an artist and technician, Carr has steadily honed her abilities in sculpting sharply cold electronics an…

For over three decades now, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project has patiently sifted through the damaged remains and bygone refuse from the late 20th century pop culture of America. Mining the snippets of audio found from abandoned drive-in theaters, mangled VHS tapes, and discarded cassettes, Fossil Aerosol studiously pieces together empathic, haunted abstractions of their original source material. their cryptic sound collages address the continued ramifications of the inherent paranoia from the …

Ekin Fil ontinues her quietly complex dream-pop oeuvre on Maps. For many years now, this Istanbul musician has been writing mysterious and haunting songs, rich in heavy-reverb effects and an introspective torpor. With each successive album, her 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 alon…

Khayal Kuno represents one of several detours that Fosil Sangiran (Matt 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. The minimal, proto-techno explorations suitably evolve slowly out an initial dispersion bloom from swarms of cassette splutter and insect mimesis. Cast within his slinkies-as-spring-reverb contraptions that provided a signature Kirlian glo…