HELM

Cafe Oto, Dalston | 26 February

Luke Younger is a busy man. When not releasing acousmatic noise records via PAN and Matt Mondanile’s New Images, or reforming Birds of Delay with Heatsick’s Steve Warwick, he runs Alter, the sonically diverse label responsible for releases by artists as disparate as Hieroglyphic Being, Basic House, Bass Clef and The Bomber Jackets, and for which this evening at Dalston’s Café Oto is a defacto showcase.

Anthony di Franco’s solo JFK set is perhaps the most conventionally abrasive of the evening. Forgoing any sense of build-and-release, we’re straight in with propulsive, cracking percussion and whirring industrial bluster, a powerful amalgam of an ostensibly conventional iteration of harsh noise and power electronics undercut with unexpected and well-buried melody. Though it lurches entertainingly through putrid acid squelch and blasts of topically industrial techno (intended or not), di Franco’s workout stumbles in its unrelenting intensity. A stammering equivalent of a beat reaches almost breakcore levels of intensity, and the occasional wince-inducing blasts of top-end frequency abuse are borderline exploitative, but it all feels a little algorithmic at times.

In comparison, Damien Dubrovnik’s wilfully theatrical attack on the senses starts innocuously enough. Loke Rahbek and Christian Stadsgaard look as you’d imagine the alumni of Vår, Lust for Youth and Sarah’s Charity to, all flippantly coiffed and pristinely dressed. Their line in post-retro synth-driven noise is satisfyingly austere as well, even when Stadsgaard starts waving about his stegosaural DIY feedback unit and Rahbek segues from quiet muttering into indecipherable screaming. The minimalist floor props—one bucket full of water, one full of ice—give some subtle indication of the avant-garde posturing to come, though. This takes full effect when Rahbek begins deepthroating and swallowing his mic, retching it up with it a very modest drizzle of vomit, bile trickling down his open shirt, before variously submerging his head and mic between the aforementioned pales, supplementing Stadsgaard’s sonic onslaught with a bedrock of subterranean bass drones, the sickheaded equivalent of Thomas Koner’s Permafrost rumblings. Contrived? Possibly. Engaging? Certainly, and the duo’s performance is sincere enough to be imbued with an air of perturbed sympathy from its audience.

From mild pathos to full-on pathosis, Younger’s terse set as Helm pairs down his increasingly refined recorded output to an excellent forty-or-so minute session of sequential, frazzled noise concréte. The tone from the off is one of miasmatic unease, a dragged-out soundtrack to Lovecraft’s slimy ode to warranted paranoia Shadow Over Innsmouth, gamelan clatter over pitched feedback morphing in to Dagon-esque gurgling. It’s not dissimilar to the grimy filth of Hair Police’s last full-length, Younger’s assured constructions occupying that same fetid headspace, like being stuck in a dripping oubliette whilst some ungodly rite is being played out just out of sight and clear earshot. Oscillatory screeches are undercut with what sounds like a single ominous bell tone, painfully stretched beyond recognition; the volume rises and falls, leaving a single metallic note hanging in the air, growing consistently in intensity. We’re eventually treated to an actual propulsive handle via slow djembe-style percussion, before waves of sheet noise recalling The Hollow Organ’s Analogues—though without that track’s emotive core—finally segue in to whining electronic chatter and digital wash, a surprisingly retro-futurist tone to end on. Where other acts this evening present instantaneous gratification and blunt confrontation, Helm’s is far more about the slow build, and is all the more disturbing for it.

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Words: Tom Howells