Helm

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 which touches on aspects of musique concrete, uncomfortable sound poetry, industrial, and hallucinatory drones. To this date, he has produced three full length albums; debut To An End, self released on his own ALTER imprint in 2010, was a complex network of intricate layers and mixed sounds, described by John Elliott (Emeralds / Spectrum Spools) as “a haunting composition of field recordings, tape loops, percussion, and electronics (among other things), creating an extremely tense and daunting audio tapestry which leaves the listener pondering the intense meaning of the sounds chosen”. It’s follow up Cryptography was released a year later on Graham Lambkin’s (The Shadow Ring) acclaimed KYE label, consisting of a five-part suite of expertly rendered electro-acoustic study using processed piano, Casio MT-40, cymbal and broken guitar strings. The album received enough acclaim within the underground to sell out its pressing and even made it into The Wire Magazines top 50 albums of 2011, with gigs alongside Mark McGuire, Oneohtrix Point Never and an extensive tour of Europe with Élg and Tomutonttu. For his third album, 2012’s Impossible Symmetry, Younger made the move to the PAN label which is where he currently calls home. The album saw Younger moving forward and refining his sound further whilst also marking a new chapter in the Helm canon as being the first to be informed by live performance. Recorded over a year in London with some technical assistance from John Hannon (Liberez), most of the compositions were created out of ideas / improvisations that were conceived in a live context and then turned into finished works in the studio. Whilst being an electronic record primarily, it contained acoustic sound sources used in a similar methodology to Cryptography, and incorporated a more extensive use of electronic elements with moments of rhythmic dark ambience recalling early Coil and Cabaret Voltaire to Traversable Wormhole’s industrial minimalism. Younger creates a world where his 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.      Helm did release the EP Silencer on PAN in 2013.