Helm: Inscrutable Sound

Josh Hall speaks with Luke Younger, whose visceral work as Helm has marked him out as a notable voice within experimental circles. However, the ensuing discussion suggests the London-based musician is veering off in interesting new directions.

Luke Younger is leaving his job. The artist, better known as Helm, has used up his holiday through touring and now, rather than turn down a new series of dates, he has decided strike out on his own – but now he’s planning to do more than just release records and play live.

“I’ve been thinking about working creatively in other aspects,” he says, “whether that’s working with children or disabled people. This music, in my mind, doesn’t just exist for people who go on Boomkat every day and collect records, and are obsessed with the lineage of 21st and 20th Century experimental music. I don’t like these ideas of experimental music just being a ghettoised thing for fetishists and nerds.”

He’s not yet sure what form that work will take. “This is something I’m still trying to work out,” he says. “But I suppose I’m just trying to think about certain ways in which experimental and electronic music can escape the trappings and preconceptions that it has. People are embracing this a lot more. It’s getting better; it’s getting less ghettoised. Or maybe it’s just one big ghetto. I don’t know.”

To many, Younger’s work as Helm seems to operate somewhere in the depths, or perhaps the edges, of the psyche. As well as being frequently described as a London psychogeography, 2012’s PAN LP Impossible Symmetry was often considered perturbing, foreboding, shot through with a crackling darkness. But these are descriptions that Younger doesn’t recognise. “I suppose subconsciously I’ve been aware of the fact that people perceive it as a dark project, or a project that’s something that can be put in that world,” he says. “But I’ve never really felt like it’s been a particularly dark project. I’ve never really used dark imagery.”

Impossible Symmetry also stood in counterpoint to what Younger sees as the unhappily prolific state of noise music. He has little interest in the CDR culture that has dominated noise, although he still enjoys the CD format. Primarily, though, he is concerned about the sheer amount of music being released – and about the amount of music for which he has been responsible. Impossible Symmetry was something bigger: a declaration; an attempt to make something more cohesive. It was a success but, at the same time, Younger has noted a shift in noise music away from profligacy and towards a more concise, institutionalised means by which noise musicians can release.

“There seem to be more legitimate labels around these days,” he says. “Labels that release vinyl, and have proper distribution. I think people are generally more inclined to listen to something if they can see that there’s been more time and effort put into it, rather than something that someone’s just quickly rushed out – literally just bounced some tracks down onto a CDR and passed it onto a group of people.”

But, for all his concern about the way in which noise music is released, Younger no longer considers himself a noise artist – in fact, he hasn’t since the last “period of productivity” he enjoyed with Birds Of Delay, his project with Steven Warwick, who also plays as Heatsick. “I don’t think I make noise music,” Younger says. “Noise music in my head is something that’s set by very specific parameters. I think what Helm is doing is too musical to be considered noise music. Even though it’s fairly abstract, if you compare it to some of the classic Japanese noise or American noise of the ’90s and early 2000s, there’s far too much structure, and too many musical elements for it to be considered noise.”

The compositional element of his work, he says, is becoming ever more important. “It’s always been something that I’ve strived to have within the music,” he says, “and more so recently – taking into consideration how an album can work, and how different pieces can work together to form a whole, rather than just a collection of random recordings.”

Younger also sits formally apart from many noise artists. He has spoken in the past about the importance of the ‘classic’ noise format, in which two tracks occupy one side each. But from Impossible Symmetry onwards, and particularly with his new work, currently in development, Younger has made a conscious move away from that formula. “I know exactly how I want the form of it to be in my head,” he says. “I’m pushing more towards trying to make a set of shorter pieces. I’m just trying to challenge myself to strip back and condense things a bit more. I guess I’m trying to make a record that’s ultimately a bit more digestible on first listen. I think a lot of my previous records have been possibly too demanding for casual listeners. I think it would be interesting to make something that’s a bit different from that.”

Rhythm, which had played an increasingly important part in his work from Impossible Symmetry through the Silencer and Hollow Organ EPs, albeit as an atmospheric rather than structural tool, will also now be sidestepped. “The recent stuff I’ve been working on has been very unrhythmic,” Younger says. “It’s been a lot mellower and a lot more…” there’s a notable hesitation to use the word ambient, instead referring to this current material as calmer, before adding, “there’s been more of an emphasis on loops, rather than rhythms”. Listening to old NON records was the inspiration for this new direction, with Younger stating “when you have a loop repeated for a certain amount of time, you start to perceive it as a rhythm. It’s this mechanical sounding phrase that seems like it’s endless.”

This use of sounds in a way that is separated from their original intention, or their source, is something that Younger finds appealing, and is a tendency that he also locates in Rashad Becker’s 2013 Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1. The album, mastering engineer Becker’s first, was, Younger says, entirely unexpected. “I think the best thing about that record was, whatever you thought that record might have sounded like, it sounded like none of those things. The expectation for it was vague in most people’s heads, but it ended up being something completely new and different.”

Becker’s album was particularly interesting for Younger because, he says, “most of the people who listen to that record have no idea how he made it. I have some idea, but that’s only through playing with him and seeing the equipment he uses. But I still don’t really know, aside from that, which is a very surface observation. I still have no idea how he puts his music together, or how he creates it.”

That inscrutability appeals to Younger. He is interested in “not being able to identify where particular sounds have originated from. You’re unable to detect the source of the material you’re listening to”. It’s “this detachment from the sound and the source where it originated from” that interests Younger most about experimental music and musique concrète.

But his interests are not confined to the alienation of a sound from its source. Instead, Younger is also drawn to hyper-literal representations of those sounds, and detailed explanations of their origins. “Someone like Chris Watson,” he says, “is documenting sounds very explicitly. A lot of the time they’re so explicit that you listen to them, and unless you’re reading the technical notes, you might not actually know where it comes from. You can identify that it’s an animal but you might not necessarily know what animal it is. I do like the other way round as well.” Russell Haswell is another artist Younger mentions here, specifically the 2009 Editions Mego LP Wild Tracks. “The song titles are just so literal [“Exceptionally Loud Propane Gas Bird Scarer”, “A Horde Of Flies Feast On A Rotting Pheasant Carcass”]. They’re abstract sounds, and when you read the titles, which are the literal descriptions of the sounds, I think it’s done in a very funny way, and in a way that’s very Russell.”

But Younger has not just been recording. He will have travelled more during 2014 than in any previous year, playing shows both in Europe and across the Atlantic. Impossible Symmetry marked, he says, a watershed moment in “what I hate to call my career,” giving him the opportunity to play more and further afield, and to an entirely new audience. “A lot of the people who’ve picked up on Helm in America are generally people from a punk background,” he says. “It seems like these days in Europe I play to people into experimental music and people into dance music, and then in America I play to people who are into punk.”

“There’s a whole bunch of punk kids in America who are now being curious about electronic music, and making electronic music on their own terms. When I was in L.A. in February I went to a night that Mount Analog put on, and there was way more of a punk edge to it than you would ever get in Europe.” Here Younger cites L.I.E.S., Ron Morelli’s label, as a very good example of how American underground dance music has evolved in this way, “I don’t think L.I.E.S. would be the same if it evolved from something in Europe.”

As well as appealing to American punks, Helm has also become part of a new cohort in Europe, oscillating around a Copenhagen set that includes Sacred Bones’ Lust For Youth and switchblade-toting Iceage. Although perhaps on first glance an unlikely grouping, Younger says these new relationships are mirrored in a return to his own punk roots. He now plays in a hardcore band, The Lowest Form, but touring with bands like Arizona’s Destruction Unit has had just as dramatic an impact on his perceptions of where Helm belongs. “I had such a good time doing that,” he says, “and had such a good time with the people in that band, and realised that their tastes in music are pretty much identical to mine. That sort of opened up this idea in my head that I can go and play with these bands, and it can make sense. I think it’s a good way of moving things forward.”

“I don’t like playing with the same people all the time. I’m going on tour with Iceage for a month in October. That’s a direct progression, not only with my realisation that it is possible to play with these bands, but also from their point of view. They’ve experienced a similar thing. I get the impression that they’ve found more kinship with some of the people who make electronic music in their hometown than the punk bands.”

Younger’s own journey from punk, through noise, and back again, hinged in part around his time in Nottingham, living with another member of The Lowest Form. “We’d make these mixtapes for each other that would just be full of all this disparate music. You’d have power violence, electro, Egyptian Lover tracks with Infest tracks, and all this stuff. It’s kind of nice to see that kind of still continuing today, and also in a more global sense. That’s helped build something that feels like an international scene.”

Back in London, Younger explored these different strands of experimental or extreme music. The now defunct Red Rose, he says, was an important hub. “It was kind of the one venue in London, back in the early 2000s that put on experimental music. You could go to a gig there and it would be some power electronics, or a dark industrial gig, and then you’d go there the next week and it would be improv, some free jazz. Before we had Cafe Oto, or before things became more defined, there were only a handful of places that would do events like that.”

“A lot of the improv stuff around that time was also a big influence. [I’d go to] to The Klinker, which was this club that ran every week, and would have two nights every single week in these pub back rooms. You could go there and see Hugh Metcalfe playing his violin with like a cabbage thing on his head.”

Metcalfe played at the Heatsick gig at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club earlier this year, and for Younger it was “amazing to see him do what he’s been doing for the last 20 years, to a packed room of people who might be from London but have never heard of the guy before. That’s one of the best things about the state of experimental, underground music now. Boundaries have been knocked down, which has needed to happen for quite a long time.”

Younger is re-evaluating where Helm belongs. No longer a noise musician; not quite a punk artist. His is a unique position, one in which his new personal relationships have enabled him to stand astride a number of the “ghettos” that so frustrate him. The Copenhagen set, he says, have become “my contemporaries, in the same way that I consider artists like Rashad Becker and Valerio Tricoli my contemporaries. I guess the way I see Helm within all of this is I kind of like being the inbetween point between Valerio Tricoli and Destruction Unit. That appeals to me. In a certain social sense, that’s what I’m striving for.”

Interview by Josh Hall