Helena Hauff – Discreet Desires
Ciara once sang: “when it comes to love I’m like a surgeon,” which seemed like a pretty bizarre statement on the surface. Surgeons may be bound by the directive to do no harm, but operating tables are not usually thought of as romantic places. However, something about that phrase sticks in my mind when listening to Discreet Desires from Helena Hauff, a surgeon in her own right. Spending time with the Hamburg based selector’s debut album gives one the feeling that you are being precisely manipulated throughout – your nerves tweaked, your serotonin levels flushed with a tactful incision to the gastrointestinal tract.
Helena Hauff
Discreet Desires
Werkdiscs/Ninja Tune
2LP, CD, Digital
Even though Hauff’s interviews often involve shrugging off assertions of greatness, discussing hangovers and claiming that her relationship with music is about as anarchistic as her label name Return To Disorder infers, Discreet Desires suggests otherwise. Satisfying from start to finish, it’s Hauff’s most jaw-gurning work to date; all her EBM, acid, and industrial techno influences synthesized, loaded into an opaque syringe, and jammed into your neck.
The album’s first ten minutes are almost wholly devoted to the idea of a slow, dreadful build-up, with the rumbling drums of “Tripartite Pact” imparting a near-theatrical sense of opening grandeur. Hauff’s time cutting her teeth at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel Club has certainly instilled a knack for pacing in her – the scaling tones of “Spur” bleed into “Sworn to Secrecy Part I”, which has a bit of the antiquated snarl of a futuristic RPG video game set entirely in a sewer.
Hauff unhinges the listener’s jawbones on “L’Homme Mort”, which is an escalating volley of percussive arrows, each additional layer adding an extra measure of chaos. On first listen, it’s hard not to be swept away in the emotion and propulsion of the moment. However, we you consider Hauff studied physics and systematic music science before fully immersing herself in the DJ business, focusing on mathematical aspects of music (what it does to your brain, how people perceive what they’re hearing), it’s hard to listen to “L’Homme Mort” without feeling as if there’s some level of psychological warfare at play.
“Piece of Pleasure” embraces the album’s most EBM-friendly moment, a crunchy synthesizer romp that imparts the quick-delivery feel good of a sugar rush, and is followed by album highlight “Tryst”; a 140BPM+ trip to the constellations which doesn’t let up for a single second of its six-minute runtime. Title-wise, both these tracks seem to allude to romance in some extent, and their juxtaposition of sensuality, artificiality and menace is illustrated perfectly by the LP’s self-portrait cover; Hauff’s opaque face pressed up against a reflection of itself with an expression either lust-filled or maniacal.
Even though “Dreams in Colour” takes a breather from the frantic tone of the album’s centre, its toy synthesizer twinkles still unsettle, and the gravelly trudge of “Silver Sand & Boxes of Mould” feel like they’re just begging to be used by a low budget horror movie, pressing relentlessly onward like weary post-apocalyptic travellers slowly disappearing on the horizon.
All praise deservingly goes to Hauff’s widespread implementation of influences throughout, interloping between genres in a way that never feels trite or obsessed with fetishizing the past. But most importantly, it’s Hauff’s dedication to intricacy that makes Discreet Desires so special – wielded with such tact and precision that listeners will stumble away from in an anaesthesia-like haze trying to figure out what just happened.
Brendam Arnott
Tracklisting:
1. Tripartite Pact
2. Spur
3. Sworn to Secrecy Part I
4. L’Homme Mort
5. Funereal Morality
6. Piece of Pleasure
7. Tryst
8. Sworn to Secrecy Part II
9. Silver Sand & Boxes of Mould
10. Dreams in Colour