Photo by Robin Silas Christian

The aim of this mix was to put together a collection of tracks which represented the darker and rhythmic side of my recent listening habits, which in turn has also been infecting some of my recent recordings. There are tracks from long time favourites like Coil, Whitehouse, Shackleton, Pan Sonic, Severed Heads and relatively recent discoveries like Call Back the Giants and Traversable Wormhole.

There's also a bit of tongue-in-cheek post-industrial miserablism thrown in for good measure--a nod to the fact that I have been possibly living in denial about being a goth at heart for many years, thanks to that world having a hand in nurturing my interest in experimental music and noise in my late teenage years. I hope you'll take in the wry way it was intended and enjoy-- with a rather large pinch of salt at hand.

Track list:

BBC Breaking News 
Pan Sonic: "Lahetys / Transmission" 
Ultra: "The New Centurian" 
Coil: "The Anal Staircase" 
Plastikman: "Contain" 
Call Back The Giants: "Call Back the Giants" 
Robert Ashley: "She Was A Visitor" 
Whitehouse: "Baby" 
Traversable Wormhole: "Paradoxical Consequence" 
Shackleton: "Death Is Not Final" 
Burzum: "Gebrechlichkeit I" 
Sleezy D: "I've Lost Control" 
NON: "Knife Ladder" 
Severed Heads: "4WD"

Londoner Luke Younger-- with his duo, Birds of Delay, and label, Alter Stock-- has been haunting the weirdo circuit for a decade now, but the hi-fi drone of his Helm project sounds nothing but fresh. It's an often occultish, precise type of ambient peddled by film-buff cohorts Haxan Cloak and Slant Azymuth (Demdike Stare plus Andy Votel of Finders Keepers). Likewise, "Miniatures" is also all tied up in the talkies-- this track was commissioned by Australia-via-London filmmaker Pia Borg, even though Younger had to depend mostly what he'd been told about the project. In his own words "there is a lot of room to fuck up when interpreting someone's visual ideas you've never seen through sound." As is always the case, the best imageless scores are less about the aural accompiment than the lush worlds the music crafts, here through computerized seagull cries and reverb that seems to resonate through some infinite hallway.

Helm's Impossible Symmetry is out today on PAN.