Helm

Luke Younger channels his London-rooted work as a sound artist, grounded in hardcore punk and industrial origins, through the dark ambient and noise project Helm. Extended compositions, assembled via electronic gear together with discovered or altered instruments, regularly combine expansive swells of abrasive, corroded feedback with more ordered, pulsing passages. Initial notice reached Younger as half of the experimental duo Birds of Delay alongside Steven Warwick, later recognized as Heatsick; the pair issued more than two dozen LPs, 7"s, cassettes, and CD-Rs from 2005 to 2010. After several outings under his own name, Younger adopted Helm for solo endeavors beginning in 2006, distributing limited CD-Rs and tapes in the following years on Blackest Rainbow, Peasant Magik, 905 Tapes, and RRRecords through its continuing Recycled Music series. The first vinyl appearance under Helm arrived with 2010's To an End, which also inaugurated Younger's Alter label. Cryptography followed in 2011 on Graham Lambkin's Kye. Geneva Cave, a limited cassette on Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions, appeared in 2012 alongside Impossible Symmetry, Helm's debut LP for Bill Kouligas' Pan; assembled meticulously across a full year, the record represented Younger's most ambitious and sonically striking work to that point and drew favorable responses from several experimental music publications. Pan and Alter jointly issued the 2013 12" EP Silencer, succeeded soon after by the companion EP The Hollow Organ in early 2014. That same period brought Impasse, an LP reissue on Matthew Mondanile's New Images label of a 2008 limited Helm CD-R that added previously unreleased material. The next proper full-length, 2015's Olympic Mess, emerged as a double LP on Pan that foregrounded the rhythmic, loop-centered facets of the sound while preserving its turbulent and unpredictable character.