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Album
Impossible Symmetry
Helm →2,449 listeners21,836 plays
2012electronicwhite rabbitdark ambientambient dub
about this album
In a first for Helm’s Luke Younger, Impossible Symmetry is founded on live improvisation rather than studio sessions. Personally I’m unfamiliar with Helm’s previous output (which extends back to 2006 and includes four previous full lengths), but it’s certainly feasible to see how the live environment has come to inform the way in which these tracks are structured: sounds are gradually stacked one on top of the other and then carefully peeled away again, with cores of rhythm and noise playing host to everything from swarms of white noise to warped, operatic vocal fragments. But while “Minatures” and “Liskojen yo” are almost symmetrical in their structures – shaped by the patient growth into climax and steady dissipation into silence – “Arcane Matters” ruptures such impending dynamic gradients with a sudden jolt of dissonant piano that thumps home once the opening distortion hurricane clears. The restless chatter and laughter of children (awash with a ghostly, school corridor ambience) hangs ominously behind each stab against the keys, with the walls soaking up each resonant clash of notes. Meanwhile, the first half of “Above All And Beyond” keeps the canvas of quiet visible behind the noise, swapping the upward volume swells for the awkward stasis of a vacated room. Synthesiser solos emerge and recede – sometimes angular and glistening like glass sheets, sometimes swooping up and down like slow motion birdsong – while muffled rumbles hint to some sort of tectonic activity ben
