Helena Gough
with what remains CD (E38)

Helena Gough’s debut album consists of seven soundworks, conceived
as spaces to enter. Within these spaces sounds are born, then evolve,
disintegrate and sometimes die. Each is created using a minimum of
raw material, usually derived from recordings of small sounds and
domestic noises. This material is pulled apart until its roots are severed
and it becomes free from its original ties. Efforts are made to find a
balance between spontaneity and precision. Rarely is there a resolution
or a direct linear progression from A to B; often it is something closer to
A into A — ideas turn in on themselves. Textures appear to be still but
are always in motion. This microscopic approach is a focus of the way in
which sounds are treated.

Helena Gough is a Birmingham-based sound artist.
For further information about her work visit helenagough.net

First edition of 300 copies, 2007
Second edition of 100 copies, 2008
£8





Massimo Ricci at Touching Extremes





What it takes to fully appreciate this work… are plenty of time and a
mind cleared from all superflous thoughts and distractions. All of us rely
on expectations and a certain scheme of promises and disappointments.
Even the most wayward music eventually settles in a comfortable mode
of not giving in to what listeners want to hear. ‘with what remains’ is
different, though. It manages to create the illusion of still being part of
this string of reasoning, while in reality it has long severed all ties.
Gough is not a hermit, but her style is a highly personal one, tapping into
potentials which are still communicable but which tend to release their
information in a way which inevitably changes some if its meaning in the
translation process: her sound materials are from her direct domestic
environment and consistently plucked apart to a point where they can no
longer be traced back to their place of origin. In the ensuing process, new
structures are established, placing the elements in various contexts and
waiting for them to blossom on foreign fields. Decoding the building blocks
of the tracks has thereby become impossible, at least within the reasoning
of deductive logic. Also, by allowing the sounds to basically start working
on their own, the composer has entered the principle of double-blindfolding
and at least partly deducted herself from the music. It is here that the
album starts its fascination, for it leaves the premises of a mere display of
effects to start working as a dialogue, even as a feedback loop which will in
turn provide its creator with valuable insights and creative stimuli for the
future. You simply can not predict where this is going: deep bass thumps
might lead to the cracklings of old vinyl, to purring particle chains or to
meditative drones stepping to the beat of an ancient gong. As the different
elements turn up again and again, it would even be impossible to tell where
exactly on the rotating disc of this amorphic rockscape you are right now.
To me, it also means that the original intent of conceiving these soundworks
as individual spaces has not entirely worked out — rather, everything melts
into one single, big space, which you can enter and leave at will, and which
will retain its wondrousness regardless of how often you walk its corridors.

Tobias Fischer at tokafi
—

Impossible to identify all the sources utilised herein, but one picks up all
manner of open-air recordings, closely miked micro-events and pervasive
electronics weaving in and out of the mix. It’s actually not too diffcult to
place oneself into a ‘room’ and imagine walking through these sounds;
there’s more than enough apparent three-dimensionality to do so,
a consistent thickness. If I had to pick out a favourite, it might be
Condensed Milk with its juicy mix of liquid and cracking sounds embedded
in a vaguely metallic, dully echoing ambience. Something about the pieces
recalls classic electronic work by people like Gottfried Michael Koenig and
Dick Raaijmakers, rather heady company. I wouldn’t go so far as to say
that Gough’s music attains the heights of the best of those fellows, but
it’s not very far out of their league. If you enjoy them, you’ll derive a
good deal from her compositions as well. Solid stuff.

Brian Olewnick at Bagatellen
—

A sending station of messages that we could even perceive as takeaway
illuminations, fragments of glorified externalisations whose significance is
not born from casualness but derives instead from the very kernel of sound,
modified by the skills of a bright-minded electroacoustic architect who is
“working to create something from nearly nothing”. This is ‘with what
remains’, a brilliant effort by Helena Gough, a Birmingham-based
academically trained composer and violinist, currently interested in
exploiting the “abstract properties” of everyday’s sounds, which she
deploys with extreme care and accuracy through a sensitive multicellular
method rarely observed before, at least by this listener. The intrinsic qualities
of what might just seem a collection of noises to untrained ears are right
there for the intellect to process, but it takes much more than a distracted
look to fully unveil this record’s enormous value. Speckled mirrors, bumpy
instantaneousness, biotic pseudo-tranquillity, all are just illusions of a
forward movement that we must repeatedly postpone to make sure that
these messages and codes are properly assimilated. The germinations of
Gough’s complex connections of decomposed frequencies and impenetrable
permanences produce superb aural emulsions of otherwise extraneous
substances, keeping us suspended between a surgical reviviscence
of our secret fears and a special kind of ecstatic indecision that — once
again — highlights the retard of the human brain's predisposition to ‘classify’
and ‘define’ when facing pure acoustic noumena. It all translates as
‘unpigeonholeable masterpiece’, one of Entr’acte’s most precious releases.

Massimo Ricci at Touching Extremes