For the 2021 online edition of the Counterflows festival, Glasgow-based Kay Logan (aka Helena Celle) created the hour-long electronic Music for Counterflows, accompanied by an interview with Stewart Smith. For the CD and digital release, the music has been mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and the interview along with visual artwork by Kay are included in a 20 page booklet. Extracts from Stewart’s interview with Kay can be read here.
The first Helena Celle album, If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst, was released on the Night School label in 2016. Since then, Kay has released work under an array of aliases, including Helena Celle’s Haunted Mirror, Helena Celle’s Mimetic Desire, Helena Celle’s Correspondence Table, Otherworld and Time Binding Ensemble. Kay’s Patreon supporters also receive regular transmissions from Helena Celle’s Observer Effect.
Music and artwork by Helena Celle
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu
Design by David Caines
Gatefold sleeve, with 20 page booklet
“ … an elongated and amorphous soundscape, fogged in reverb and scattered with unsettling percussive detritus. Issued by Faversham, Kent based label False Walls, the piece is a rumbling roam through dimly lit corridors that, over the course of 60 minutes, feels like being swallowed into the belly of reverberant catacombs. Around melodic xylophone-like percussion, [Kay] Logan establishes that this is high fantasy rather than realist terror, melodramatic synth cutting through ferric warble to create a hypnagogic, almost fairytale feel.”
— Spenser Tomson, Wire magazine, on Music for Counterflows (July 2022)
“Quietly it fades in, making its origins almost imperceptible as it goes, but ratchets up the brain-throb drama in due course. Taking on information and context from its surroundings, you feel it could go in pretty much any direction next, and often it does. It’s been created in the service of something exciting and will improve your life, no questions asked.”
— Noel Gardner, The Quietus, on Music for Counterflows