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Helm, "Silencer" and "The Hollow Organ"
Although I have only been following Luke Younger's career for a few short years, one thing is very clear to me: he definitely does not like to repeat himself.  Curiously, however, that creative restlessness is not channeled into any sort of recognizably linear evolution; rather, each new Helm release seems to be a self-contained experiment or reinvention.  In keeping with that theme, these latest two EPs take divergent paths and succeed in divergent ways, though Silencer is definitely the superior one.
To his credit, Younger is one of the few prominent noise artists who has yet to jump on the techno bandwagon (though there probably is not any room left on it at this point anyway).  Silencer is still an atypically beat-driven effort however–it is just that the rolling, lurching tom-tom beat of the title piece sounds far more indebted to Les Baxter than to anything currently coming out of Bristol or Berlin.  The sizzling blurts, insectoid clicks, electronic squiggles, and grinding metallic shimmer are all very much in the restrained noise/musique concrète vein, but it is easy to picture Luke turning knobs and pressing buttons in the shadow of a volcano while surrounded by tiki torches and a spirited limbo contest.  The closing "The Haze" treads somewhat similar territory, though the groove is a bit more sultry and the noises more in the "giant robotic crickets or an amplified lawn sprinkler" vein.
The remaining two pieces, "Mirrored Palms" and "Bergamo," are quite a bit different.  The superior one is the beatless "Palms," which might secretly be the best piece on the EP, evoking a hallucinatory atmosphere of escalating dread worthy of Angelo Badalamenti's best soundtrack work for David Lynch.  "Bergamo," on the other hand, approximates being trapped in a dripping, slowly flooding cave beneath some giant, pounding machinery.
Even though all of the individual pieces are strong, however, I was left with a nagging feeling of not being quite satisfied.  The reasons for that feel somewhat contradictory and vague, but I think my main problem is that the 10-minute "Silencer" is not quite compelling enough to justify its length, while the EP as a whole is too short and varied to get fully absorbed in.  Regardless, Silencer is probably still a great introduction for anyone new to Younger, as it is atypically rhythmic and distinctive, though I personally get a lot more out of his full-lengths.
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Curiously, The Hollow Organ single/EP does not begin with "The Hollow Organ," nor is the title track unquestionably the stand-out song.  Rather, it opens with a very cool 3-minute piece called "Carrier," which combines a hollow thrum, a buried dancefloor throb, harsh scraping and grinding, and sprays of noise that resemble showers of sparks from a broken power line. Then it abruptly transforms into a coda of subterranean burbling and a wildly panning and quavering animal-like whine.  After that brief and wonderful opening, unfortunately, Younger's inspiration seems to have dissipated a bit.
The remaining three songs are mostly just texture-based soundscapes without any sort of serious melodic/rhythmic activity or significant compositional arc.  They are not bad or anything, but I feel like Luke is basically just treading water for the next 22 minutes.  Each piece certainly sounds vibrant and multilayered though, particularly "Analogues," which gradually drifts from heavy metallic grinding to a deep, forlorn crackle that sounds like the slow burning of an ancient forest.  "Spiteful Jester," on the other hand, is a miasma of distressed and empty-sounding industrial blurts and an unrelenting whine.  The fun then finally winds down with the 10-minute closing title piece, which is a slowly pulsing and ominous bit of menacing ambience that calls to mind an abandoned, windswept shipyard in the dead of night.
I think Luke succeeded at what he was going for with The Hollow Organ, which is mostly some sort of machine noise-damaged dark ambient, a soundtrack for a non-existent film (complete with sinister pipe organ finale), or a suite of nightmarish faux field recordings, but it ultimately did not make a strong impression on me.  That might be attributable to how permanently burned-out I am these days on anything resembling dark ambient though, which is certainly not Younger's fault.  Or it might just be that this EP was too brief for me to get fully immersed in Luke's brooding horror-scape.  Or that I wished the simmering moodiness would eventually erupt in some kind of crescendo, which it never does.  In any case, I am sure that Helm fans looking for a good headphone mini-album full of sharply realized, vibrant, and hallucinatory textures to tide them over until the next album will find that Organ satiates that need nicely.  To my ears, this definitely feels like a fairly minor addition to Younger's oeuvre, but it is admittedly good for what it is.
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