Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please. Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

I have a schedule and daily routine but it is completely wrapped around my dayjob and has nothing to do with any creative endeavour.

To be clear, music is a nice side-job that I’ve been lucky to have control of and maintain over the years. It allows me a certain type of artistic freedom which I value. Having the choice to not to make work is as important as being able to make it.

Can you talk about a breakthrough work, event or performance in your career? Why does it feel special to you? When, why and how did you start working on it, what were some of the motivations and ideas behind it?

Probably my second album Cryptography because I felt like I’d properly figured out what I was trying to do with the project in a conceptual sense. I also realised I wanted to present my work as full albums rather than the ongoing diary style documentation of the cassette and CDR culture I’d been immersed in the years prior.

It was also around this time I started to receive a bit more press and attention on my work so for the first time it felt like there was an unknown audience there beyond my small scene. It was actually recorded towards the end of 2009 but wasn’t released until 2011. It’s a pretty perfect snapshot of where I was artistically at that point, ready to transition into a new decade.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

I’ve no idea, if I did I’d love to be able to harness it more often. I feel any time I purposefully try to be creative the opposite happens, so I try not to overthink the process much.

Feeling inspired is definitely important when it comes to recording and that inspiration can come from anywhere – seeing a gig, listening to a record, a good conversation, anything really. A life of leisure away from financial worries would probably be an ideal place to start from as well.

I think it’s probably easier to be consistently productive without questioning your own creative decisions much when you’re younger and in the early stages of an artistic ‘career’ – or at least that’s how it felt to me. Distractions become more common as you get older and end up juggling the responsibilities of life alongside creative work.

Music and sounds can heal, but they can also hurt. Do you personally have experiences with either or both of these? Where do you personally see the biggest need and potential for music as a tool for healing?

I personally have a problem with such literal vocabulary being used to describe something as open-ended as music.

Of course we can take great comfort in music and sound, it can be used effectively to enhance certain situations and activities that have positive effects on our wellbeing (meditation, exercise, dancing, etc). But to say that music alone has inherent healing potential is just silly and you should never trust an artist who claims that it does.

On the flip side of the question, the only way a sound can really hurt you is if it’s played at an extreme level of volume, resulting in permanent damage to your hearing. Or when used with psychological techniques as a means of torture to break the minds of political prisoners (Guantanamo bay, CIA, etc). Thankfully I’ve never had an experience with either of those situations.

There is a fine line between cultural exchange and appropriation. What are your thoughts on the limits of copying, using cultural signs and symbols and the cultural/social/gender specificity of art?

This is a question I can only really answer as a consumer of culture rather than an artist.

To be honest, I don’t think my music has any connection to social / cultural issues in any way as it’s just not the purpose of it. I think in the context of art that anything is up for grabs and as long as ideas are carried out honestly with a certain amount of intellectual rigour, then I see no problem. After all, anything published in the public sphere will be open to scrutiny and criticism in response if anyone has a problem.

Ideas have been exchanged across cultures in art and music for years and it’s a pretty important part of how the culture grows and develops as a whole, especially in Britain.

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work?

I’ve not really got anything to say in response to this other than I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to see a cat quack like a duck when you expected it to ‘meow’. I imagine that would be quite confusing.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

I feel my approach to art is fairly simple, I’m just satisfying a creative impulse I have and Helm is the creative outlet. I want to create an aesthetic experience based on my personal tastes and what I want to hear and feel from sound. I do this for myself and also in the hope of connecting with others who appreciate it. Life would be a lot worse for me without it.

The idea of allowing your work to take on a social and political role for more engagement feels like rank opportunism to me, especially in something so niche. My music isn’t activism. It is not tied to or driven by any specific political ideology and is made available to all who wish to engage with it, despite what I would ever personally think about their political opinions. It feels to me sometimes that artists now have a bit of pressure on them to be seen as political when I don’t think they have to be. People have said to me that this is down the current climate where everything is politicised, but to be honest I don’t remember a time in my adult life when everything else around me wasn’t politicised. When I started making this music the Iraq war was in full swing, thousands of people marching on the streets of London against it. It never even crossed my mind that my abstract sound work (just “noise” to most) could and should ever be a vehicle for commenting on social or political issues. It would feel inappropriate and opportunistic.

What can music express about life and death which words alone may not?

Music is mainly about feeling and atmosphere. In terms of communicating specific existential ideas / concepts I’m not sure how successful it can be without the addition of text and other imagery.

I don’t think there’s been another artist to have used death as a conceptual axis like Marco Corbelli did for example, but his work wouldn’t have hit in the same way without the track titles or artwork. I would say literature and theory are much more convincing mediums for communicating specific ideas based on these concepts.

With experimental music in particular, I feel that the listener can project their own ideas and theories onto a piece of work quite easily. This can reduce any of the artist’s conceptual intent to an irrelevance a lot of the time. Not always a bad thing in my opinion either.