HELM

In an epoch where image is king, we are gaining unprecedented control and awareness of the avatars we project onto the world while at the same time our rights to privacy and self-determination erode into nothingness. Hammered on all sides by visual stimuli, we inhabit a universe permeated and driven by advertising and data mining. Our value as consumers is proportional to our role as data sources, and both these factors are cultivated at every occasion to maintain the revenue stream which allows us to think our email is free.

Meanwhile researchers, governments and the data companies which provide our online services are reverse engineering our minds, individually and collectively as we race towards the technological singularity whose consequences cannot be predicted nor imagined. Perhaps the wisest course would be to prepare ourselves to best serve the new master or masters. Or is resistance still possible?

Helm is a word of ambigous meaning, to be understood as an armored covering for head and face which conceals and protects its wearer, but also as the decisive place from which our collective ship is to be steered. Who is at the helm? Who chooses the course, and who follows? Who is guiding this process? Will we recognize the moment when we are no longer in control? And how can we defend or protect ourselves?

This record is a collection of sonic images, broken cyclic patterns, political fight songs, united by its diversity. Thus it is both a product of the forces which surround and move us and an attempt to resist or deviate from the course which has been chosen for us, to confound analysis, throw a wrench in the gears. But it is perhaps foremost a message of hope, a book of hymns to commemorate the end of an era and herald the coming of a new, technological deity, in the hope that its desires will align with our own.