Helena Celle’s Music for Counterflows has been reviewed in various places — here’s a round up:
The Wire:
“ … 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, in July 2022 edition
Monolith Cocktail:
“I regard Celle as more of an alchemist than an academic. She transfigures time and place and transforms rhythm into the irrhythmic. She improvises and hypnotises and experiments from an electronic playbook less-leafed.”
https://monolithcocktail.com/2022/08/10/our-daily-bread-535-helena-celle-music-for-counterflows/
On the fringes of sound:
“Part of a rapidly growing body of work, Music for Counterflows is an ambitious album from Glasgow-based artist Helena Celle that is comprised of a single hour-long track, effectively filling an entire compact disc by itself. The work itself is surprisingly varied in its composition despite maintaining the same instrumentation practically through its whole runtime. Hazy and reverberated sounds ping around and play off one another to create a hypnotic atmosphere that ebbs in and out. There is a certain theme that the song starts out with and periodically revisits throughout. The composition actually ends with a wildly mutated version of this theme that slowly falls apart until we are left in the silent stillness of the end. It’s mesmerizing and peculiar in its approach but makes for quite the experience as it never wears out its overarching themes.”
https://www.onthefringesofsound.com/post/rounding-the-fringes-july-21
Compulsion Online:
“Whether composed, improvised or programmed, Music For Counterflows is mischievous and fun, disrupting form and order…Consider it an album of outsider inventiveness or one that pushes a technology to its extremes, either way it is a delightful, demanding piece of work that is worth hearing from a multi-talented sound artist.”
http://compulsiononline.com/helena_celle_music_for_counterflows.htm
The Skinny:
“Music for Counterflows is a top-drawer production that pushes at the edges of a particular technology in a considered, engaging and beautiful way.”
https://www.theskinny.co.uk/music/reviews/albums/helena-celle-music-for-counterflows
Plus, some tweets:
“Listening to Helena Celle’s Music For Counterflows. This is great! It kind of sounds like forgotten 90s techno played on a broken cassette player, or a haunted PSX game”
“It’s an absolute cracker.”
“Highest recommendation for this amazing Helena Celle (@free_musick) album on the @falsewalls37 label, “Music For Counterflows” – an hour of captivating mutating loop structures. Booklet has an interview with HC conducted by @Stewfsmith which makes the physical an absolute must.”
