HELHESTEN are a three-headed sonic blitz, featuring the talents of Hannah Ellul, Ben Knight and Greg Thomas. Two of them live in Deptford and one of them lives in the Essex countryside and you can hear the sunshine and the tower blocks in their music.

Employing clarinet, beat-up guitar, effected-voice and a variety of percussion, Helhesten craft an aching flux of soaring and swamped-out sounds. Whether the band are in the throes of a frenzied onslaught or an equally ravaged accumulating pastoral jam, they never escape the tranced-out web, which pulls them together as much as it holds them apart.

'SPLIT' W / CHOPS

Dithyramb (excerpt)

UTR013 | 12" | 9 tracks, 40 mins | Aug 2008

For this, their debut LP - a split with wild, damaged-dance band Chops - Helhesten bring us a single piece, "Dithyramb". It's a collision of energies, stretching and distorting the inherited sounds and shapes of records, full of yowl and lo-fi discord, with the zeal of the gutter-punk, free music underground that's making ecstatic noises across the globe right now.

A dissonant clatter of precariously structured outer-rock pieces is bound fast by revolving guitar and viola drone, piano clonk and crumbling tape loops. From these uncertain foundations, the clarinet and vocal squall attack, build and finally fall out completely, only for the beat up three-stringed Fender to lurch forward again for one final flare-up.