Room40 – 26th June 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
It’s rare that an album sits so far beyond the realms of any genre that it’s difficult to know where to start in discussing it. Helen Svoboda’s Headwater is one such rare album.
The pitch describes Headwater as ‘a stream of fragmentation, individuality and wholeness, shaped by disparate and complementary aspects of Helen Svoboda’s solo practice. Sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ run throughout the record to form an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved songform. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself’.
Lately I’ve been quite amazed by how little people I know can actually remember from times past. I don’t mean the fact that friends from school can’t remember people from our year we weren’t eve n friends with (although I do), but just events and things in general. I find myself haunted by memories stretching as far back to when I was just three, but most people I know can barely remember what they did last week, or what they had for dinner. Seeing my mother slide rapidly into a haze of dementia forgetfulness in recent months, I’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting on memory on many levels. I’ve long considered it analogous to a vast ROM drive, but have wondered about the means of access to the stored files. And as much as these contemplations have led to some dark places, I’ve become more accepting of different capacities for recollection, while still feeling a degree of fear for the future.
The ensemble she’s has assembled certainly makes for an unusual combination, consisting as it does of Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production). Double bass is rare. Two double basses – in a quartet – is unheard of, and makes for some incredibly unconventional instrumental interplay across the sixteen compositions.
Many of those compositions are brief – under two minutes in duration – but convey so much.
‘Veins’, released in advance of the album and featuring vocals from Selma Savolainen is sparse, ethereal, and is representative – to some extent, although the range of the compositions is such that no one piece could ever truly summarise its contents.
The album’s first song, ‘If’, is a deeply atmospheric amalgamation of stylistic elements. In many respects, it’s predominantly a folk song, and one built on foundations of curving drones and rousing vocals. It’s stirringly evocative, and calls to mind in some ways the earthy feel of Wardruna, only without the tribal percussion or sense of the cinematic. This feels more inwardly-focused and reflective, but is certainly no less powerful.
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‘Child’ begins almost acapella save for a sparse, low-key drone, but builds to a wailing crescendo, and Svoboda’s voice is nothing short of captivating, conveying so much more than the words alone. In contrast, the instrumental ‘Blur’ is a sawing strain of dissonance as a cacophony of strings scrape and scratch discordantly to create a nerve-jangling tension. It may only be two minutes in duration, but it’s ten minutes in intensity.
There’s spacey experimentalism and loose jazz leanings on ‘Void of Space’, and ‘Evening Hepuli’ brings high drama and breathy, operatic hysteria over stop/start strings which ring and reverberate. The final piece, ‘Hepuli Earworm’ is commanding, in places a wild jazz frenzy, occasionally inviting comparisons to The Necks, in others conjuring expansive soundscapes and moments with real emotional edge.
Headwater is not a straightforward album: it’s quirky and unconventional, and not always immediately accessible. But it’s inventive, imaginative, truly unique in composition and delivery, and, in parts, incredibly powerful.
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Photo: Celeste de Clario
Aural Aggravation 