David Helpling
A new album by David Helpling and Jon Jenkins
Further details are at the Deep Exile website
avid Helpling is becoming
increasingly well known. His latest album, Treasure, a joint effort with Jon Jenkins, shows his skills at their highest ever. His extensive experience of film and media are evident in his masterful attention to detail and precision. Combined with his unique ability to convey depths of emotion and understanding, the result is a masterpiece that lives up to its title.
David's mastery of technique is second to none - comparison with others does nothing to convey the texture or balance of his creations, and the success of his DHM Design music company is testimony to his abilities. Look for his name in film credits.
David's compositions are crafted with great care and subtlety. They never flag, and through their subtle gradations of colour, texture and depth create a complex and strangely haunting landscape that slowly evolves to take the spirit to new plains. He achieves balance between so many elements - mood, texture, speed - that one feels in the presence of a great talent. The moods vary greatly, always intriguing and suggesting far more than meets the ear. Careful listening identifies many minor elements, like the tiny particles of colour in an impressionist painting. No one element predominates, but the overall effect conveys a very distinct identity.
His recent successes with film have confirmed the versatility of his talent: David is equally at ease composing for an Indian ear as he is for psychological thrillers and mysteries.
Treasure
(with Jon Jenkins)
Released June 2007. See Deep Exile website
Treasure lives up to everything I have come to expect from David Helpling. His experience with film music is evident, as is his versatility and insistence on perfection. There is an immense range of emotion in the many varied tracks on this album, which resembles a journey through light and dark, at first into the cave of the album art, then continuing into a world of ice and finally home. Deep compassion in the title track is matched by deep reflection in the more meditative Frozen Channel and the introspective Now More Than Ever. David creates a detailed musical canvas suggesting great depth, compassion and wealth, while still managing to surprise and delight. Treasure is the perfect title.
Grand Collusion offers a soundscape canvas where explosive detail is picked out on piano and then dissolved into slide guitar. There is intrigue here, the opening of a story, perhaps, with a long history and drama. The title track is one of reconciliation and caress: a small child's delicate perfection and the hope it carries into the world, with a suggestion of the energy within.
The Knowing, which follows, begins with lengthy confusion - drifting through doubts in an effort to understand some enigma, recollecting and accepting in cycles of thought before a distant light dawns and grows slowly into something more distinct, moving towards clear understanding, growing relentlessly and unstoppably to explode into an ecstacy conveyed by overdrive guitar - this is what lead guitar was created for! The climax is repeated again and again until the full weight of understanding here is finally accepted, and we move on, all doubts gone. This track never fails to send a huge rush of endorphins down my spine.
This first section is the light at the entrance: as we move further into the cave other details emerge of a more sombre hue, and the album changes to nocturnal mode with Beyond Words and Into the Deep. Music is beyond words, and far more eloquent at a basic level. "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture", said Frank Zappa, and as I try to describe this album I agree.
The cave echoes in Into the Deep, with strange creatures in the shadows and an eerie light suffusing the dark. Not a Soul, Not a Sound has a cinematographic quality - a landscape, in a world of ice perhaps, a unique frozen beauty fixed seemingly for an eternity. The ice persists in the following Frozen Channel, but here the displays are celestial, the aurora borealis streaming as passing seconds on piano echo over the silent waters.
Imperceptibly we enter Now More Than Ever, which recalls previous compositions. We are drifting, but memories flash into and out of our vision in what seems like a single moment explored in infinite detail. This Day Forward continues the exploration, but here there is an undertone of danger and confrontation, some final decision. Which is taken in The First Goodbye. Here as on previous albums the closing coda piece recapitulates the moods and conveys what David communicates best: understanding, final understanding.
And all shall be well
And all manner of things shall be well.
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire,
And the fire and the rose are one.
Treasure: Released June 2007. Available at the Deep Exile website.
Sleeping on the Edge of the World
On this, David's second release, a complex and haunting soundscape slowly evolves to take the listener deeper and farther. With a balance between so many elements, the moods vary greatly, always intriguing and suggesting far more than meets the ear. This work has symphonic qualities: the listener passes through a constantly evolving landscape, or nightscape, of mood and colour, underscored by an almost ubiquitous mood of reconciliation in which all emotional elements are carefully measured and no one overwhelms.
After the prelude of Rain Falls, which sets a nocturne-like preface to the work, the title track explores a cyclical but subtly shifting sequence punctuated by distant thunder, beginning from a simple statement of theme and moving to a constantly expanding setting that then yields to a piano melody before evanescing into a night skyscape of shimmering beauty. A masterful composition. Deepest Days seems to invert the structure of the preceding title track, drifting in an out of a fast rhythmical and abstract chorus before fading into nothingness.
Listen to the opening of Sticks and Stones, a night landscape of reflection pointed sharp by a western guitar, perhaps in the desert, and as a cloud passes over the moon we feel some inner reconciliation. As the piece evolves we hear something like an explanation and exploration, ending with a recapitulation of the basic terms - the structure is almost classical in discipline. Again in Moon Dreaming Thunder an initial statement, handed through piano with electric guitar counterpoint with a distant but menacing percussion, resolves itself in a moment of beauty, and is gone. Moon dreaming thunder indeed.
The faster Soul of a Child follows, a fast paced up-beat composition which nevertheless manages to question its own vitality. This piece never fails to move me, as a child perhaps might, through the doubt it seems to cast on childhood or the attention it draws to the vulnerability and ultimate tragedy awaiting all innocence, the skull beneath the skin, the memento mori. The coda at the close hints at the soul's ascent to heaven. Again, a masterly piece.
A calm moment follows in All Things End, perhaps an empty room that was once full but now resounds with absence. Four simple chords frame starpoints of recollection, while a deep unidentifiable ground recurs to pace the other minor elements occasionally intruding. A piece for meditation, seemingly recapitulating a moment, a day, or perhaps a life.
Deeper Still intrigues deeply by the timbres David creates to weave a background to the reverberating points of piano melody. Shadows of Far Night is something of a climax to the album, suggesting dénouement and resolution, restating some of the thematic elements of previous tracks but skilfully reconciling them.
The final track, Promise, as its title suggests, sets off to explore new territory but without forgetting the landscape already travelled. There is something of sadness here - the fundamental tragedy of life - suggesting great loss, but accepting the inevitability of change and the relative insignificance of this little life.
I have studied and listen to a wide variety of music, mostly classical, and play a number of instruments. I first listened to Sleeping on the Edge of the World while reading Alan Guth's "The Inflationary Universe", and I could not have chosen a better accompaniment to the description of primeval mystery which Guth conveys with fascination. Since then, however, I have listened to the album without any book, in many settings, and am constantly moved by its beauty and subtlety. David knows how to play the emotions, to create hope and joy, to convey despair and tragedy, and reconcile the two with great skill. Not many artists manage that.
David Helpling has become an anchor point in something I first explored as a genre called "ambient music", but clearly he is much more than that. I look forward to many more compositions from him.
Film music
Cold Storage
This contains some of David's best work ever. The film has yet to be released, but the music is so atmospheric and eloquent that, with a little help from the titles, I was able to imagine the plot, more or less. There is great depth and feeling in this music, nostalgia, pain, tension, longing, drama, suspense - each explored in depth and unforgettably - not to mention the chills of the horror film genre which he has honed to perfection. The orchestration is perfect, with close attention to detail, and the Steinway Grand has never sounded better, thanks to help in the studio from Jon Jenkins. The titles are revealing, but for the final track, Understanding, no title was necessary: nothing conveys the emotion of final realization as this does. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.
Trade Offs – A film by Vikram Yashpal
Music by David Helpling - Fusion with Indian styles and instruments ...
Soundtrack available at Spotted Peccary
DVD available with free CD of the soundtrack at indiaplaza.com
Night Feeders
Horror: Available from Amazon
Classic chills and thrills. Must have been a real party in the studio making this soundtrack!
Albums
Treasure (with Jon Jenkins)
Released June 2007. See Deep Exile website
Sleeping on the Edge of the World
Between Green and Blue
David's first album - available at Spotted Peccary
