Have you ever melted a vinyl record over a bowl in the oven? I haven't, but it's something that I witness evidence of at craft fairs all the time. Whenever I spot candy bowls, or what have you, fashioned out of records, I can't help but wonder what it might sound like if you could manage to run a needle across the whole of one of the grooves. I bet it would sound pretty gnarly, or at least as gnarly as Helena Celle's If You Can't Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don't Deserve Me At My Best. Helena Celle is the longest-running side project of composer and Scottish sound alchemist Kay Logan. Her sonic creations can have a truly lovely, fractal, and interstitial grain to them that makes them seem like their bleeding through dimensions and cross-pollinating timelines through curved space, and If You Can't Handle You is no exception. Conceived as an interlocutor with her 2016 LP If I Can't Handle Me At My Best, Then You Don't Deserve You At Your Worst; the present EP directly addresses EDM, jungle, and the like, in the same manner that its predecessor concerned itself with abstractly sensual soundscapes. Only now, it appears that the modular rebounds and clouds of atmospheric density present on that earlier release have been eased by their own flaking entropy into shedding their plaquey exteriors until they are rounded off into frantic pinball-like objects, bouncing off satellite dishes and triggering fountains of technicolor light displays in their wake. Peering over the neon dividing line of a track like "Ennobled Reception of The Excellector (My Face When Mix)," you will encounter a civilization-wide freak out of alien forms, all sucking in space dust with panting breaths and exhaling a moist vapor of Euro-house scented perfume that further fuels their galactic gyrations, while taking a trip down the slopes of "Snow-Filled Chalice of My Magonian Exile (ft Jennifer Walton)" reveals an accommodating traunch of momentous acid house slush grooves upon which you can skim like a breaching dolphin while catching laser beams between your teeth to let them recoil between your jaws and polish your veneers. In a kind of mirror trick, the final track, "Original Besttrack (Abe's Oddysee Extended Mix" brings the experience full circle, back to the strange, eerily comforting, and corridor-like sonic chambers of If I Can't Handle Me, only now with breakbeats bleeding through the walls, a final pleasant reminder of the curious, playful joy you've been invited to partake in as you leave the party at the album's conclusion. You might not have thought you deserved something so warped and wonderful in your life- thankfully, Helena Celle thought better of you.
