Helena Celle If You Don't Deserve You At Your Worst, Then I Don't Deserve Me At My Best

Dedicated 21st Century polymath Kay Logan continues to expand her soundworld in every direction at once with her Helena Celle alias. A maximalist internal landscape of broken Jungle patterns, distorted synths and heavily warped instrumentation bent out of cognisance, »If You Can’t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don’t Deserve Me At My Best« is Logan’s most danceable, most fun and most gloriously congealed record to date.

Conceived in part as a response to her 2016 debut release »If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst,« 2023’s update employs similar principles (degrading technology, the joy of chance, an outsider’s gaze onto the dance floor, an embracing of the occult) to delirious effect. If »I Can’t Handle« was lo fi and fragile in its technoid recasting of dance music, here Logan’s confidence allows a frantic playfulness that retains the spontaneity of all her output. It’s the work of a creative spirit revelling in the possibilities of sound, rhythm, texture and pattern.

Helena Celle’s music opens up psychic space in front of the listener and invites them in. In this world, sounds and tropes once recognisable are rendered fractal, spectral and continually melting in and out of recognition. Simply put, Helena Celle might be detouring Drum & Bass, Techno and Breakbeat with a prankster’s grin but the result is pure ecstasy crushed into a part of the listener’s consciousness hitherto untroubled.

Since her 2016 debut, Logan has released music as Time Binding Ensemble, Otherworld, in groups Anxiety and Herbert Powell and myriad variations on the Helena Celle moniker. This album is a riposte to her debut and updates its principles. Joyful, degraded Jungle breaks, Cyberpunk synth meltdown, noise solos, true head music, like the furthest Aphex Twin being deep friend in a Glasgow backwater.