himukalt

Himukalt is the recording project of Ester Kärkkäinen, who works out of the Nevada desert with noise, voice, electronics, and a photocopier. She took the name from an Estonian-English dictionary found in a thrift store outside Reno, where it sits as an adverb meaning "lustfully." The music is assembled from what most recordings throw out: hiss, the whirr of stray interference, the breath between words, all of it cut apart and copied and looped until it hardens into rhythm, with vocals pitchshifted and distorted past the point of language. Since 2016 she has issued more than a dozen albums through Tesco Organisation, Malignant Records, Total Black, Old Europa Cafe, The Helen Scarsdale Agency, and No Rent, and she records with Harriet Kate Morgan as Scopophilia. The long-running Sex Worker cycle, drawn from her early twenties working clubs in and around Reno, runs through the recordings and through a parallel body of xerox collage and photography that has been exhibited internationally and collected in book form.