yek koo is the solo project of Los Angeles artist, composer, and performer Helga Fassonaki as she transverses the visual and poetic, through the exploration of space, body, voice, and movement. She can awaken a sound field with dissonance or fill it with cyclical sufi-trance tones that subtly color her vocal palette. Exploring the body as a vehicle for the movement of sound filtered through the responsive chambers of matter, air, and environment,
yek koo creates experience that is both emotively charged and spatially transformative. Aside from her free-form guitar, pocket trumpet, and vocal wailings in duo project Metal Rouge (with New Zealander Andrew Scott), she’s also known to resound trails of invisible effects and echoes through cassette players and movement, some of which can be heard on Head, released on Drawing Room Records in 2017. yek koo has performed at Zebulon, Cal Arts, Audio Foundation Gallery, The Lab, MOCA Los Angeles, Human Resources LA, Public Fiction, Wave Farm, The Stone, Vox Populi, and others.
LISTEN
SOUNDCLOUD
BANDCAMP
PURCHASE
EMERALD COCOON
DRAWING ROOM RECORDS
DISCOGRAPHY
2017 Head, yek koo CS (Drawing Room Records)
2014 l’interieur de la vue, yek koo + Zaimph CS (Obsolete Units)
2013 Desolation Peak, yek koo LP (Emerald Cocoon)
2012 Love Song for the Dead C, yek koo LP (Emerald Cocoon)
2011 Oh Woman / Flame Creation, Alone Together #3, Yek koo 7” (Emerald Cocoon)
2010 I Saw Myself, Yek koo CS (Stunned Records)
2008 Psychic Atonement for Land Deaths, Yek Koo CDr (Foxy Digitalis)
2007 Reality Cinder-Blocks, yek koo business card Cdr (CLaudia)
A Plea For A Night Desert Blue Moon Storm, Yek Koo Cdr, (Seymour Records)
2006 covert Loadstones, 7” lathe-cut solo (A Binary Datum)
Auckland Gems, Cdr I-V, Crease Container Project, Next Wave Festival (self-release)
2005 Wire and String Aerobics, solo Cdr (self-release)
Closed-Loop Vibration, 7” solo lathe-cut record (self-release)
PRESS
“…filled with space and air – a clattering marvel which grinds, howls, and drags like a dying dog.” – Review of Head, Bradford Bailey – The Hum, June 12, 2017
“…The voice is one of the strongest elements; forlorn plaints, hideous doomed wails and anguished sobs that you’d need a heart of stone to remain untouched.” – Review of Desolation Peak, Ed Pinsent – The Sound Projector, January 5, 2015
“…There’s a bloodymindedness to the way she can wrestle single blats of electricity into fistfuls of pugilistic fuzz, somehow connecting raggedy blues form with the most desolate No Wave. And her vocal phrasing is dazzling, rolling with the fuzz and disarticulating rhythms and line-soundings to the point of post-tongue…” – David Keenan – Volcanic Tongue, 2014
“For me, the album’s music isn’t about Fassonaki’s personal mythology. Rather, it’s enervating drone-giutar-psych-noise, like Spacemen 3 covering Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex, but if they were just one guy, and that guy was actually Vampira.” – Review of Desolation Peak, LA Record, 2014
“…sudden eruptions of usurped rock logic, entering into a kind of hallucinatory zone where female vocals orbit strange strings while amplifiers trade heat and static and that classic run-out-groove appeal of The Dead C’s classic recordings is smeared to the point of dissolve.” – Volcanic Tongue, 2012
“…This is an awkward, brittle, muddy record, like if Dirty Beaches dropped their pop side and went for mega-slow experimental psych weirdness instead. Unusual.” – NormanRecords on ‘Love Song for the Dead C’ LP, 2012
“Fassonaki gives voice to some primal, almost guttural utterances…” – Henry Hobson, April 26, 2014 in Culture, Music
“NYC” NOISE ALBUM OF THE MONTH: ZAIMPH & YEK KOO – Village Voice, April 2014
Review of Desolation Peak – Esoterrorist, April 7, 2014
Review of Desolation Peak – Decayke, January 31, 2014
Review of yek koo, ‘Alone Together’ – Raised by Gypsies, June 9, 2014
Review of ‘Love Song for the Dead C’ – Decoder Magazine, October 4, 2013
Interview: The Night We Talked For Hours – Decayke, May 1, 2013
Helga Fassonaki 
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