By the time “Arise” came out in February, it had already been through a lot of hands. Glasgow psych-rock band Helicon had sent more than twenty demos back and forth with Los Angeles producer and DJ AL LOVER before the nine tracks that made the record went into Castle of Doom with Tony Doogan. James Ewen filmed the process for the 20-minute “We Sound Like Helicon“, and now the album is going out again, with Fuzz Club due to release a remix LP later this year.
The remix record brings in artists connected to Mogwai, Belle & Sebastian, Ride, The Black Angels, Los Bitchos, Swedish band The Janitors and Tremours/LA Witch, along with D.ross, Declan Welsh and AL LOVER. It also has one song that never made “Arise” at all. “Bring You Round” was the demo AL LOVER kept pushing for during the original sessions, and when the remix record started coming together he found a way to bring it back.
A lot of “Arise” started with Helicon sending something across the Atlantic and waiting to hear what AL LOVER did with it. His first instinct was not to dismantle a song just because he could.
“I was listening to hear what they were up to. What was the vibe they were felling and how could I add to that. Just trying to accentuate what was already there.”
The bigger change came from how he built music in the first place. Helicon had long worked as a guitar band. Start there, add parts, keep building. AL LOVER was much happier letting a loop repeat, sitting on a groove and leaving a section relatively bare.
“At first, that could feel unfinished,” John-Paul Hughes said. “But it forces you to stop filling every available space and trust the repetition, texture and rhythm, which became fundamental to the feel and sound of ARISE.”
You can hear that shift in the basic ingredients of the record. Helicon still work with guitars, sitar and electronics, but the loops give the rhythm more room and make repetition do more of the work. Parts can sit where they are for longer. The band do not have to answer every empty space with another layer.
That is quite a change to negotiate when there are nine people contributing. The current Helicon credits run through John-Paul, Gary Hughes, Anna McCracken, Mark McLure, Graham Gordon, Seb Jonsen, Billy Docherty, Mike Hastings and Declan Welsh. Seven of them make up the live band. John-Paul and Gary started Helicon in East Kilbride, and the band have been with Fuzz Club since 2017.
Nine contributors do not mean nine equal votes every time something has to be killed.
“We are pretty brutal at critiquing whether we like an idea early in the process. But we’ve been around each other long enough not to take it personally. If one of us doesn’t like an idea, a quick way to kill it is to compare it to something you know the other person hates, ha ha.”
If several members are cold on something, it is usually finished. Everybody shapes their own part, and years together have left Helicon with what John-Paul calls a “collective mind and taste”. When somebody has to make the last decision, though, that person is usually him.
“Somebody eventually has to decide what moves forward and what doesn’t. I’m usually the person driving the overall idea of what a record should be. That doesn’t mean I’m always right or that I get everything my own way. I have no interest in that.”
He is equally clear that a song still needs the rest of the band to get anywhere. “If a song is going to realise its potential, everyone must contribute. But if a few of us aren’t into it, it’s dead.”
“Not A Thought” took some of that usual protection away. Most songs began as Helicon demos before AL LOVER got involved. This one started with loops from his side, so the band were walking into an idea that nobody in Helicon had already spent weeks defending.
“It removed the comfort blanket of beginning as Helicon,” John-Paul said. “Normally, we would give Al something that already had our fingerprints all over it and see how he disrupted it.”
Declan wrote lyrics the night before they recorded. Tony Doogan later changed their shape again in the final edit, taking them from a more narrative form into a mantra. John-Paul considers the song one of the clearest examples of what worked about the whole collaboration because everybody was reacting to something unfamiliar from the start.
AL LOVER got something equally unfamiliar back.
“They shaped it into something that I could have never fathomed. Harmonies, melodies, rhythms that I just couldn’t have ever come up with. That’s the thing about a group of folks working together vs a solo artist, there’s so many different personalities going into it. It becomes a whole new thing.”
That kind of exchange is familiar ground for AL LOVER. His own work has moved through trip-hop, dub, synthesised krautrock and dark ambient using samples, drum machines, analogue synths and live instruments. He has remixed Osees and Night Beats, toured across the US and Europe, been resident DJ at Levitation and Desert Daze, and worked with Goat, Anton Newcombe, Peaking Lights, The KVB, White Fence, Cairo Liberation Front and The Black Angels. His wider musical reference points include J Dilla, DJ Shadow, DJ Muggs, Lee Scratch Perry, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Cluster.
Doing “Arise” mostly at a distance still caused some basic problems.
“For staters, I couldn’t understand what the hell any of them were saying lol,” AL LOVER wrote.
The accent was the easy joke. The harder part was the private vocabulary a band builds after years of working together. Helicon knew what their own shorthand meant. Translating that through email and calls to somebody in Los Angeles was slower.
“Once we were all in person together, I think those barriers were broken down and the vibes did the talking.”
AL LOVER has spoken about that part of the collaboration in pretty simple terms too.
“The process of working with Helicon on this project has been nothing but a joy. It’s so nice to have music be the conduit for human connection. This is an ongoing theme with any creative endeavour that I’ve undertaken. I hope that connectivity reaches through the music to the listener, helping them feel like a participant in the music, not just passive observers.”
“Bring You Round” is where the story gets a little messier. AL LOVER loved the demo and argued for it, but it did not survive the final cut.
“There was one demo, ‘Bring you round’ that I loved and pushed for but didn’t make the initial cut but will be in the upcoming remix record. At the end of the day I think all the songs that made the record belonged on it but it’s nice to know that this track will see the full light of day in a different context. Close but given its own shine.”
Its return is not a case of someone taking the rejected demo and simply remixing it. While talking through the new LP, AL LOVER suggested putting one original song among all the remixes. “Bring You Round” was sitting right there.
“When discussing the remix Al I’m I had suggested that having an original song that isn’t a remix could be a fun thing and saw it as an opportunity to reintroduce the idea of working that song in the mix. I mentioned it to JP and he had the band track the parts out from the demo so I could go deeper with it. I’m glad it worked out because I think that’s one really deserves some shine.”
John-Paul had Helicon replay and record the parts from the demo, then AL LOVER took those recordings back to work on the song again.
The rest of the remix album gets a much looser grip from his side. AL LOVER has intentionally avoided hearing too much before the finished record arrives.
“I honestly haven’t heard that many of them and don’t really want to until it’s in my hands on wax. I want the people involved to let their own voices speak through and see what happens. Even if I have an opinion, it’s more interesting to see what people develop without too much interference.”
John-Paul has heard enough to pick out Barry Burns of Mogwai’s version of “It Won’t Stop”. The original deals with fear, depression, loneliness and the thoughts that take over at night. Burns pushed the tension further and brought those parts of the song closer to the surface.
“It didn’t necessarily change how I hear the original, but he amplified just how much darkness was already sitting underneath it.”
There are plenty of Glasgow connections around “Arise”, which makes Helicon’s own relationship with the city slightly funny. Tony Doogan produced their first album and returned for their fourth. Chris Geddes of Belle & Sebastian plays piano on “Goodbye Cool World”. Barry Burns turns up on the remix record. Helicon still do not see themselves as a band that came through some organised Glasgow circle.
“We’ve never really been a part of the Glasgow scene or network as it were,” John-Paul said. “So getting these guys in was just a question of who we knew and trusted.”
Doogan came back because the first record had worked well and the band wanted to record with him again after several more years of writing and playing. Geddes is a friend. They asked him because they wanted his piano on that particular song.
“At the end of it all, you kinda look at the list of impressive names and think, ‘holy shit, that’s pretty cool’.”
Helicon have also worked before with Will Carruthers and Ride’s Mark Gardener, and their music has been played on BBC Radio 6 Music. “Arise”, recorded and produced by Doogan at Castle of Doom, is their fourth studio album. Fuzz Club released it on 13 February 2026, and it reached number 20 on the Official UK Albums Downloads Chart.
James Ewen reached the band through a completely different route. The Glasgow-based filmmaker and music journalist found Helicon on a playlist in 2017 while living in Toronto. He was listening to a lot of garage, neo-psychedelia and stoner rock at the time. Most of those bands were American, so he assumed Helicon were too.
He carried on listening for years without checking. Then he moved to Glasgow in 2022 and noticed they were playing locally.
“I did feel quite daft for not having done my homework, but when I heard those Glaswegian accents on stage I felt equal parts surprised and chuffed that they were from my home turf. That first time I saw them live, I just kept thinking, ‘How did such heavy psychedelia come from Scotland?'”
The first gig did not immediately produce a film. James saw Helicon several more times, and their set at Fuzz Club Eindhoven in 2024 finally pushed him into doing something about it.
“I felt I needed to capture this band now and spread the word about them any way I could.”
James has worked in documentaries, music videos and music journalism, with previous credits including Twelfth Day’s “Superwoman” video, the documentary “Down The Line” and Helicon’s “Château H (D.Ross Remix)” video, plus interviews with Hooveriii, Buffet Lunch and Shredd.
“We Sound Like Helicon” was originally going to be a different film. The plan was for the band to record “Arise” on an island in north-west Scotland. James expected to spend a lot of time on the place itself and watch how recording in an isolated studio affected what Helicon made.
The island plan fell through. The source does not give a more exact location or the reason it was abandoned. James turned his camera back towards the band and how a group that large actually functions.
“I shifted my focus to how the band function with so many members, what they all bring to the party and why they need an army to create their particular brand of psych. Actually, it was a bit of a blessing in disguise, because they’re such a funny bunch, the film had more time to show the comedy that ensued during the shoot.”
John-Paul hoped some of that personality had made it through. “We take what we do seriously, but not ourselves, and aren’t afraid to laugh at the whole fucking bullshit circus that goes with being a musician these days.”
Being inside the same band for years also means certain things stop looking unusual. John-Paul wondered whether somebody coming in fresh would notice how often Helicon change, how long they have kept at it and how little time the people involved spend looking back.
“When you’re always looking forward, you can forget to pause and appreciate what you’ve already done.”
Twenty minutes gave James another problem. He had far more footage than he could use. One long section followed Groovy and his sitar. James had the whole story: how Groovy became interested in it, where he imports the instruments from and how long he has spent learning to play. He had also filmed a lot of him because Groovy kept drawing the camera.
“I guess my eye was always drawn to his energy and seeing how he commands that sitar of his,” James said.
The sequence worked, but it gave one member too much space in a film about a much bigger band. He cut it.
Sometimes cutting himself out of the room mattered too. One song had a tricky time signature and was taking a lot of attempts to get right. James started to think that having a camera there was making concentration harder, so he left them to it and went to film some of the other members.
“It’s an inevitability that a camera’s presence alters actuality, but generally I found the band to be pretty at ease with me being there.”
James also filmed a longer conversation with John-Paul and AL LOVER about the history of psychedelia. Much more of it was recorded than eventually made the 20-minute documentary, because he felt a long history lesson would slow the film down.
“There is a scene in the film where Al and John-Paul touch on this. The interview delved into the history quite a bit, but I didn’t want this scene to feel like a lecture, so I cut the majority of it. I felt that the intended audience of the film would be pretty well-versed with the genre, and including anything more in that section would have disrupted the pace.”
He left enough there for people who wanted to follow it further themselves.
For John-Paul, the useful part of psychedelia is still curiosity. He has connected that with the way algorithms keep pushing people back towards things they already know.
“A lot of modern life pushes people into smaller worlds, smaller algorithms, and smaller communities, which leads to smaller thinking. We wanted to explore the value of curiosity, experimentation and a willingness to embrace the unfamiliar when so much of contemporary culture looks and sounds the same.”
AL LOVER is less certain that psychedelia is always the right word. Asked for one current record that still carries that curiosity for him, he picked Twisted Teens and “Florida Water Blues”.
“I don’t know if psychedelia is the right word but recently I’ve been introduced to the group “Twisted Teens” and their record “Florida Water Blues” and it’s the most fun, interesting, experimental, thing I’ve heard in a while. If psychedelia is curiosity, then I think these folks fit the bill. they are bouncing around and exploring more than I see a lot of bands doing these days. Mixing up a pot of gumbo that is confusing yet familiar and I love it. Big up to them!”
“We Sound Like Helicon” finally followed the band from home demos through live shows, interviews and the Castle of Doom sessions with AL LOVER. It launched around Helicon’s Made In Scotland Gigs showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on 17 August 2026, with further live events and screenings planned across the UK, Europe and the United States.
By then “Arise” had already outgrown the film James originally set out to make. The remix record now gives him another group of people he could point a camera at.
“It would be cool to interview everyone who has contributed to the remix record about their approach to their individual tunes, as well as hearing about their perception of the band and their music. It would be interesting to hear those outside perspectives and weave their answers into the existing film to see how that changes the flow and feel of it all. We Sound Like Helicon: Special Edition!”
