Halo trowels through a soft soil of idea-rich, melodic self-accompaniment, an impressive display of compositional dexterity, complementing bass and electric piano with a hefty role call of samplers and synthesizers, vintage, digital and vegetable.
[Release page] Evincing both nervous vulnerability and a certain arrogance, you’ve never heard anyone quite like Laurel Halo. Choosing to “sound dry” on this recording gives Halo a certain nearness and at times, “sensual ugliness” (her own words) that makes her more daring than those who prefer to bathe their faillible instruments in echo and reverb. On “Years,” your first reaction is to ask her to take a few steps back, please. Overdubbing makes “MK Ultra” a trebly canticle dressed in creme calico.
Halo trowels through a soft soil of idea-rich, melodic self-accompaniment, an impressive display of compositional dexterity, complementing bass and electric piano with a hefty role call of samplers and synthesizers, vintage, digital and vegetable. Quarantine is a kind of heartland America avant-garde puritanism, plain-spoken but couched in mystery stories imagined among endless wheat fields and under very big skies. She’s one of those special people who can see the moon at midday.
Her titles also swing between extremes of body consciousness—”Airsick” and “Carcass” and “Tumor”, “Joy” and “Wow”, which is repeated in her choice of cover art, a detail from a controversial and iconic painting by Makoto Aida, “Harakiri School Girls.” There’s no turning away from the confrontation with Halo’s voice. The listener emerges blinking and a bit sore but smarter.
Quarantine is available on Hyperdub. [Release page]
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