8/10/2020 0 Comments Quarantine Laurel Halo Rar
From the more dance-oriented pop of her Spring EP as King Felix, to the darker, dizzier Hour Logic release on Hippos In Tanks, Laurel Halo has staked her claim as one of the more intriguing figures in ambient-leaning art-pop.Alongside fellow synth-obsessives Motion Sickness of Time Travel and especially Julia Holter, Halos part of a breed of classically trained talents taking the blurry heat-haze of Hypnagogic pop into the more elegant, ethereal domains of former stalwarts like Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson.On Quarantine, her debut LP for Steve Goodmans hardcore continuum institution, Hyperdubone perhaps not all that surprising given some of his recent AR work like the signing of Hype Williams Dean Blunt Inga CopelandHalos forged what is often not only her most immersive and beautiful work to date, but one thats likely to be her most divisive as well.In an effort to lay her voice as emotionally bare and vulnerable as the songs she sings beneath them, Halo left her voice purposefully devoid of effects and digital smog.
The result, at times, is a broken-pitched wail that, as on Carcass or Years, jars the listener out of the warm, burbling electronic bed surrounding them. Its a confrontational approach, and one based on a kind of sonic honesty thats commendable if often hard to listen to; its an attempt to splice through this electronic glowand Halo knows how to glow. These are songs of awkwardness and loss, emergent distances between spaces once enclosed, gapless. The juxtapositions are critical; this bleak voice, one of quiet certainty about how quickly everything dissolves that borders on the aggressive for just that reason, underpinned musically by the sounds of embrace. Fortunately, for those of us undeterred by Halos vocal approach, Quarantine is an often breathtaking piece of emotive reverie that stands sonically as one of the years more consistently inviting ambient LPs. Nerve is all simmering pads and Space Odyssey synth pealsa floating Kubrickian fantasiaand Thaw opens with ambient bird-calls before segueing into the kind of slow-waltz pattern Cluster might have been proud of in the mid-70s. And of course Halo uses the aptly titled TumorThe signal keeps cutting out But one thing is clear Nothing grows in my heart There is nothing hereto create one of its most interesting sonic beds, a Japanese garden of far off chimes and wafting, shifting drone.
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