54. Laurel Halo

Director's cut version of a review published in The Wire #340, June 2012

Laurel Halo – Quarantine (Hyperdub)

The songs of Laurel Halo's first full album commute the unease that lurked behind the rhythmic psychedelia of last year's Hour Logic and Antenna to a level both more prominent and more subtle. A generalised wrongness fills and warps their bodies, as if the very resonant air that carries these sounds was toxic to breathe. Bass pulses and synthesizer flux seem to suggest structures that, on closer inspection, melt away. Time seems to telescope in parts and expand in others, so that the chorus of the opening “Airsick” seems to emerge at varying durations. “Joy”, which starts out with what sounds like the vocal intro to one of the more synth-pop numbers from King Felix, turns into a shifting, wailing field of analogue noise. Vocals, high in the mix, seem to go off-key, although, the next second, the idea of a stable key appears illusory; she chomps syllables into awkward shapes, such that it may take you a few listens to grasp the line “you'll make love to cold bodies” in “MK Ultra”. 'Songs' is both too enclosing and too sloppy a term: they're smears of technological colour that spill across the canvas, but far from abstract, or just abstract enough – a heavy smudging of outlines – to be perturbing.

In spite of the third track's title, there's little joy on this record, a real contrast to Halo's previous work; the sampled pop exclamations on “Holoday” – “Just wanna be with you” – are deployed as an ironic counterpoint to the vocal's dark, fractured moans; closer “Light + Space” summons a sliver of rapture with its xeroxed synths and plumes of major-key vocals. From the intimations of aerial death on “Airsick” to the cries of “nothing was in my heart, there is no-one here” on “Tumor”, it's pervaded by numbness, claustrophobia, pain intensified to the point of dissociation. But it's hard to shift the sense that this is linked to the sheer contemporaneity of her work (Giorgio Agamben: “the contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time”). The strangeness of her work, the difficulty in adjusting to its time-space, is perhaps really a function of the backward state of present music culture. These songs are anamorphic sound-paintings, that, from the right angle, turn out to be leering skulls. Such a perspective casts the entire surrounding musical landscape as a blur.