Laurel Halo - Atlas

The Quietus

“When we try to remember a dream… often we only retain a skeleton of the dream images… a vague grid, through which fragmented forms emerge and disappear as quickly as they came,” wrote Czech painter František Kupka in his notebook. His stunning painting ‘L’Eau (La baigneuse)’, a post-impressionistic prelude to abstraction with a featureless nude female in a lake, gorgeously complements Laurel Halo’s composition ‘Naked to the Light’, a celestial soundwave of immersed jazzy piano chords and ethereal strings. It’s music that evokes the feeling of a half-remembered dream.

Since the days of Freud, Jung & co, water is amongst the ,most common symbols for the unconscious, the nooks and crannies of our psyche. Unsurprisingly, Halo describes her new record as a “road trip music for the subconscious.” The aquatic – or rather sub-aquatic – patina is central to Atlas, which marks a departure from her previous work. Even though the idea of listening to another quarantine-inspired ambient record might seem off-putting, the rewards are simply too tempting.

I can’t escape associations to late 19th/early 20th century art. Atlas feels like an example of what I’d call ‘watercolour ambient music’. It makes me think of tonalism, the American artistic movement inspired by the French Barbizon style and characterised by subtle gradations of the colour tones. Artists would emphasise mood, feeling, evocation and suggestion. When I hear the pensive piece ‘Late Night Drive’, I imagine the painting ‘Nocturne in grey and silver’ by James Whistler as the view from the window of my car. Listening to ‘Reading the Air’, I see myself as J. M. W. Turner while he was working on his masterpiece ‘Sea and Sky’. Halo’s music provides strong poetic associations, the kind you get when presented with sublime natural phenomena and inexplicable events. ‘Sick Eros’ boasts a transcendental aura, something we associate with other Turner’s works such as ‘Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)’.

Atlas brings forth a sonic tapestry of soothing electroacoustic textures with contributions by Bendik Giske, James Underwood, Lucy Railton and Coby Sey. There are submerged impressionistic soundscapes that nod to Basinski’s piece ‘Watermusic II’, improvised piano sketches in the tradition of Satie’s furniture music and gossamer string arrangements à la Jelinek. Her music is defined by an ‘aquarelle effect’, with her translucent sounds operating as flowing watercolours. While structurally different, Julian Zyklus’ release Waterpiano, which shares similar sensibilities, springs to mind.

A few years ago, I swam in a moonlit Adriatic sea while high on molly, and the silky-soft piano melodies of ‘Sweat, tears or sea’, a kind of underwater tribute to Debussy, take me back to that moment, which felt like floating in mercury. There is a deep sense of yearning permeating Halo’s compositions, yet they are also marked by a sense of hope and optimism – the kind of transient joie de vivre one experiences when the last rays of light kiss your skin before sundown. Listening to the title composition, I remember standing at Antigonea, Albania, an ancient city allegedly built by the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus on a hill overlooking the Drino Valley. There I observed unique cloud formations above the Mali i Gjerë Mountains while a distinct Ionian light transfixed them in an awe-inspiring natural spectacle – a dream image.

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Atlas by Laurel Halo

This Atlas, like many others, collates various depictions of the world from above. One envisages a book containing pages of clouds as viewed from an above-diagonal: that moment during a flight's ascent when they're rendered in a seamless blanket, like the world's secret upper floor. All of the contributors on this album (Halo in the company of Bendik Giske, Lucy Railton and James Underwood) sound like they're rising up out of their own heads, enrapt in their own internal monologue, plumes of disparate thought pooling into an orchestra of introversion hanging in the sky, far up above the players themselves. The results are wonderful, albeit authentic to the actual sensation of wonder: uplifted, yet also churning with uncertainty, negotiating sensations too lively to yet settle into fixed form. Some atlases makes the boundaries between entities and energies easier to comprehend – this one does the precise opposite, mapping the mind as it calibrates to the new, in all its queries and contradictions.

Somehow this experience is also gently cathartic, like the moment of quiet after a day spent talking. The inner voice revives itself in a rush of warmth, filling the space left by the departure of other people. "Sweat, Tears Or The Sea" seems to depict a house pianist after closing time, venue keys sprawled on the stool, setlist crumpled and defunct on the stand, as the player indulges, half-awake, in meanderings purely for their own enjoyment for the first time that night. These moments of textural minimalism are fleeting in a record otherwise bustling with strings, keys, saxophones and electronic that swirl in the ears like high-altitude winds. At its most dense, Atlas resembles a heart rendered in vapours; sections of the shape are always swelling as others are subsiding; some clusters of sound successfully corral others into harmonic alignment, while others rush through eachother as colliding shoals. There is one overt human voice throughout the whole thing – courtesy of Coby Sey, briefly, during the latter part of "Belleville" – and its entrance is alarming. The listener is sucked back into the body for about 20 seconds, making clear the strength and distance of the soul's departure across the rest of this beautiful collection.

Pitchfork

Read Philip Sherburne’s review of the album.

Resident Advisor

In early 2020, Laurel Halo started working on Atlas during a residency in the Pacific Palisades. The program offered a chance to rekindle her childhood l..