Midweek Beats & Pieces vol.32

Reading and listening tips, ten years of Quarantine by Laurel Halo

Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING:

Not much to report back on this week. I’m currently in the middle of working on a whole bunch of projects. Some of them will come out before the end of the year, and some of them will come out next year. I should probably find some time to do some more radio shows and DJ sets over the next couple of months, but we’ll see. Being able to relax is pretty great as well.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING/LISTENING TO:

Monira Al Qadiri has turned her gift for black humor to the subject of black gold, writes Valentin Diaconov. But is there more to these satires on petroculture than laughter in the dark? Valentin Diaconov for Art Agenda.

Women of British Reggae: In this four-part radio series, NTS celebrates the women of British reggae, combining insights from the past and voices of the present to explore the history of reggae from a female perspective.

Tone Glow 085: Jeff Mills & Jean-Phi Dary: An interview with DJ, producer, and composer Jeff Mills and keyboardist Jean-Phi Dary.

Imagine a Bookcase, Full of Moana Writers: Ahead of the inaugural Flying Fetu festival, Tulia Thompson interviews Co-Directors Grace Teuila Iwashita-Taylor and Lana Lopesi on creating dedicated space for Moana writing. For The Pantograph Punch.

These 10 Latin American Sound Artists Are Expanding What Ambient Music Can Be: A generation of experimentalists are defying colonial assumptions and stretching the limits of sound. Isabelia Herrera for Pitchfork.

MUSIC:

Thee Samara Alofa returns with a nice slice of rhythmic dream-pop for the early 2020s. ILYSM (I Love You So Much) combines a strident shuffle with reality-melting melodies and a vocal that ascends towards the heavens. More of this please.

I think Sweetheart is Auckland singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Sean James Donnelly, aka SJD’s first full-length album in five years? If you’re familiar with Sean’s pop/soul/electronica oeuvre, you know he rarely misses, and Sweetheart is no exception here. That said, there are a couple of electronic singer-songwriter tracks on this album that just knock it out of the ballpark, in particular, ‘i just can’t wait’.

Don’t you love it when two musicians you respect and rate quietly come together through Instagram and record a collaborative album via file transfers? If you’re wondering, I’m talking about Crawl, the first duo album from Liquid Liquid percussionist Dennis Young and the Los Angeles-based photographer/musician Danny Scott Lane. Both of these guys are prolific music-makers who rarely repeat themselves and have wonderfully explorative impulses. Across Crawl’s eight tracks, they play off each other brilliantly. It’s a wonderful coming together of generations, coasts, concepts and admirations.

LAUREL HALO, QUARANTINE

In April 2012, the American electronic musician and DJ Laurel Halo released her debut album, Quarantine, through Kode9’s Hyperdub Records. Earlier this week, she reflected on that release in her newsletter. Reading Laurel’s words got me thinking back, and as it turns out, I reviewed Quarantine at the time for the New Zealand-based music news website Under The Radar. I’ve re-produced my review in full below.

Laurel Halo, Quarantine (Hyperdub)

9/10

By Martyn Pepperell

Quarantine is the debut album from New York by way of Michigan electronic composer and singer Laurel Halo. Her first release on Hyperdub Records, Quarantine sees Halo expanding on her diversely built-up soundworld, as constructed over the course of her respective 2010 and 2011 EPs King Felix and Hour Logic (both released via Hippos In Tanks). Trading in a psychedelic, environmental take on techno and pop music, the songs on Quarantine, in general, work in a stargazed singer-synthwriter configuration, locally comparable to a highly detailed cyborg dystopia version of Glass Vaults, with increased degrees of sonic friction.

Environmental as opposed to ambient, the twelve ornately detailed compositions on Quarantine, are constructed around drum programming and synth patterns that explicitly suggest movement and travel. Rendering the concept of journey through bubbling digital tones that suggest the flow of water through a river of toxic sludge, sweeping pads and tones which imply expansive empty (perhaps abandoned) spaces, and twitching blips with a shooting star redolent quality, Halo proceeds to roughly rub these inhuman, yet oddly naturalistic sound configurations against her own relatively unprocessed singing voice. Not a traditionally good singer per se, Halo's performances succeed through flawed humanity, creating a perfect counterpoint or, as a Japanese anime fan would put it "ghost in the shell" to the cold futurist tendencies explored in her digital orchestration.

The aforementioned phrase "roughly rub" is key here, as across the course of Quarantine's running time, what could initially appear to be a sleek, chrome-plated elevator pride of perfectly placed atmosphere, slowly reveals more and more of a tortured internal state. Within the lyrical quotient of Halo's work, this dark, twisted side becomes more apparent with each repeat listen, crystallising in lines such as "You'll make love to cold bodies" (on 'MK Ultra'). Along the same train of thought, on numbers such as 'Holoday', a vocal snippet ("Just want to be with you") is juxtaposed with rough, fuzzy textures which suggest anything but romantic coupling. Fed into song titles like 'Carcass' and 'Tumor' and the excellent Makoto Aida helmed cover artwork (which on closer inspection reveals manga-style Japanese schoolgirls disembowelling themselves), with repeated listening, the violence, trauma and obsession embedded in Quarantine become increasingly apparent; and inversely - increasingly cathartic.

In this era, there are a lot of musicians currently active who would like to believe they are fashioning work with a slow smouldering depth, a sort of sonic weight that will truly reward the listener who listens the most; and the closest. In reality, especially within the shifting landscape of sounds and genres, Halo intersects; music this loaded and this ready to be unpacked and understood through an increasingly intense series of chambers of understanding is tellingly rare. Sadly, given the constant stream of information out there, and the general disposable attitude associated with hyperlinked electronic music, it's hard to say how many will really make a true pilgrimage to the centre of Quarantine. I've been there, you should venture forth as well.  

FIN.