FEATURE:
Spotlight
that has been recording for years now, I have not yet spotlighted the great Laurel Halo. She is “an American composer, producer and musician, born in Detroit and based in Los Angeles. Her music is renowned for its nuance, character and focused vision, where ambient, musique concrète, low-end rhythms and improvisatory piano come together in a cohesive tapestry. She’s released a number of albums and collaborated across the realms of club music, concert music, film and fashion”. On 18th July, Laurel Halo is playing in London as part of a run of gigs. I wanted to explore her music, as the album, Midnight Zone, came out earlier in the year. A great soundtrack that followed her previous album, 2023’s Atlas. I am going to get to a few interviews and features with Halo. Treble Zine spoke with Laurel Halo about the Midnight Zone soundtrack and her work on it:
“Midnight Zone is the name not only of Laurel Halo‘s new record but also of the film it scores, an experimental dialogue-free journey following a beam of light cast by a lighthouse as it strikes the water and penetrates deeper and deeper into the ocean until it reaches the titular midnight zone, where surface light ceases to shine. It’s unclear whether the album and the film are separate objects; does the record score the film or is the film the imagistic completion of the record? Perhaps they are identical. Regardless, they are inseparable in a conceptual sense, capturing the same riven emotional state that journey from the knowable to the unknowable the light provides regardless of its chosen medium.
That Halo would produce a work so imagistically rich is not new for her. Her work has always tended toward the image-driven, with its rich use of textures mapping well to the harshness of digital decay, the robust organicism of wood and insects and the breathiness of wind. What I had not noticed was her slow accretion of the benthic in her work. Here, it is undeniable, reinforced by the film, the title, the cover, the track titles themselves, everything, let alone the sonic choices, which are so cold and vast and percolating with haze-like mystery. But on reviewing her work backward from this moment, the development toward this sonic space has been ongoing roughly since Possessed, another score of hers from 2020.
That record at the time struck me as extrapolating on that sense of wind and breath, using piano and strings to chart the tracelike lines of the air. But in retrospect, especially seeing as how those slower and more ambiently rich approaches to her sound developed over the record Dissent which she contributed to and her previous record Atlas with its who’s-who cast of experimental musicians, it was also the first trace of not just watery soundscaping but cold and dark water especially. To say Midnight Zone captures its subject matter well would be a steep understatement; its imagistic capture is brilliant, moving over the span of the material from the top layer sunlight zone, rich with additional instrumentation and brimming with life, into the progressively colder, bleaker and more abstract depths of the ocean.
This kind of conceptual ambient work is not for everyone, but our readers thankfully are the brave and adventurous sort. It follows a similar sonic arc to John Luther Adams’ Pulitzer-winning orchestral work Become Ocean. Like that esteemed work, it is not event-driven as much as mood-driven, privileging density of the sonic air over density of arrangement. It’s fascinating hearing an ambient work’s approach to density; it achieves a literal figure, feeing like your brain is being pressurized by the music and the intensity of its sub-bass frequencies rather than it referring to note density. That the record ends with the orchestral elements of “Sunlight Zone,” its opening piece, doesn’t feel like a bonus track as much as an intake of breath after hours in the dark. Halo is perpetually patient and gentle, in a manner at least; the violence of that bleak cold doesn’t really become apparent until that release at the end. She’s mastered this form of slow-accreting tension, paired against a film that is the perfect syncretic completion, or vice versa. It’s hard to imagine her remaining in this space after this. The sense of completion is abiding”.
There are a couple of other interview to come to. Let’s go to Flow State and their interesting interview. I hope anyone who does not know Laurel Halo will follow her and listen to her music. A tremendous composer and producer, I am keen to see what comes next for her. Her music is so atmospheric and beautiful. I do want as many people as possible to go and seek her out and listen to her music:
“What’s your earliest memory of music?
Oh, good question, hard to say. According to my mom it was the community festival Dally in the Alley in Detroit’s Cass Corridor when I was three and I called it “nice mucus.” But I don’t remember who was playing. I do remember seeing Phantom of the Opera when I was five.
What were your first recordings like and how did you make them?
My first recordings were… humble. I took a couple composition courses in college, and processed the MIDI instrument rendering of whatever minimal-adjacent piano/violin pieces I had written through pedals.
What were the albums / artists that early on influenced your sound?
In the early days I was listening to a lot of classic electronica and dream pop from Warp and 4AD (Aphex Twin, Autechre, Broadcast, Cocteau Twins), but also Burial, plus a lot of local Michigan music like Detroit techno, electro, minimal, music on Ghostly. Tadd Mullinix was a hero at the time. I lived in a show house in Ann Arbor called Arborvitae for a time and was exposed to a lot of folk, noise, klezmer, Detroit techno… plus just a lot of weird or unclassifiable music, for lack of a better description.
I had a couple close music friends and we would try to out-weird each other with our selections at the freeform station WCBN we all had shows on. It was a strange mix, especially considering I also had a lot of classical music in my bones from the prior 15 years of classical music education. I was like many piano kids obsessed with playing the more romantic/post-Romantic/impressionist composers like Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich.
How do you discover music these days? Any notable recent finds?
I guess it’s a mix of personal recommendations, YouTube, NTS, and online retailers like Boomkat or Bandcamp. I like texting friends I haven’t heard from in a while and just asking them what they’re listening to. More often than not you get some cool recommendations that way. On YouTube I have specific channels I’m subscribed to, and it’s often easier to find very niche music there that wouldn’t be uploaded to DSPs, or live performances. I love how with NTS it’s easy to find and save the tracks you like – it’s a great discovery tool. Boomkat have their signature Manchester-dapped reviews that are often so spot on. Bandcamp is great as it’s easy to browse label catalogs – labels that I often discover through all of the above, and so on… Right now I’m obsessed with this acoustic guitar Autechre covers album by this artist called Autechre Guitar by Shane Parish, I found that through Boomkat… [Ed: Featured in Flow State a couple weeks ago.]
Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.
My dad! He’s an amazing painter. He does amazing landscapes of industrial sites in Detroit as well as nature settings. When he was younger, he made quite psychedelic work. The cover of Chance of Rain was a drawing of his from his youth.
What are you working on next?
I have an acoustic upright waiting for me to come home from tour to write the next record with”.
I am going to end with Metal Magazine and their recent interview with Laurel Halo. She is someone I am quite new to but have instantly been captivated by her brilliance. I have explored her previous albums and she is such a talent. Everything she touches seemingly turns to gold:
“Inspired by this static-like sound and free-flowing drift, musician Laurel Halo builds a soundtrack for the film Midnight Zone by artist Julian Charrière. Released on March 13th, the tracks are grounding, uncanny, and transcendent”:
“What similarities do you see between the ocean and music?
Interesting question! Not sure if I possess the philosophical depth to answer it well. I guess both the ocean and music can seem quite immortal but are actually dependent on air. The history of music and the vastness of the ocean are both humbling.
When developing the soundtrack, did you already have the visuals or did they come after, or was it a back-and-forth kind of process?
The film was in a near-final edit, so I was working to that cut after a spotting session with Julian to map out the sections.
What was the collaborative process like for a film that has no words and whose main characters are sea-life creatures? How did you build and interpret the story?
During the spotting session, Julian had specific beats that he wanted to hit in terms of rises or falls in energy, moments of silence, moments of density versus moments of emptiness in the music. He was encouraging me to not anthropomorphise the visual material.
While the ocean and non-human actors are the stars, I would say the human is still perceptible, wouldn’t you? It reminds me of the composition, straddling between electronic, constructed sounds, and more ambient, nature-inspired sounds. How did you balance them?
It’s interesting because our ears aren’t really designed to listen underwater. Our directional hearing is limited, and most hearing takes place through conduction of sound waves through skull bones. So the human isn’t necessarily allowed to listen that deep, at least not unaided. I think a soundtrack like this necessitated the use of both acoustic and electronic sounds, for this reason to start.
And then, at 600-1200 metres deep (about where the film was shot), there’s a mix of marine vocalisations, human sounds in the form of ships’ mechanical drones and synthetic sonar, booms and other noises from tectonic activity, and then also amazingly the sound of the sheer biomass of fish and plankton creating this widespread, high-frequency popping or fizzing sound. So I guess I needed to incorporate both electronic and acoustic texture in order to emulate a bit of all of these sounds.
You once spoke about the difference between mood and emotion, can you tell me how each of those show up in the soundtrack?
Emotions are more short-lived and causal, moods are more diffuse and less clear in their origin. Probably this soundtrack is more mood-orientated as there aren’t a lot of overt emotions present, which may be more readily picked up on in the form of for example clear melodies, or varying smoothness versus agitation in the arrangement or rhythm of a piece of music. This soundtrack is more slowly shifting and evolving, which would point more towards the presence of a mood or a sustained, indirect feeling.
You spoke about meditating and the concept of “where the room isn’t” and that it was something you brought into your music. Being that this soundtrack is for a film about the ocean, expansiveness, and humanity, where do you see this meditative concept in your composition?
There was a specific section of the film that felt like the apex, for which Julian had requested the music carry some kind of ‘om’ energy, or an energy of transcendence. I also feel like I was bringing some breathing aspect to the composition, following the descent of the lens and the movement of the water and sea life in the film. Writing slow-changing music necessitates breathing as a form of pacesetting, at least for me. I would say the music is pointing towards a meditative feeling, but wouldn’t go so far to say as it actually achieves or embodies that”.
Let’s end it there. Go and follow the magnificent Laurel Halo. Someone who definitely needs to be in your sights, I am curious what comes after the soundtrack for Midnight Zone. Her recent single with John Tejada, Shade, is exceptional. This is someone who I would dearly love to see bring her creations and incredible compositions to life…
ON the stage.
___________
Follow Laurel Halo
