- Laurel Halo creates the quietest and most beautiful record of her career with help from Lucy Railton, Bendik Giske and others.
- 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 love for the piano, an instrument she had largely abandoned in favour of the electronics that have defined her wide and varied career so far. She taught herself the basics of jazz, surrounded by other musicians. When the pandemic hit, "everyone fled," she explained, leaving her in a "shady, dark room" to practice the piano by herself. She left a few days later, but the seeds for Atlas were sown, later to grow into the most collaborative but also impenetrable and spartan album of her career—the sound of being alone together.
Atlas is largely acoustic in nature, but the sounds are spread until they're thin and diaphanous. The music is see-through but still tactile, like rice paper. If you had to lump it in with another record, Atlas is most similar to Halo's 2021 collaboration with Moritz von Oswald: jazzy, improvisatory, stubbornly knotty. But where that one was rooted in the rhythms and respirations of jazz, Atlas is untethered, and more neoclassical in its melody and scope. Featuring appearances from Coby Sey, cellist Lucy Railton, violinist James Underwood and experimental saxophonist Bendik Giske, Atlas is played by a ghostly orchestra whose instrumentation seems to sublimate into granular particles before reassembling again into swooping, often epic, melodies.
The LP starts with "Abandon," featuring all three instrumentalists, and it sounds like an orchestra tuning up for a performance of The Caretaker songs—all hiss, static and breath. Over the course of the album, the fog thins and textures change. The focal point on "Naked To The Light," for example, is the piano, earthy and deep, which comes out in tumbling blocks of notes that define other Laurel Halo material—think 2013's Behind The Green Door. On "Sick Eros," strings rise and fall like traditional classical composition. It would be baroque if it didn't feel like the notes were melting as they played, the reverb of a massive, imaginary concert hall swallowing the music whole.
The acoustic instrumentation is in constant conversation—or perhaps a shouting match—with the electronics and post-processing, as heard on the title track. Sounds blur into each other, and the piano disappears into the background. You can feel the push of the keys and the movement of the strings more than you can hear them. The music is just slightly dissonant, telling a story that keeps getting interrupted. Sometimes the sound is foreboding, and other times it's almost peaceful, as on the closing "Earthbound," where the swirl of instruments coheres into a graceful swoop.
So much attention around the album has centered on the single "Belleville," one of the shortest tracks on the LP (outside of Halo's barebones solo interludes). This one features Halo's piano most prominently, her fingers cascading across the ivories slowly but carefully, until a swell of vocals—Halo's own, complemented by Coby Sey—imitates the elegant dovetailing of the strings. It's an instinctual callback to Halo's earliest work, when her voice did pirouettes around cold, pseudo-classical productions (remember Quarantine?). "Belleville," in its sub-three-minute runtime, ties Atlas back to the rest of Halo's career, the moment of surfacing on an album that otherwise prefers to stay behind the mirror. But in those depths is some of the most affecting ambient music of the year, and perhaps even the very best in Halo's rich, unpredictable catalogue.
Tracklist01. Abandon
02. Naked to the Light
03. Late Night Drive
04. Sick Eros
05. Belleville
06. Sweat, Tears or the Sea
07. Atlas
08. Reading the Air
09. You Burn Me
10. Earthbound