Herb Sundays 134: Laurel Halo

Playlist: Apple Music / Spotify

Art by Michael Cina

“The mix is a mix of relaxing, ear-massaging, and activating sounds. I listen to a lot of the same records and artists (Bill Evans on repeat, forever) but tried to incorporate a range to encompass the full Sunday mood — soft, slow, patient, calming music. A lot of piano and guitar, some jazz, a few songs, some favorites from the Awe show on NTS.” 

- Laurel Halo for Herb Sundays

From the Bio: Laurel Halo is a musician, DJ and founder of the recording label Awe. Drawing from a range of musical traditions, her output is diverse yet singular, with releases traversing ambient, leftfield club, experimental pop and film score. Since 2012 she has released a number of albums ranging in genre, complexity and scope, including Quarantine (2012, Hyperdub), In Situ (2015, Honest Jon's), Raw Silk Uncut Wood (2018, Latency), and Possessed: OST (2020, Vinyl Factory). She has performed in venues, festivals, clubs and institutions across the world, including the Southbank Centre, Sydney Opera House, The Kitchen, Kölner Philharmonie, CTM/Transmediale, Sónar, Berghain, Nowadays and Montreux Jazz Festival, among others.

She has collaborated with musicians, artists and designers including Moritz von Oswald, Metahaven, Kevin Beasley, Julia Holter, Eli Keszler, Leila Bordreuil, Hanne Lippard, Eckhaus Latta, Martine Syms [editor’s note: Herb 68], John Cale, and the London Contemporary Orchestra. Her most recent LP, Atlas, was released in fall 2023 as the debut on her record label, Awe. The album, described as "roadtrip music for the subconscious", is a series of sensual ambient jazz collages, and features instrumentalists such as Bendik Giske, Lucy Railton and Coby Sey. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

The edge of the 2010s saw an inversion of electronic and dance music from the ‘00s hedonism of Girl Talk/Mash-Ups, Blog House, Berlin-centered minimal Techno, and US-friendly EDM into something more arch, more seductive. The Laurel Halo project first appeared on seminal labels like Hippos In Tanks, an imprint that changed the space irrevocably with only 47 releases, as well as the most significant genre label of our era, Hyperdub. The aforementioned Hippos In Tanks catalog included titles from upstart artists such as Grimes, Dean Blunt, Autre Ne Veut, d'Eon, Oneohtrix Point Never, and James Ferraro and set the tone for the new world, or as

Raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Laurel would close out the decade in Berlin (or maybe Paris) with 3+ albums in tow, global acclaim and repute, and just before DJing became illegal, an entry in the famed DJ-Kicks mix series, which neatly condensed POMO club music along side some Detroit faves from early Jeff Mills and Blake Baxter.

Indeed it’s this “Detroit-ness” of Halo’s work, the celestial and uncanny, that’s always a click away. It’s the song titles (Atlas’ “Late Night Drive” and “Belleville”) or her DJ sets like the S-Tier 2011 Fact mix that form a running theme, or an aim for the celestial but still corporeal. Finding success with a keen facility between dance and experimental spaces, the tension in Halo’s catalog sits between the introvert and extroverted sides of her personality, which makes her discography like a slalom between the two, a factor which she discussed with Resident Advisor recently.

Since the turn of the decade, Halo’s music has hued softer. The turning point seems to be Raw Silk Uncut Wood (2018) which was apparently inspired by her work on the documentary film, Possessed, a score that even landed her the closing spot on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s funereal final playlist. The record features fellow genre adventurers Oliver Coates and Eli Keszler and predicts some of the gauzy bits that would fully arrive with her next album. As Sasha Geffen wrote for Pitchfork, “She is no longer so invested in parrying attention from one moment to the next; she’d rather linger on one set of chords, one simple melody, or an unusual percussive pattern.” Indeeed, just before that, the body mechanics of Dust (2017) showed that Halo was coming out of the self-protection of youth, into something more honest and refined, and one can guess that a stint in Moritz von Oswald's (another Detroit mindset emissary) trio helped too. In that time she recovered her love for piano improv and jazz/classical/ambient tendencies.

I’d argue Laurel is in her imperial era, surviving the tumults that befall early electronic music careers, into something more magisterial, as both a band leader and a label runner. As an ardent cultural student, Halo brings her passion for music, film, and books into a directorial vision that feels hers entirely now. 

2023’s Atlas arrived with great fanfare and met the challenge, incorporates new/old strategies (i.e."Imaginary harmonics") to make something utterly now. Culled from years of collected work, Atlas is less of a self-heroic titling, instead referring to the album itself as a  great struggle, something Halo returned to continually return to work on. Selected as Boomkat’s album of the year, they would perfectly exclaim: “a mix of weightless jazz, orchestral and drift energies that’s both elusive and engrossing; just when you think you have the measure of it, it shapeshifts into something else. Made of rarified material; it bends the contemporary “ambient” template into something almost entirely new, featuring contributions from Bendik Giske, James Underwood, Lucy Railton and Coby Sey who together create a blanket of pure atmosphere that wafts over you like a cloud, but which fully comes to life with closer, deep listening.”​

Halo is in her lane since returning to her craft with fresh eyes. A self-described music school “runt” from piano class and school bands, she rejoins the freeway of artists like Kelly Moran (Herb 122), or Mary Lattimore, who lean into their classical bent in order to push it further. Also pivotal to her practice has been collaboration itself, using her longtime allegiance to radio, from Ann Arbor’s WCBN, to her time at Berlin Community Radio, and now at NTS, Halo has used radio as a document of her time and a study hour to cull interesting sounds (and fellow selectors) into her orbit.

laurelhalo

A post shared by @laurelhalo

Halo is finishing a global run of live dates on her chosen home of the American West Coast, alongside cellist Leila Bordreuil, with snippets feeling like her latest album does, harnessing a rooted but stargazing form. What comes next will surely excite.

laurelhalo

A post shared by @laurelhalo

Bonus Beats (Three The Hard Way: Comp Corner

The trusty compilation has always served as a manifesto for electronic music and one we leaned on heavily in the early Ghostly days. However, in the streaming era, they’ve been downgraded slightly in favor of playlists and radio-led DJ mixes. I’ve been happy to see a new wave of compilations, so Am sharing a few:

• Original Ghostly/Spectral crew and longtime friend Ryan Elliott celebrates 5 years of his vital label, Faith Beat. The Michgander, now in Berlin, has been building a North American-led wave of new producers up the mountain and this passionate comp and subsequent mix, will restore your faith in Jack-centric rhythms that veer away from pastiche. A great Beatportal piece is here too.

• Hit Em, the dream-fueled genre (literally), gets its moment with Thank You, Dream Girl., released by Tabula Rasa, and curated by Travis Stewart (Machinedrum) alongside original dreamer Drew Daniel (Matmos, The Soft Pink Truth). I’m still digging in, but it’s exciting to see a collective charge, an enthusiasm for the new.

• In similar maximalist spirit, anyone who gets me knows I harbor a secret love for the dark art of Trance music of a certain historical vintage. My decades-long thirst for neon blood is recently quenched, what with true believer Evian Christ and co.’s TranceParty CD of edits/remixes and Montreal’s TDJ serving up a compilation/boxset that also comes in mixed form and with a fuckin’ bracelet (or three?). Praise be.