LAUREL HALO Vinilo y CD

Review: Two artists split a double-A single, exploring both sounds and their structure in their own unique ways. 'Manifolds' sees Jessica Ekomane dive so far into polyphonic writing processes she reaches 'multiphonic', with different sonic voices, sources and timbres no longer on parallel trajectories, but eventually splicing into something closer to a human chant than most ritualistic tunes we're heard in a while. The effect is staggering. Laurel Halo then presents 'Octavia', which is best described as a kind of collage of beautiful harmonisation, a series of melodic motifs and textures that form small wholes, dissipate, reappear, merge, are all aurally connected but never combined. Highly technical stuff on the part of both producers, the coherency between the two is impossible to miss, making for a unique but coherent ambient-drone gem.

Review: The fourth ever solo studio album from the acclaimed electronic artist and composer Laurel Halo, Atlas is intended to guide the listener through their own subconscious mind, coming as an intense sequence of soaring ambiences and beatless jazz montages. Finding its footing in instrumental improvisation by Halo herself, plus featuring artists Coby Sey, James Underwood and Lucy Railton - and then blowing any assumptive connotation with jazz out of the park with its subtly effected vocal processing and electronic tinkerings and washes thereafter - fans can be sure that this is not going to be your stock experimental affair.

Review: Although she's offered up plenty of high-grade DJ mixes in the past, this volume in the "DJ Kicks" series marks Laurel Halo's first commercially available mix-up. The sometime Hyperdub producer has dutifully delivered something rather special, somehow joining the dots between 29 diverse and disparate cuts in the manner of a true turntable maestro. Beginning with the melodious experimentalism of her own "Public Art", Halo giddily charges between mutant industrial funk (Stallone The Reducer, Final Cut), thrusting electronic disco (Red Axes), deep techno (Parris), mind-altering acid-style intensity (Rrose), stomping, sweat-soaked peak-time techno (Machinewoman, FIT Siegel), polyrhythmic bass music (Facta, one of her Livity Sound collabs with Hodge) and an impressive array of cuts that defy easy categorization. The resultant all-action mix is nothing less than stunning.

Review: In 2018, Laurel Halo recorded her first soundtrack score, a ghostly and intoxicating suite of tracks created for an experimental Dutch documentary about surveillance and social media called "Possessed". Here that music gets a deserved vinyl release courtesy of Vinyl Factory. It's an alluring set of tracks that sees Halo cannily combine radio static and distance electronics with ambient tones, beautiful piano meditations, folksy compositions, found sound and superb violin and cello parts provided by guest musicians Galya Bisengalieva and Oliver Coates. Throughout, Halo's superb compositions sit somewhere between breathtaking beauty, soundscape paranoia and bittersweet escapism.