FUTURE STRUCTURES & MODERN GHOSTS
Spherical collections of stars form around black holes in situ; that is, locally to their cosmic neighbourhoods. It is said that future space colonisation will rely on sourcing supplies in situ. Construction in situ uses raw materials at the site: colossal sculptures such as Naqsh-e Rustam, the Leshan Giant Buddha and Mount Rushmore were built in this fashion…
A forecast of future structures, built out of at-hand, raw materials, forms part of the liner notes to Laurel Halo’s latest EP, In Situ, released last year on Honest Jon’s Records. It’s a synoptic description to the eight tracks that form the double EP, constructed, for the most part, out of improvised material played out during live sets. The future, according to Nabokov, is “but a figure of speech, a spectre of thought”, and while Halo may share these sentiments, she somehow manages to make audible the very thought of a future sound. In Situ is mutant in its field recordings, mechanical in its samples, inquisitive in its melody, and its rhythms free of gravity—at once gaining momentum while also slowing down. Her heavily crafted debut album, Quarantine, released in 2012 on Hyperdub received critical acclaim for its songwriting and production, while the 2013 follow-up, Chances of Rain, established her preferred instrumental and rhythmic oriented approach, allowing for a more impromptu live set.
Ahead of her return to Dublin for the Out to Lunch Weekender, we discussed by email some of the diverse projects and collaborations the Michigan-born producer and musician has been involved with over the last year. From a collaboration with a virtual Japanese anime pop idol, to a site-visit at an obsolete surveillance post in Germany, Halo’s recent repertoire exists as sonic monuments to a future-past.
You played in Dublin last October, not long after the release of your latest EP, In Situ. How was it?
Fun! I really enjoyed that show, the Out to Lunch guys were great.
I believe you are based in Berlin at the moment—a city famous for its club scene, as well as its vast, repurposed concrete structures. What circumstances led you there, and what is it that drew you to the city as a musician?
I first came to Berlin in 2012 while on a tour and fell in love with the place. I was living in New York for four years at that point and was feeling that financial strain and concomitant apathy and was debating leaving. Berlin’s nightlife was refreshing – lasts long, relatively affordable, easy, great soundsystems – but it was more the banal daily aspects of Berlin that I appreciated initially. Though I do still miss New York and no city is a cure-all.
In the liner notes for In Situ, there are references to space colonisation, a reliance on sourcing material in situ for construction, and colossal structures that evoke monuments from a by-gone era, all far removed from the modes of out-sourced production that are so prevalent today. Can you tell us a bit more about your thought process behind the material?
The music was mostly ideas from my live sets that I’d played out and then arranged into full tracks. I wanted to work more with empty space and the material aspect of the sounds, I like the idea that music can represent physicality while being immaterial or impermanent. I also wanted to do a release that had simple musical ideas at the centre, rather than projecting a headspace or an overarching concept.
The artwork for In Situ features an iridescent slick of oil. I’ve always found the dichroic reflections of oil on water to be incredibly seductive, yet menacing. Can you tell me about the origins of the artwork for the EP?
I guess it was the optimistic upshot feeling of those oil slicks – it’s shit weather and the environment’s getting continually fucked, but at least there’s something remotely beautiful to come out of it.
Last year you participated in a project initiated by Resident Advisor called Frequency Response, creating a musical response to Teufelsberg, an obsolete surveillance site near Grunewald in West Berlin. The long reverb created by the radome architecture evokes this spectre-like presence. When performing live, do you approach architecture as an instrument, or are you more in tune with bodies in space?
Bodies in a space are always a thing that changes the sound drastically from soundcheck to show time. It’s simultaneously poetic and vulgar that collective bodies in a space (or packed flesh) realise the bass!
Another recent commission was to write music for the Japanese Vocaloid, Hatsune Miku, for CTM Festival earlier this year. How did you approach working with the vocal library available? What was your approach towards writing lyrics for the character to sing?
At first the idea was to write original lyrics in English. But an interesting problem arose – her voice actually sounds much better when she sings in Japanese, because it’s a syllabic language, whereas English is much more malleable, and therefore difficult for a singing software to perfectly emulate. Her voice still sounds synthetic no matter what, but aesthetically it sounds better in Japanese. We decided then it would be better to use her vast 100,000 plus song catalog to draw lyrics from, and then randomise these and organise by theme, which we then fit onto specific songs in the piece. I basically wrote the songs and the melodies, and gave my collaborator Mari Matsutoya the MIDI file for the melody, which she then programmed with the Vocaloid software, mapping and fitting lyrics in Japanese.
How has working on this project changed the way you think about ways of performing?
It was a fun project because I was able to write songs for Miku to sing that I could never physically do myself. It’s also interesting to open up performance to collaborators, because for the most part I’ve only done solo live sets.
Laurel Halo plays on Saturday 13th August in Tengu as part of the Out to Lunch Weekender.
Tickets are for the Out To Lunch Weekender are €65 for the three full days, or €35 for Saturday or Sunday and are available through Eventbrite and Resident Advisor. You can find links to those, plus all the information about the event at outtolunch.ie
Words: Sharon Phelan
Check out our interview with Peggy Gou here.
