Laurel Halo - Atlas

Laurel Halo — Atlas (Awe)

Photo by Norrel Blair

Like a collection of sketched maps of unseen or barely remembered topographies Atlas composer Laurel Halo charts her reaction to time spent in unfamiliar landscapes and cities. She captures that preternatural oddness of being at once part of and apart from life when one is a stranger in town. Minutely observant and slightly bewildered, Halo’s music captures that fugue state between awareness and dreaming where the senses meld into impressionistic sensation. Based on piano sketches written during 2020 and 2021, Halo added guitar, vibraphone and violin whilst working in Paris, London and Berlin. Saxophonist Bendik Giske, cellist Lucy Ralton, violinist James Underwood and vocalist Coby Sey augment the pieces which Halo electronically manipulates into allusive vignettes of atmosphere and mood.

The pieces on Atlas hardly vary in pace or method but with repeated listens they begin to reveal their secrets. Halo smears her piano with haunted strings and layers of echo and reverb to create dense atmospheres through which peripheral sounds suddenly slide across the foreground like a scrap of conversation in the language of a place from which you’ve just returned home. Giske’s saxophone is buried deep in the opening and closing tracks, a presence just out of reach then heard as if through a door that swings open in a foggy street for the ear to snatch at the notes and anticipate the rest. In an uncanny way, you feel you’re reconstructing a tune from a score written in invisible ink. On the lullaby-like “Belleville” Sey’s voice is a mere emanation amidst a swell of strings, a last gasp protest at bedtime before sleep overwhelms. Throughout, the strings act as emotional markers; pensive on “Naked into the Light”, febrile on “Late Night Drive” and “Sick Eros”, multitracked into orchestral grandeur on the title track.

Atlas doesn’t seek to evoke specific places so much as a sense of internal movement that parallels displacement and travel. On first listen Halo’s compositions tend to merge into one another, a blur of impressions like looking down on a cloud dappled landscape or passing buildings through a rain smeared train window. The atmospheres are foggy, drenched but rich, infused with the apparent illogic of dreams whose significance must be pieced together with hindsight from clues obvious and obscure.

Andrew Forell

Tirzah (The Room) (2021)

Clémence’s Top Ten Albums of 2022

Dry Cleaning 'Stumpwork' [4AD]

ROSALÍA 'MOTOMAMI' [Columbia Records]

Alex G 'God Save the Animals' [Domino]

MJ Lenderman 'Boat Songs' [Dear Life Records]

Coby Sey 'Conduit' [AD 93]

Nilüfer Yanya 'PAINLESS' [ATO Records]

Klein ‘Star in the hood' [Parkwuud Entertainment]

Moin 'Paste' [AD 93]

Voice Actor 'Sent from my Telephone' [STROOM]

They Are Gutting a Body of Water & A Country Western 'An Insult to the Sport' [Topshelf Records]

*Notable mentions: Sun Lyn 'Songs About Housework' [bruce’s fingers], Boldy James 'Killing Nothing' [Real Bad Man Records] and Nia Archives 'Forbiden Feelingz' [HIJINXX]

**Favorite tracks of 2022 can be listened here

COBY SEY

LONDON, 01.04.24

With COBY SEY

Rainy Miller & Space Afrika - The Graves at Charleroi (feat. Coby Sey)

Swordman Kitala UK/Europe debut!

Excited to be going on my first ever tour as a musician in the company of this chap. We will be bringing Ugandan underground-style MC fire and Godzilla-heavy beats and bass.

See venue websites for tickets and more details.

Extra psyched to be joined by Blue Tapes' own Ashtray Navigations for the Leeds date! We will be debuting new material from our forthcoming LP plus these old favourites: https://phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/kaiju-kitala

TYSON, “can't be unstuck” feat. coby sey

TYSON - Can't Be Unstuck feat. Coby Sey

Conduit / Coby Sey (AD 93, 2023)

Coby Sey might be familiar as a crucial collaborator to Mica Levi and Tirzah, but his full-length debut reveals an entirely singular character. Conduit is a sonic outlier that sits on the fringes of grime, dub and jazz, wherein darkness and claustrophobia are often placed alongside moments of transcendence by a wunderkind producer. It is a bold contortion of its constituent parts, diverse and fresh from the very first confrontational vocal loop to the album’s piano-laden anti-ending. 

Sey’s vocals – free-flowing passages of spoken word – guide his compositions, but the focus here is very much on the textural passages that envelop them. An imperious producer, the Lewisham native has constructed eight singular passages across the record, ranging from deconstructed grime and nocturnal ambient cityscapes to sprawling eldritch jazz. ‘Night Ride’ is a bioluminescent adventure in dub-techno, all TV static and 404 error codes, whilst opener ‘Etym’ begins with brazen bars – isolated vocals – before Sey’s voice is engulfed by a technicolour wall of glitching sound. 

The best moment comes on ‘Response’, a ten-minute sprawl at the back end of the album. The unheimlich squalls of maltreated saxophones create an atmosphere of eeriness, which only builds as reverb-laden beats and distant strings bleed into the fray. “Active… active… ACTIVE,” Sey growls at the track’s peak, which is like Twin Peaks S3E8 made audio. This darkness, however, is quickly alleviated by the next track, misty-eyed closer ‘Eve (Anwummerɛ)’, a sparse, infinite piano meditation, coloured with the calming sensations of rainfall. Perhaps, these two pieces are ‘Conduit’ in microcosm – claustrophobia bubbles away throughout, but beauty and transcendence is never far away.

Dial Square (Confront)

Rainy Miller x Space Afrika — A Grissaille Wedding (Fixed Abode)

Photo by Timon Benson

As performers, writers and producers Rainy Miller and Space Afrika (Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid) are key figures in an eclectic Manchester centered electronic, avant-pop scene that includes artists Blackhaine, Iceboy Violet and Richie Culver. Grissaille is a style of painting done exclusively in shades of grey. It can serve as a base upon which color is overpainted and/or as method of imitating (sculptural) relief. Both aspects are present on this collaboration, A Grissaille Wedding where the songs whisper from doorways, alleys, industrial wastelands. Foggy, weakly lit by the reflection of rain splattered streetlamps on oil slicked asphalt. A new version of Northern soul built from grime, dubstep, machines both shiny and decrepit. With Miller’s vocal often autotuned these songs flicker between despair and hope, soliloquys of love, loss and trauma blooming into a cruel world framed by Space Afrika’s impressionist soundscapes, which highlight the vulnerability and quiet defiance of the narrators.

“Summon the Spirit/Demon” opens as an invocation. Miller’s whispers and coos shrouded in a murky Burial like atmosphere as Voice Actor intones invitingly. Miller’s multitracked singing follows, pitched high to emphasize his fragility. “Maybe It’s Time to Lay Down the Arms” features Mica Levi and Miller over a stumbling trip hop beat and lysergic swirls of synth and backing vocals. A lonely plea for inner peace. On “Sweet (I’m Free)” RenzNiro and Iceboy Violet reflect on finding self-acceptance and love amongst damaged lives in ruined towns as Space Afrika’s soundscape slips and churns beneath them. Celestial backing vocals, billowing synth pads, violins and a simple cyclical acoustic guitar riff give the “The Graves at Charleroi” a hymnal intensity as Coby Sey sings of the passage through grief. Richie Culver delivers the spoken word piece “I Believe in God, When Things are Going My Way” against a background of quavering strings and beatless ambience. He plays with the ambiguity of his interlocutor, is it God? A lover? Himself?

“I need rules, false promises/The laws keep me safe/Safe by your side/4th of December, a victim of my own thoughts” feels like a summary of the project’s main theme. Paradox, complexity, hope and despair are ever present. The greyness throws trauma into stark silhouette but splashes of color, hard won knowledge and the will to express the fragility of self can lead to some form of acceptance and allow one to move forward. A Grissaille Wedding forges all this into a hauntingly beautiful set of songs which aren’t afraid to bare teeth as well as wounds.

Andrew Forell

Permeated Secrets (2022)

coby sey -- permeated secrets