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.
