Review: Laurel Halo – Atlas
Intermingled inner worlds for strings, saxophones, keys and sudden voice.
This Atlas, like many others, collates various depictions of the world from above. One envisages a book containing pages of clouds as viewed from an above-diagonal: that moment during a flight's ascent when they're rendered in a seamless blanket, like the world's secret upper floor. All of the contributors on this album (Halo in the company of Bendik Giske, Lucy Railton and James Underwood) sound like they're rising up out of their own heads, enrapt in their own internal monologue, plumes of disparate thought pooling into an orchestra of introversion hanging in the sky, far up above the players themselves. The results are wonderful, albeit authentic to the actual sensation of wonder: uplifted, yet also churning with uncertainty, negotiating sensations too lively to yet settle into fixed form. Some atlases makes the boundaries between entities and energies easier to comprehend – this one does the precise opposite, mapping the mind as it calibrates to the new, in all its queries and contradictions.
Somehow this experience is also gently cathartic, like the moment of quiet after a day spent talking. The inner voice revives itself in a rush of warmth, filling the space left by the departure of other people. "Sweat, Tears Or The Sea" seems to depict a house pianist after closing time, venue keys sprawled on the stool, setlist crumpled and defunct on the stand, as the player indulges, half-awake, in meanderings purely for their own enjoyment for the first time that night. These moments of textural minimalism are fleeting in a record otherwise bustling with strings, keys, saxophones and electronic that swirl in the ears like high-altitude winds. At its most dense, Atlas resembles a heart rendered in vapours; sections of the shape are always swelling as others are subsiding; some clusters of sound successfully corral others into harmonic alignment, while others rush through eachother as colliding shoals. There is one overt human voice throughout the whole thing – courtesy of Coby Sey, briefly, during the latter part of "Belleville" – and its entrance is alarming. The listener is sucked back into the body for about 20 seconds, making clear the strength and distance of the soul's departure across the rest of this beautiful collection.
