Laurel Halo, Hour Logic
Featured Album
Smudging and smearing her songs in places where more rigid lines might normally be
Like many other young musicians who work with old synthesizers (see also: Oneohtrix Point Never, Forma, Emeralds), Laurel Halo smudges and smears her songs in places where more rigid lines and grids might normally be. Her latest EP — at 34 robust minutes, it might as well be an album — finds her drifting through different moods and modes of textural electronic music to mesmerizing effect. “Aquifer” opens with a surge of energy and a brooding sense of rhythm that evokes some of the steely gait of Detroit techno, but even at their most banging, the restless beats sound in service to the weird atmospherics swirled together over top. “Constant Index” features Halo singing with a gothic sense of longing while layered synth lines flicker and rise up around her. “Head” switches speed to a more low-down form of dub techno, with the thump and wonder of old Berlin warehouse hits reimagined by a Brooklyn girl at home alone with her computer. Halo’s range continues to expand from there, with an assured sense of dubby wandering in the nine-minute title track and an expressive, dark-tinged edge to “Strength in Free Space” that could work in the soundtrack to a horror movie with a heart.
