Laurel Halo

However, she then turned to electronic dance music on the EP Hour Logic (Hippos In Tanks, 2011) with the post-techno and quasi-breakcore of Speed Of Rain and the post-samba frenzy Aquifer, although both are dressed in cosmic and new-age flavors. The closer, Strength In Free Space, is a simple floating ecstatic "om" surfing galactic waves. This and the lengthy glitchy gothic tour de force of Head explores uncharted territory beyond the first EP's immediate reference points, while the nine-minute Hour Logic sounds like an easy-listening remix of Aquifer.

Quarantine (Hyperdub, 2012) juxtaposes relatively simple songs like the melismatic soul-jazz ballad Years with complex creations like Thaw for creepy noisescape, tribal polyrhythm, squealing synth and quasi-religious lament. The former derail into the cosmic fluctuations and petulant call of Carcass or the Aquarius-age melody amid liquid bubbling electronics and percussion of Airsick; while the latter attain an earthly quality thanks for example to the looping Bach-ian toccata that propels the agonizing chant of MK Ultra and the disorienting beats and drones that dilute the childish rigmarole of Tumor. Joy and Wow return to the otherworldly non-existence of Strength In Free Space with the addition of dissonant lysergic tones. Then there are all sorts of detours, notably the extraterrestrial pulsation of Nerve and the mermaid call of Light + Space, that imply other dimensions and routes to get there. While none of the songs matches the depth of Head, the whole is one of the most atmospheric albums to come out of the chillwave generation.

The all-instrumental Chance of Rain (Hyperdub, 2013) is, instead, steeped in electronic dance music, all manufactured by her with no outside help. The dreamy, and a little childish, instrumental overture Dr Echt leads into the busy seven-minute Oneiroi, a techno locomotive that incorporates a Caribbean rhythm. Serendip is another techno creature but it morphs and twists with no apparent destination. The beat is frantic and louder in the seven-minute Chance of Rain that boasts a series of manic crescendos. atmospheric intermezzo Melt Syncopation and synth effects sabotage the android dance Thrax. Polyrhythms get out of control in the seven-minute Ainnome that decays into psychedelic dissonance. Having relocated to Berlin, she was probably influenced by the local djs, but the result was rather amateurish.

The eight-song double-EP In Situ (2015) marked some progress in her instrumental music with the more cerebral dance-music of Situation the subliminal Nebenwirkungen, whose beats are barely audible, and Shake, whose beats are muffled. But most of the instrumentals were trivial.

The pieces of Dust (Hyperdub, 2017) are generally shorter but much denser and much more disjointed than on Chance of Rain. The arrangements are humble: her own synth and drum programming, electric piano (courtesy of Shit and Shine's Craig Clouse), tenor saxophone (Diamond Terrifier), percussion (Eli Keszler). But the key process is not the arranging, it's the deconstructing, the way songs disintegrate and then rebuild themselves into slippery rhythms, hazy keyboard lines, stuttering vocal phrasing, harmonious noise. These songs are high-entropy structures whose complexity is hard to quantify, let alone control. The apparent erratic, anarchic, way in which they are assembled constitutes a cerebral logic in itself. They are cohesive but, at the same time, present multiple identities, as if sung by the same person from different directions. Everywhere is dissonance and dischord. The vocals don't sing: they communicate in a nonlinguistic language, a language not of symbols but of phonemes. They feel like sinister psycho-therapies that probe the souls of cyborgs. A detached African bluesy chant maneuvers in Sun to Solar around skipping dubby beats and neurotic electronics until voices start breaking into each other's singing. A similar chant, but multiplied to feel like a vocal group, tries to find its way through Moontalk, where a Caribbean percussion ensemble meets Quincy Jones' orchestra and the tempo is hijacked by the old telephone signal of invalid number. Another vintage African chant is fueled by the slow-motion ticking of a clock in Koinos, one of the ghostlier compositions. The spoken-word piece Who Won is a Freudian trip against a backdrop of percussive noise and dejected saxophone. The plantation chant Syzygy swims in a sea of drones and noises and progressively melts away. The anemic elegy Do U Ever Happen lets digital noises roll freely while hatching echoes of itself. Occasionally, the song's identity is easier to grasp: she tries to sing a regular ballad over what sounds like a detuned orchestra in Like an L; and Jelly, with vocalists Klein and Lafawndah, is a deconstruction of a Caribbean dance like Oneiroi. She's even more impressive when she goes for the jugular, for abstract soundpainting, in the instrumentals that reduce to a sequence of fragments as if the bytes of the digital file had been shuffled: the chaotic free-jazz jam Arschkriecher, Nicht Ohne Risiko, that drowns a xylophone in watery musique concrete, and closer Buh-Bye, with a shrill keyboard pattern and distant horns. Overall, the album feels like an act of cathartic aesthetic exorcism, throwing away what the language that she had learned before and starting to speak a whole new language.

Continuing to move away from the vocal-driven music of her first album, the six-song mini-album Raw Silk Uncut Wood (Latency, 2018) offered the ten-minute ambient gothic instrumental Raw Silk, the ten-minute ecstatic new-age music of Nahbarkeit, with Halo's synthesizers soaring away. The shorter pieces are more adventurous: the jazzy interlude for piano and drums Mercury, the piano sonata The Sick Mind, which sounds like a duet for buzzing bees and cowbells, and Quietude, an anarchic musique concrete interlude per prepared piano. Overall, however, a step backwards from the magnificent chaos of Dust. Again, a rather amateurish work.