Anticipation for Laurel Halo’s first full length album has been building steadily as last year’s excellent Hour Logic EP became something of a word of mouth success. Quarantine is both satisfying and surprising in that it does far more than merely deliver what might be expected from this maverick and fascinating artist. The title is apt – the music here feels insulated, isolated and set apart from the natural world. Set in context, it feels as if it may be part of a broader agenda at the Hyperdub label to move away from the now established conventions of dubstep and bass music (the recent release from Dean Blunt and Inna Copeland, although more of a sample collage, seems motivated by similar concerns).
Laurel Halo has made great strides here in developing the more abstract and questioning side of her musical personality. Musically, much of Quarantine trades in experiments in texture and sound. Club rhythms are consciously avoided, and the overall sensation is weightless – sometimes unnerving, sometimes detached, but most often shot through with a curious warmth and a sense of innocence. There are times when Laurel Halo bears a peculiar passing vocal resemblance to Canadian singer-songwriter Kathryn Calder but the musical settings here are so far away from Calder’s infectious sugar rush melodies. Often, Laurel Halo’s vocals are intentionally intrusive, with disorientating melodic lines constructed using jarring intervals, her presence elevated by being set so far above the musical backdrop. It’s almost as if the very soul and purpose of this music is the creation of a harsh conflict between the voice and its surroundings.
On Carcass, her heavily treated voice puncures a serene bubble of sound and hypnotic rhythm. The music may be mesmerising, but the voice is often deeply unsetlling. At its most relaxed, Quarantine has a quality similar to the dreamlike reveries in the work of Julia Holter. Tumor pits repetitive and eerie mechanical sound against the unusual shape of Laurel Halo’s vocal melody, her harmonies adding to a sense of unease.
Quarantine Laurel Halo Rar
On Airsick, she makes a virtue of what are largely clipped and monosyllabic lyrics, creating a strong feeling from the most minimal of ingredients. The closing Light And Space does indeed offer what it says on the tin, a pleasingly airy conclusion to a sometimes challenging and unsettling album. Perhaps a more helpful comparison is with the hyper composed sound world of Dirty Projectors. Although Laurel Halo’s melodies often have the feel of being improvised or dispatched casually, but they may have in fact been very meticulously arranged. On the short interlude Wow, the harmonies have a similar playful starkness and attack. If the music on Quarantine deals in construction and design, then the vocals explore the possibilities of consonance and dissonance to powerful effect.
Some will find it either uneasy, or perhaps irritating, but these kind of unconventional musical presences appear only rarely and often prove divisive. Some will be tempted to define Quarantine as ambient music – but that feels misleading. Whilst it may be dream-like at times, the overall effect is surreal but not sleepy. There’s an alertness and sense of movement within these carefully crafted soundscapes.
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Easily one of the queasiest albums in recent memory, Halo's attempt to unify her sound and provide an entry work into her past works courtesy Easily one of the queasiest albums in recent memory, Halo's attempt to unify her sound and provide an entry work into her past works courtesy of Hyperdub, coming off a sterling year this can be equal parts off-putting and utterly enthralling. The main element here is Halo's voice, which she wields like The Knife and manipulates to no end; a child-like coo here, abrasive atonalities there, a warm wash when the moment calls for it. For an electronic album, there is little in the way of a beat, and the grappling with ideas can be frustrating, but hard work will win the day, and this album's secrets will be solved one day.
There isn't anything out there that sounds like Quarantine, not even Laurel Halo's previous work. Unlike other human/machine hybrids the sound There isn't anything out there that sounds like Quarantine, not even Laurel Halo's previous work. Unlike other human/machine hybrids the sound produced here isn't some cyborg with fully integrated elements smoothly conjoined, but a frisson between Laurel Halo's fallible almost awkward vocals and the Sci-fi sounds her battery of audio equipment produces. It's this awkwardness which makes the album so good but difficult too, which may mean it'll alienate as many people as it entrances, which would be a shame 'cos there is a lot to enjoy here. Take a chance and get infected.
When an artist 'finds her voice,' it's meant as a figure of speech and signifies a certain kind of greedy perspective from our end that values neat narrative arcs and easily identifiable resolutions. It's typically reserved for someone like, who's darted and dashed rather than having followed a simple trajectory over the past couple of years, recording a vast and diverse amount of material under her own name and as for six record labels (and counting).
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Her Hyperdub debut, Quarantine, appears to acknowledge the need for something definitive, and by intricately arranging and shrewdly sequencing her C.V. On a micro scale, it's her best and most cohesive work to date. And it's largely because Halo finds her voice in a literal sense. She foregrounds vocals to a far greater extent than on her previous material, and while Quarantine veers from claustrophobic sci-fi dioramas to meditative synth drones to nakedly expressive confessionals, it's unified by an underlying perspective and personality that commands attention yet still leaves plenty to the imagination.
You find out fairly quickly that Halo is setting all the rules of engagement on Quarantine. Opener 'Airsick' introduces many of the tricks Halo uses from there on out- oddly stacked and constantly shifting harmonies, portamento pitch-bending, narcotic melodies, a prevailing sense of technological dread- before the nearly a cappella 'Years' leaves her completely exposed. Halo doesn't exactly yell or scream on 'Years', it's something like a boundary-pushing exhalation after a long and self-imposed silence, sung in an uncomfortably loud and flat tone.
Some will find it, to put it lightly, hard to deal with, and by most standard metrics of evaluation, it's not proper singing and borders on ugly. But consider the combative content of the lyrics: 'I will never see you again/ You're mad 'cause I will not leave you alone.' There's purpose to all of this, reminding me of Jeff Mangum's approach on the opening devotional from 'King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 2 & 3', where the volume signifies an artist pushing against internal and external repression with necessary, confrontational force.
Halo's vocals only occasionally go back into attack mode, but 'Years' is indicative of Quarantine's prodding and provoking nature and how it subverts the typical ideas of how we brand aggressive and intense music. The instruments of war are almost completely absent here: The digital dissonance is rarely abrasive, there's nothing resembling a true bassline, nor is there anything that scans as a snare or kick drum perhaps outside of the almost tropical pitter-patter outlining 'Airsick', or the jetstream whir of 'Thaw'.
If anything, it resembles the beatless, zero-gravity voids created by, and similarly, the extraterrestrial quality of Quarantine's terrain heightens your senses and makes your nerves sit a little more on edge to counter the unfamiliarity. Though often melodic, it doesn't really ever come off as pop. My experience with Quarantine feels more like an interactive, multimedia affair, as though I'm listening to a record while simultaneously trying to solve a puzzle or challenge the CPU in a video game. I don't hear verses and choruses so much as Q&A, stimuli, and open-ended responses, challenges presented, accepted, and accomplished. I can't really hum the melody of 'MK Ultra'; the thrill is in finally being able to trace its strange, boomeranging path in real time. The tension created by the juddering undercurrent of low frequencies and Halo's octave-shifted vocals on 'Carcass' is unnerving enough, and her use of the phrase 'my carcass' rather than 'my body' intends to provoke an entirely different and gnarlier set of emotional responses.
Indeed, while much of Quarantine' s futuristic production and man-machine interface conjures science fiction, much of the lyrical approach reads like scientific or Socratic method. Beyond the blurry delineation between devotion and revenge on 'Years', what to make of something like 'Holoday'? Structurally, it feels like an interlude, a free-time juxtaposition of scrambled circuitry and a high-pitched sample of Halo singing, 'just wanna be with you!'
Like an errant, synaptic trigger. Is it a love song or a neurological study of the feeling? Likewise, it certainly has to be intentional that the titles signifying expressions of rapture ('Wow', 'Joy') are given to compositions in thrall to the dehumanization of Halo's voice. The most pointed example of Halo's painstaking production appears on 'Tumor': The illuminant vocal processing accompanying the lyrics, 'Caught behind the wall of tears/ Distorted liquid image of you/ The signal keeps cutting out but one thing is clear/ Nothing grows in my heart, there is no one here,' evokes a radiant sadness. Seconds later, stripped of all effects and affects, Halo menacingly deadpans to the object of her desire, 'you are my target.'
There are plenty of disarmingly pretty moments too on Quarantine, yet even those strive for unsettling effect, finding beauty in uncertainty, confidence in the embrace of the unknown. There are already subtle hints at discord during the spacey lullaby of 'Thaw', milky synths and samples beaming in and out of an odd time signature as Halo sings in a strangely conversational timbre, 'Don't get addicted to anything/ Just keep on walking/ One foot in front of the other/ Forward motion's the only answer.' The closing is Quarantine's most conventionally performed keys-and-voice piece and also the most gorgeous, though a rare glimpse at Halo's more lush, jazzy phrasing is dedicated to the admission that 'words are just words that you soon forget.' Coming at the tail end of a diffuse, exploratory second half, it's a disquieting and ultimately weighty epigram for Quarantine, a record created in the image of its author in its ability to dodge easy explanations and comparisons. After all, the greatest pleasure of Quarantine lies in its being a world unto itself, a self-contained vortex where influence is nearly impossible to project or extract, leaving only the alternately frightening and reassuring state of solitude.
When an artist 'finds her voice,' it's meant as a figure of speech and signifies a certain kind of greedy perspective from our end that values neat narrative arcs and easily identifiable resolutions. It's typically reserved for someone like, who's darted and dashed rather than having followed a simple trajectory over the past couple of years, recording a vast and diverse amount of material under her own name and as for six record labels (and counting). Her Hyperdub debut, Quarantine, appears to acknowledge the need for something definitive, and by intricately arranging and shrewdly sequencing her C.V.
On a micro scale, it's her best and most cohesive work to date. And it's largely because Halo finds her voice in a literal sense. She foregrounds vocals to a far greater extent than on her previous material, and while Quarantine veers from claustrophobic sci-fi dioramas to meditative synth drones to nakedly expressive confessionals, it's unified by an underlying perspective and personality that commands attention yet still leaves plenty to the imagination. You find out fairly quickly that Halo is setting all the rules of engagement on Quarantine. Opener 'Airsick' introduces many of the tricks Halo uses from there on out- oddly stacked and constantly shifting harmonies, portamento pitch-bending, narcotic melodies, a prevailing sense of technological dread- before the nearly a cappella 'Years' leaves her completely exposed. Halo doesn't exactly yell or scream on 'Years', it's something like a boundary-pushing exhalation after a long and self-imposed silence, sung in an uncomfortably loud and flat tone. Some will find it, to put it lightly, hard to deal with, and by most standard metrics of evaluation, it's not proper singing and borders on ugly.
But consider the combative content of the lyrics: 'I will never see you again/ You're mad 'cause I will not leave you alone.' There's purpose to all of this, reminding me of Jeff Mangum's approach on the opening devotional from 'King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 2 & 3', where the volume signifies an artist pushing against internal and external repression with necessary, confrontational force. Halo's vocals only occasionally go back into attack mode, but 'Years' is indicative of Quarantine's prodding and provoking nature and how it subverts the typical ideas of how we brand aggressive and intense music. The instruments of war are almost completely absent here: The digital dissonance is rarely abrasive, there's nothing resembling a true bassline, nor is there anything that scans as a snare or kick drum perhaps outside of the almost tropical pitter-patter outlining 'Airsick', or the jetstream whir of 'Thaw'. If anything, it resembles the beatless, zero-gravity voids created by, and similarly, the extraterrestrial quality of Quarantine's terrain heightens your senses and makes your nerves sit a little more on edge to counter the unfamiliarity.
Though often melodic, it doesn't really ever come off as pop. My experience with Quarantine feels more like an interactive, multimedia affair, as though I'm listening to a record while simultaneously trying to solve a puzzle or challenge the CPU in a video game. I don't hear verses and choruses so much as Q&A, stimuli, and open-ended responses, challenges presented, accepted, and accomplished.
I can't really hum the melody of 'MK Ultra'; the thrill is in finally being able to trace its strange, boomeranging path in real time. The tension created by the juddering undercurrent of low frequencies and Halo's octave-shifted vocals on 'Carcass' is unnerving enough, and her use of the phrase 'my carcass' rather than 'my body' intends to provoke an entirely different and gnarlier set of emotional responses. Indeed, while much of Quarantine' s futuristic production and man-machine interface conjures science fiction, much of the lyrical approach reads like scientific or Socratic method. Beyond the blurry delineation between devotion and revenge on 'Years', what to make of something like 'Holoday'? Structurally, it feels like an interlude, a free-time juxtaposition of scrambled circuitry and a high-pitched sample of Halo singing, 'just wanna be with you!'
Like an errant, synaptic trigger. Is it a love song or a neurological study of the feeling? Likewise, it certainly has to be intentional that the titles signifying expressions of rapture ('Wow', 'Joy') are given to compositions in thrall to the dehumanization of Halo's voice. The most pointed example of Halo's painstaking production appears on 'Tumor': The illuminant vocal processing accompanying the lyrics, 'Caught behind the wall of tears/ Distorted liquid image of you/ The signal keeps cutting out but one thing is clear/ Nothing grows in my heart, there is no one here,' evokes a radiant sadness. Seconds later, stripped of all effects and affects, Halo menacingly deadpans to the object of her desire, 'you are my target.' There are plenty of disarmingly pretty moments too on Quarantine, yet even those strive for unsettling effect, finding beauty in uncertainty, confidence in the embrace of the unknown.
There are already subtle hints at discord during the spacey lullaby of 'Thaw', milky synths and samples beaming in and out of an odd time signature as Halo sings in a strangely conversational timbre, 'Don't get addicted to anything/ Just keep on walking/ One foot in front of the other/ Forward motion's the only answer.' The closing is Quarantine's most conventionally performed keys-and-voice piece and also the most gorgeous, though a rare glimpse at Halo's more lush, jazzy phrasing is dedicated to the admission that 'words are just words that you soon forget.' Coming at the tail end of a diffuse, exploratory second half, it's a disquieting and ultimately weighty epigram for Quarantine, a record created in the image of its author in its ability to dodge easy explanations and comparisons. After all, the greatest pleasure of Quarantine lies in its being a world unto itself, a self-contained vortex where influence is nearly impossible to project or extract, leaving only the alternately frightening and reassuring state of solitude.
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Contents. Background Halo recorded Quarantine between July 2011 and February 2012 primarily in her home studio, with some instrument tracks also recorded in London. She made over thirty demos, eighteen of which were deleted. In November 2011, Halo sent the LP demos to label head, who responded with positive interest. Initially applying extensive and to her vocals, which she found 'supremely boring,' Halo instead opted to leave them dry and unadorned, stating that 'it was tempting to use but I decided against it because there’s this brutal, sensual ugliness in the vocals uncorrected, and painfully human vocals made sense.' Speaking to, she described the album's thematic focus as 'contrails, trauma, volatile chemicals, viruses.' The album cover features an adaptation of Harakiri School Girls, a work by which Halo chose for the artwork after seeing it at an exhibition on Japanese in New York.
She stated that 'I love that it’s brutal and violent but colourful and slow to sink in.' Critical reception Professional ratings Aggregate scores Source Rating 80/100 Review scores Source Rating (8/10) (6/10) (8/10) (favourable) (4/5) Quarantine received positive critical reviews from critics, with an aggregate score of 80 out of 100 on. Named Quarantine as the 'release of the year' in its annual critics' poll.
Emperor battle for dune fix. Ian Cohen of called the album 'something definitive' and Halo's 'best and most cohesive work to date.' Called it 'one of this year's most intriguing and divisive listens,' and noted that 'what's blasted her music headlong into the future is its re-integration of those most ancient of musical devices - the unadorned human voice, verse/chorus structures – into environments they’re usually so thoroughly unfamiliar with.' Wrote that 'it manages to sidestep pretension at almost every turn, partly due to the near-naive vocals that dominate the warm crackle and glow.' States 'Quarantine binds her past sounds into a toxic, lush blend of ambient suspension and disorienting detail,' and called the album Halo's 'most immersive and beautiful work to date.'
Described the album as 'conflicted, ambivalent, complex' and praised its sound as that of 'new territory being trod.' Track listing All tracks written by Laurel Halo. Title Length 1. 'Airsick' 3:58 2.
'Years' 2:52 3. 'Thaw' 5:59 4. 'Joy' 3:27 5. 'MK Ultra' 4:17 6. 'Wow' 1:23 7. 'Carcass' 4:30 8.
'Holoday' 1:50 9. 'Tumor' 2:40 10. 'Morcom' 3:03 11. 'Nerve' 2:31 12.
'Light + Space' 4:49 Total length: 41:19 Personnel Credits adapted from the liner notes of Quarantine. Daly, Aidan. The Line of Best Fit.
Retrieved 30 June 2017. ^ Shaw, Steve (4 June 2012). Retrieved 17 January 2013. Cliff, Aimee.
Retrieved 17 July 2017. Jual kia carnival diesel. ^ Foxx, Trilby. Retrieved 18 July 2017. ^ Nicholson, Rebecca (31 May 2012). Retrieved 17 January 2013. Pelly, Jenn (13 June 2012). Retrieved 17 January 2013.
Laurel Halo Dust
Retrieved 18 July 2017. Kellman, Andy. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
Bychawski, Adam (21 June 2012). Retrieved 17 January 2013. Gardner, Noel (25 May 2012).
Retrieved 17 January 2013. ^ Cohen, Ian (7 June 2012). Retrieved 17 January 2013.
Gibb, Rory (23 May 2012). Retrieved 17 January 2013. ^ Miller, Derek (21 June 2012). Retrieved 17 January 2013. ^ Parker, Hames (May 2012).
Retrieved 17 January 2017. January 2013. Quarantine (LP liner notes).
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