Album Review: Raw Silk Uncut Wood by Laurel Halo

An inimitable emptiness at the root of all things brings tears to the eyes as the moon its tide, and I try to focus on this void, to grasp its stillness that might soothe me. Yet like all abysses, it's a mirror that fragments its illusions. Faced before it, you are a labyrinth, scattering yourself like dust on erstwhile winds. There are love poems scrawled on prison brick.

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The sonic adventurer returns to confound once more with this sparse, meditative instrumental experiment Laurel Halo, the acclaimed American producer and DJ now based in Berlin, comes across in interviews as likeable, funny and engaged, but you could be forgiven for feeling that her experimental approach to music is rather more highfalutin. After a couple of EPs that twisted the Detroit techno sound into ambient, muted contortions more likely to make you scratch your chin than move your feet, she turned in a series of comparatively accessible albums that nevertheless offer few access points. Halo's world is characterised submerged beats, glimpses of vocal and swathes of washed-out synth.

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Voices abounded on Laurel Halo's 2017 album Dust. Voices sung and simpered, voices repeating isolated Japanese words, voices intoning consonant-rich, ASMR-inducing phrases. The album probed at what exactly the voice could do if split apart and rearranged like any other piece of machinery; it destabilized the voice's traditional role as pop music's emotional core.

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