Out March 14th, Halo on the Inside is the new album by Chicago’s Circuit des Yeux (aka CdY, aka Haley Fohr). It is Fohr’s boldest work to date – warped and transcendent, darkly romantic and thrillingly alien.
You can hear the anthemic new single ‘Canopy of Eden.’ Listen and watch the Dana Trippe-directed video.
Haley Fohr on ‘Canopy of Eden’:
“Somehow, on a day in the not too distant past, I ended up on a speedboat jutting toward a place called Canopy of Eden located off the coast of Puerto Vallarta.
The sun was hot, the boat was crammed with passengers, and there was a wild tritoned sawtooth sound coming from its engine.
The boat dropped me off in a tourist trap. It was a shadeless beachfront with overpriced bottles of water and pre-programmed music blaring through a broken radio.
It was my personal hell on earth.
Trapped by the idea of predestination, I re-imagined my scenario in which everyone onboard the speedboat used their voice and internal rhythm to reroute our oceanic course. In this alternate universe, we were able to arrive at our own chosen destination and overcome the god-awful radio.”
Last month, Fohr announced the album with the tense and pulsing single which NPR described as “the sound of bones being ground into bread,” while calling Fohr “[An] artist who cuts through so much noise with her art.”
A musician, composer, and multidisciplinary artist, Fohr’s work defies easy categorisation. It has encompassed critically acclaimed albums, free-form improvisation, painting, audio visual installations, and large ensemble compositions. She has performed in an anechoic chamber (a room with no echo), written for a 50-piece children’s choir, and plunged from a rooftop (under the supervision of a stunt-coordinator).
Bringing Halo to fruition involved numerous changes in Fohr’s typical methods of operation. She worked at night. Throughout the writing, Fohr was living alone, slipping down to her basement studio from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. to free her mind, her voice, her hands. These late hours should not be understood as grim and isolative, though. It was a quiet space for uninhibited exploration.
These graveyard shift writing sessions resulted in a revelation for the musician. “I found a very surprising, small voice in me, and it was deep, deep behind my heart,” Fohr says. She discovered it in the solitary quiet of her studio space, with the city outside hushed enough for Fohr to hear the rhythms of her organs in sync with one another—her own inner symphony. She continued working around that concept for eight more months, carving Halo on the Inside out of her reinvigorated relationships with solitude and herself. And then she looked outward.
A trip to Greece ignited in Fohr an interest in the character of Pan, the mythological, flute playing half-goat, half-man. His story of transformation, melody, fertility, and eventual demise served as a moodboard to the album’s rapturous, brightly burning moments.
The process was adjourned in a trip to Minneapolis to complete the record with producer Andrew Broder (Bon Iver, Moor Mother, Lambchop). The album’s centrepiece, Cathexis, puts the pair’s creative chemistry on full display. Haley’s seemingly limitless voice interplays with Broder’s cathartic guitar coda, offering perhaps the album’s most ascendant moment.
The center of Halo remains Fohr’s voice. It is a powerful, seemingly supernatural instrument — a four-octave span that can span gentle melodic hooks, animalistic bleats, and elemental wails. Here, Fohr makes use of its full range in maximalist compositions that swerve fearlessly between genres and styles. “Through the process of making this music I was able to rewind myself to a time before fear,” she says. “And in the absence of fear I found the intimate beat of sex, love, and melody”.
There’s shock in metamorphosis, Halo On The Inside tells us, but there’s also levity and beauty. A moment of seclusion and dislocation yielding to rebirth and ominous beauty.
Circuit des Yeux
Halo On The Inside
TRACK LIST
- Megaloner
- Canopy of Eden
- Skeleton Key
- Anthem of Me
- Cosmic Joke
- Cathexis
- Truth
- Organ Bed
- It Takes My Pain Away
CIRCUIT DES YEUX
