Laurel Halo
Chance Of Rain

There's that electric piano beginning that, at least at the start, would lead you to anticipate a slightly more conventional listen. Fender Rhodes. An opening in perfect '70s jazz-rock style, on the edge of a citation: it seems like the instrumental prelude of an album by Mahavishnu Orchestra or Return To Forever. But what follows is something else entirely. Almost three quarters of an hour (quite a lot, no doubt) of hallucinations and beams of light, with a VERY high psychedelic impact. Never judge an entire album by the first track, especially if it's just a warm-up and not much more...

... or rather, a sketch in search of the right atmosphere...

Once, Ann Arbor was - musically - different. You knew it because it was the home of Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Bob Seger. And naturally, the Motor City Five. Because we are still in the motor district. Just hearing "Ann Arbor" on TV or reading it in print, I instinctively (at least I did) thought of the cars and the SOUNDS of those parts. But I have the feeling that in the coming years we will begin to associate Ann Arbor with the name of Laurel Halo, a name that the new American electro-experimental scene is proposing with increasing insistence (and credibility). Even though Michigan hasn't been her home for a long time, and Manhattan has taken its place - it's known, the attractive power of the metropolis on Creative Minds of all backgrounds is far from being exhausted...

We last left her amidst various uncertainties and in a somewhat blurred overall picture, partly natural for a debut work on a long duration - that of the debut album "Quarantine," where the choice of voice + electronics didn't fully succeed. Not as one could expect from someone who had spread traces of a precocious talent hard to ignore - the first EPs of the 2010//11 biennium. "Chance Of Rain" announces a clear change of style based on relinquishing singing and (most importantly) a much broader and deeper exploration of the synthetic spaces born from the Psyche of the young "noise-maker". As if, not needing to focus on the voice anymore, she had all the time to dedicate - body and soul, but a lot of BODY - to the rhythmic expansion of her music and to a more mature search for tones. With those ethnic-tribal accents that make her - in perspective - a notable exponent of today's techno-shamanism. And that visionary predisposition that allows going beyond an aseptic mix of times and samples. Beyond pure exercise. Beyond.

As the rhythm expands to embrace more complex solutions, so - simultaneously - does the average length of the tracks. In other words: more time to fully develop the ideas (many) without risk of confusion. But it's music to be appreciated by pure instinct, even before understanding its structures with the mind. The first contact should occur under these conditions. It's useless to struggle to capture every detail on the first listen. It's the music that should carry you, not the brain that should frame and categorize it. At least at first. Otherwise, the journey doesn't start.

And it's an intricate journey, one that starts with the images of Laurel's painter father on the cover - another style and other tones compared to "Harakiri School Girls" of the previous album; and above all, quite different SUBJECTS... and I loved encountering these sounds taking into account her words, who - brilliant and intuitive - defines her pieces as "humoral" and not "romantic," as someone has labeled them, declaring herself allergic to any word related to "romanticism". She likes to dare, she likes modernity, she likes to escape classifications. And it’s always difficult to catalog something that comes from the stomach, more than from gray matter. If "Quarantine" was the result of studio experimentation, "Chance Of Rain" is born from live experience, from the development of sensations, from deeply digging inside.

For the record: the album is meant to be understood in two long sections separated by a short central interlude - "Melt". A simple basic structure on which complex rhythmic architectures, soundtracks for tribal dances, obsessive techno-pulsations are built. A vortex of emotions translated into sound. An acid rain of visionary electricity that leaves little room for rational explanations.

Laurel described it like this: "It's very, very difficult to talk about"...

And I couldn't use better words than hers...