Jessica Ekomane, Laurel Halo - Manifolds / Octavia (2024) [Hi-Res]

Laurel Halo follows last year’s ‘Atlas’ stunner with an excellent split LP with Berlin-based sound artist Jessica Ekomane as part of the Portraits GRM series, with Laurel taking a quietly orchestral 21 minute nite flyte on one side, and Ekomane synthesising uncanny bagpipe-ish nuttery on the flip.

French computer musician and lecturer Jessica Ekomane is still chasing the elusive dragon that led to her excellent 2019 debut ‘Multivocal’. ‘Manifolds’ is a head-swallowing 17 minute piece in whelming transition from polymetric slather and slosh, thru keening dissonant synths, to an astonishing handbrake turn into curdled chamber music. A subsequent swell of bifurcating bleeps resembles Rashad Becker or David Tudor’s notional CPU species, lucidly evoking that feeling of nanobots tearing and re-stitching nerve fibres in the midst of a timbral tempest. Ekomane is motivated by the possibilities of polyphony here, deployed via cascading xenharmonic waves that flash across the stereo field, mutating and revising their form before you even realise what's happening. She’s a crafty composer too, laying out a sophisticated narrative by introducing each sound before twisting it like melted sugar; noise giving way to disarming, alien ambience, and serenity ceding to apprehensive psychedelia. It all sounds a bit like a choir of cybernetic voices shrieking at the moon - rarely do we hear contemporary computer music that feels so visceral, alive, and confounding.

Halo's side is completely different, and like last year's Boomkat EOY chart-topping 'Atlas' was inspired by Italo Calvino's 1972 novel 'Invisible Cities'. 'Octavia' lays out some of those themes - specifically the idea of a "spiderweb city" - using delicate piano motifs and swooping, chimerical strings. It's an unashamedly romantic composition, but riddled with a darkness that creeps around the edges. Gorgeous, smoky cinematics are buoyed by booming, noxious rumbles, and Halo's finely tweaked electronic processes propel the piece from a tangible real world of inscrutable cityscapes to an unknowable sci-fi sprawl way above. Indeed, the piece's title is a reference to Calvino's floating city that's perched over a vast abyss, balanced on a precarious net. It's hard not to see it as a reference to our own perilous reality, and as worldly themes poke through the lace - diminutive snippets of smoked-out jazz and romantic baroque music - they're unavoidably swallowed by the dense atmosphere, like being lost in a dream.

Laurel Halo - Octavia 24-44100 FLAC
1.01 - Laurel Halo - Octavia (21:19)

Jessica Ekomane - Manifolds 24-44100 FLAC
1.01 - Jessica Ekomane - Manifolds (17:28)