If the best word to describe the sound of Halo on the Inside is “nocturnal,” that’s because the process behind it was quite literally that, too. Haley Fohr, the Chicago-based artist who records as Circuit des Yeux, lived alone through the making of her -io follow-up, working 9pm to 5am (make sure you read that right: pm to am) down in her basement studio. As much as it serves an exploration of Fohr’s inner world, or that of the characters she fashions, it’s also a challenge to transform her working space: into a gothic club, a dream, an ideal destination. Here, continuing to push the boundaries of her sound means forays into minimalism and throbbing dance music, harnessing the imagination – more than darkness itself – as the animating force. Her astoundingly operatic vocals must steer their way through vocal effects, layering, and whirlwinds of noise – partially crafted with producer Andrew Broder (Bon Iver, Moor Mother, Lambchop) – as if evading oblivion. By the end, they have fully dissipated. But like so much of Halo on the Inside, they keep echoing in your mind.
1. Megaloner
The dense instrumentation on ‘Megaloner’ lurches and throbs its way through a dread-inducing atmosphere, but for Circuit des Yeux, this darkness is but a vessel for inspiration: “In time you’ll see me through all things dreamy/ I can see the face in anything when the tide pulls to me.” Halo on the Inside’s opener is not a song you’d call dreamy so much as nightmarish, but in Fohr’s spiritual language, the distinction makes sense. Maybe the tide pulls to us, if we’re lucky.
2. Canopy of Eden
This song includes a section transcribed in the lyric sheet as [OPERA DANCE BREAK], which should tell you all you need to know. Circuit des Yeux has traversed a lot of genres, but I doubt she’s made a piece of industrial dance music as hard-hitting as ‘Canopy of Eden’. The track pulses with conviction, though one that comes from a rather strange place. “I am a trumpet and I have arrived,” she declares, and if you’re wondering where (there are better questions to ask), the answer is a tourist trap near Puerto Vallartal the music blaring from the radio was so inescapably awful that Fohr fantasized about breaking it and charting a different course entirely. Identifying its source should only make the song’s idiosyncratic boldness all the more infectious.
3. Skeleton Key
Circuit des Yeux grants us Halo on the Inside’s first real explosive moment with ‘Skeleton Key’. Marrying Fohr’s penchant for apocalyptic imagery with sexual expression, the song’s seductive tenderness forces the songwriter to eventually take a step back and consider the precision of her words: “I need a synonym for ‘skin’/ That naked feeling of giving in/ Of touching and looking,” she sings as she strips the whole arrangement down, before asserting that nothing could pierce through the barrier of language like an electrifying guitar solo and total sonic whiplash. The tide pulling in, you venture.
4. Anthem of Me
Burrowing violently inward, ‘Anthem of Me’ strikes an impossibly delicate balance between pummeling distortion, pounding drums, shimmering electronics, and twinkles of piano. Fohr has always been a master of controlled chaos, but rarely have the results been so specifically astonishing. “It will rock you,” she declares, which reads like an understatement, but could hardly sound more resplendent.
5. Cosmic Joke
It’s cutting that Fohr uses the word cosmic – which could describe so many of her songs – on the track that shrinks the record back to the most mundanely and palpably human. “Watching my heart break, anything please intervene,” she pleads, the nothingness of ‘Skeleton Key’ no longer seductive. But it doesn’t keep its head down for long, leaving space for optimism in the desolate soundscape.
6. Cathexis
Not to get all “the Oxford Dictionary defines…,” but because it is a Greek word and I’m Greek, allow me: in psychoanalysis, cathexis is the process of allocating mental energy to a person, object, or idea. So far, the emotional arc of Halo on the Inside has been a fascinating one, dragging us from imposing heaviness to cagey introspection; with Fohr’s vocals manipulated and layered beyond recognition, ‘Cathexis’ fits into the latter. This one you would describe as dreamy, like the cloud of thought that haunts but starts to dissolve out of one’s self late into the night. Yet it’s also the point on the album where the light starts pouring back in: the guitars less like the fiery sun, more like specks of starlight.
7. Truth
Transformed and re-embodied, the narrator is determined to manifest the “new starts” that were merely an afterthought on ‘Cosmic Joke’, which means a return to the eerie, hot-blooded techno that kicked off the record. Her mantra: “Truth is just imagination of the mind.” Fohr, of course, spins it out of the realm of clarity, mutating our sense of perception just like the styles she seemingly draws from.
8. Organ Bed
“You are the innocence of all things sleeping,” Fohr sings, letting some of her most striking lines guide the record’s strangely soothing climax. “And if you could wrap your arms around me/ Deep into infinity/ I know you would.” A saxophone echoes through the sparkle and swirl of the synths, presumably Fohr’s definition – or redefinition – of infinity. It’s a good one.
9. It Takes My Pain Away
Recalling Kali Malone’s ambient use of the organ, ‘It Takes My Pain Away’ harnesses both the intensity and the relieving properties of the instrument, retaining the balance for a full five minutes. As a closer, it is suggestive of the album’s conscious themes – the reality of suffering, the possibilities of transformation, the blanket of darkened abstraction – succumbing to numbness, sleep, perhaps infinity. It is relaxing if you somehow hear it in isolation. In Circuit des Yeux’s work, however, solitary as it may seem, everything is entangled: you may find your way out, but what that came before never ceases to reverberate. The quiet is as much a storm of accumulation as the noise, except it’s seeped through the skin, exposed and holding out for the next morning.
