Circuit des Yeux – -io
Matador – 22 October 2021
The sixth Circuit Des Yeux album (and first for Matador) begins with a short piece inspired by Buddhist meditation. It could be a warning to the listener that a certain amount of relaxation is needed, that what they are about to hear isn’t necessarily going to be easy, or it could be the singer’s way of preparing herself for a cathartic or redemptive or painful experience. Vanishing, which immediately follows that short introductory piece, starts life as a fairly simple, almost glammy stomp, and then that indescribable voice kicks in. Before long it feels as if the walls of the song are closing in. Haley Fohr has a gift for creating architectural spaces within her music that are both huge and claustrophobic. If this is your first exposure to Circuit Des Yeux then the sheer dramatic presence of Fohr’s singing will knock you sideways. On –io that presence is more monumental than ever, looming large in the company of a twenty-three piece ensemble of brass, string and wind players.
The album title is a kind of suffix, an end without a beginning, and Fohr has a preoccupation with endings. She describes the album’s sound-world as ‘a place where everything is ending all the time’, and this is both a reference to the Covid pandemic (the ending of human lives on a large scale and the end of our normal ways of living) and also to her own personal grief, brought on by the death of a close friend.
Fohr approaches loss and grief in a range of ways. A song like The Chase evokes a feeling of paranoia, of closeness, of a wish to escape the inescapable. Lead single Dogma sounds like Morricone doing krautrock, a thumping, itching beast built nurtured on the wellspring of political and personal anger. But there are moments of brightness too, like the soaring opening of Sculpting The Exodus. These searing, bright points are inspired by Fohr’s residency at Robert Rauschenberg’s house in a pre-pandemic time that takes on the light of a kind of distant arcadia. It imparts an almost synaesthetic glow to the album.
Where Fohr would once have relied on her guitar, she has switched allegiance to the organ and piano. This, allied to thickly layered orchestral sounds and the strange light that hangs over every note, gives the whole thing heavy, dreamlike quality: Walking Toward Winter is almost devotional while Argument dances a slow and vaguely sinister dance, beginning with urbane polish before the arrangement becomes worrisome with glitches, squeals and drones then finishes with a passage of disarming pastoral quietude. Elsewhere we are treated to epic, shifting suites of percussive gravitas, yowls of brass and subtle woodwind (Neutron Star) and minimal, staggeringly beautiful one-take piano ballads (Stranger – perhaps the single most expressive meditation on visceral grief on the entire record). It all ends on a strangely conventional note with the immaculately crafted Oracle Song. It’s not quite a full stop, but it does hint at the possibility of closure.
Fohr’s work as Circuit Des Yeux is consistently challenging, boldly experimental and always liberating. -io is probably her strongest work to date, a powerful statement born out of genuine feeling.
Pre-order and pre-save -io now: https://cdy.ffm.to/-ioalbum
Photo Credit: Evan Jenkins