Chorusing

On Half Mirror, O’Connell superimposes warm analog synths onto self-described “confessional folk” with a simultaneously cosmic and earthly outcome. Tracked at home in the mountains of North Carolina using a vintage tape delay, electric guitar, and a homemade synthesizer he named ‘Balsam,’ the album is at once a lonesome push-pull of electronics humanized by folk elements, and folk music made alien by electronic adornments. O’Connell’s own story is just as captivatingly segmented, and he crafted the personal, cathartic Half Mirror over the course of a decade.

In 2011, O’Connell’s interest in electronics and engineering led him to Asheville, NC, where he worked for Moog Music calibrating and building synthesizers, and testing vintage analog delay chips by day. At night he would spend his time building homemade synths and writing songs. It was here that he began the bulk of the work on Half Mirror, imbuing his music with the qualities of his environment almost by necessity. Filtering the poetry of fractured, imperfect memories through a lush, but sparse palette of sounds, Half Mirror evokes a profoundly moody sense of place -- the fog heavy in the mountain peaks, the dew present on early morning walks, and the musky smell of rhododendrons in the air.