Circuit des Yeux

Last fall, when Circuit des Yeux (aka CdY, aka Haley Fohr) released the stand-alone single “God Dick,” she described the song as a passage leading from the past toward things to come. “It served a chrysalis function,” she wrote of the track, which morphs between orchestral grandeur and shuddering electronic percussion. Leaning in deeper, Fohr called it, “A love banshee bursting through porcelain skin one hair at a time until, finally, the beast within is fully on display.”

Out March 14th, Halo on the Inside is the product of that metamorphosis. It is the butterfly and the beast – a rhapsodic, hedonistic, dance floor-adjacent, pagan-friendly, horns-adorning wall of sound and emotion. Halo on the Inside finds CdY renewed, recombinant, and thrillingly alien.

“I can make a radio break,” Fohr sings on the pulsing, John Carpenter-esque slasher rave of “Canopy of Eden.” On “Megaloner” – with its electro-stomp and surreal Donnie Darko-ish mood – she invokes “fate in all the fires you make” on her catchiest chorus to date. The two songs offer an opening jolt of dark and expansive pop, at once insular and empowered, strange and sensual.

A Chicago based musician, composer, and multidisciplinary artist, Fohr’s work defies easy categorization. It has encompassed critically acclaimed albums, free-form improvisation, painting, audio visual installations, and large ensemble compositions. She has performed in an anechoic chamber (a room with no echo), written for a 50-piece children’s choir, and plunged from a rooftop (under the supervision of a stunt-coordinator).

Bringing Halo to fruition involved numerous changes in Fohr’s typical methods of operation. She worked at night. Throughout the writing, Fohr was living alone, slipping down to her basement studio from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. to free her mind, her voice, her hands. These late hours should not be understood as grim and isolative, though. It was a quiet space for uninhibited exploration. She turned herself loose on unfamiliar tools, winding her way through pedals and synthesizers, finding “play and melody through software malfunction and feedback.”

These graveyard shift writing sessions resulted in a revelation for the musician. “I found a very surprising, small voice in me, and it was deep, deep behind my heart,” Fohr says. She discovered it in the solitary quiet of her studio space, with the city outside hushed enough for Fohr to hear the rhythms of her organs in sync with one another—her own inner symphony. She continued working around that concept for eight more months, carving Halo on the Inside out of her reinvigorated relationships with solitude and herself. And then she looked outward.

A trip to Greece ignited in Fohr an interest in the character of Pan, the mythological, flute playing half-goat, half-man. His story of transformation, melody, fertility, and eventual demise served as a moodboard to the album's rapturous, brightly burning moments. You can hear it in “Anthem Of Me,” as sci-fi pads, bit-crushed distortions, and cavernous kick drums dissolve into twinkling piano drops while Fohr’s siren-like voice calls: “It’s an anthem of me. It will rock you.”

The process was adjourned in a trip to Minneapolis to complete the record with producer Andrew Broder (Bon Iver, Moor Mother, Lambchop). The album’s centrepiece, Cathexis, puts the pair’s creative chemistry on full display. Haley’s seemingly limitless voice interplays with Broder’s cathartic guitar coda, offering perhaps the album’s most ascendant moment.

The center of Halo remains Fohr’s voice. It is a powerful, seemingly supernatural instrument — a four-octave span that can span gentle melodic hooks, animalistic bleats, and elemental wails. Here, Fohr makes use of its full range in maximalist compositions that swerve fearlessly between genres and styles. “Through the process of making this music I was able to rewind myself to a time before fear,” she says. “And in the absence of fear I found the intimate beat of sex, love, and melody”.

There’s shock in metamorphosis, Halo On The Inside tells us, but there’s also levity and beauty. A moment of seclusion and dislocation yielding to rebirth and ominous beauty.