Laurel Halo’s Atlas is a shadowy work of startling complexity: a fogbank of a record, emotionally ambiguous and dense with dissonance. Emblazoned with a blurry photograph of the artist on its cover, the 2023 release inaugurated Halo’s label, Awe, with an implicit challenge: Good luck getting a bead on the American composer. Over the past decade and a half, her discography has run through avant-pop, minimalist electronics, ambient jazz fusion, and even tough, propulsive club music; Atlas drove home her determination to be elusive.
Awe’s second release, from Danish artists MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen, at first seems like it couldn’t be further from Atlas’ zero-visibility murk. The mood is relaxed, a little ruminative—occasionally anxious or slightly wistful, but only in an absent-minded way. The music appears even less complicated than the mood. Everything is right there on the surface: patient electric piano, trim lines of clean-tone electric guitar, lilting loops of hand percussion. None of it is much more forceful than a long sigh. Repeated phrases twist slowly in place, like mobiles; despite a thin papering of reverb, there’s no disguising that these songs are mostly empty space.
If Opening Night sounds like background music, that’s because it is. Velsorf (aka Mads Kristian Højlund Frøslev, of TLF Trio) and Nielsen (director of Copenhagen’s Boli Group, and a session player with credits for Dean Blunt and Slim0) wrote these pieces for the inauguration of New Theater Hollywood, an experimental space run by artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff out of the former 2nd Stage Theater, a 49-seat venue on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. Ensconced in the balcony, the two musicians serenaded guests as they entered, filled the time between celebratory speeches, and kept playing as attendees, presumably, sipped bubbly and snacked on canapes. The album was recorded on the spot. (Halo sits in on piano on one song.) In the longest piece, the nearly 16-minute title track, the murmur of crowd noise burbles faintly beneath drum-machine pitter-patter and breezy synth-and-guitar interplay, breaking the fourth wall and turning partygoers into extras.
Stylistically, Opening Night falls in with a recent wave of self-consciously chill material with one foot in the cut-out bins; I’m thinking of the spongy new-age fusion of Total Blue, the lackadaisical pop-rock of Jack J, the smeary ambient jazz of Lifted, the bedroom Balearic of Hotspring. But Velsorf and Nielsen’s music is more skeletal than any of those reference points; it does more with less. Songs are built out of simple looping phrases that soldier dutifully on without pause or variation. The sound quality is unvarnished, the rhythms rudimentary—the drum machine sounds like one of those old wood-paneled gizmos with preset foxtrot beats—and the frills nil.
