When an artist "finds her voice," it's meant as a figure of speech and signifies a certain kind of greedy perspective from our end that values neat narrative arcs and easily identifiable resolutions. It's typically reserved for someone like Laurel Halo, who's darted and dashed rather than having followed a simple trajectory over the past couple of years, recording a vast and diverse amount of material under her own name and as King Felix for six record labels (and counting). Her Hyperdub debut, Quarantine, appears to acknowledge the need for something definitive, and by intricately arranging and shrewdly sequencing her C.V. on a micro scale, it's her best and most cohesive work to date. And it's largely because Halo finds her voice in a literal sense. She foregrounds vocals to a far greater extent than on her previous material, and while Quarantine veers from claustrophobic sci-fi dioramas to meditative synth drones to nakedly expressive confessionals, it's unified by an underlying perspective and personality that commands attention yet still leaves plenty to the imagination.
You find out fairly quickly that Halo is setting all the rules of engagement on Quarantine. Opener "Airsick" introduces many of the tricks Halo uses from there on out-- oddly stacked and constantly shifting harmonies, portamento pitch-bending, narcotic melodies, a prevailing sense of technological dread-- before the nearly a cappella "Years" leaves her completely exposed. Halo doesn't exactly yell or scream on "Years", it's something like a boundary-pushing exhalation after a long and self-imposed silence, sung in an uncomfortably loud and flat tone. Some will find it, to put it lightly, hard to deal with, and by most standard metrics of evaluation, it's not proper singing and borders on ugly. But consider the combative content of the lyrics: "I will never see you again/ You're mad 'cause I will not leave you alone." There's purpose to all of this, reminding me of Jeff Mangum's approach on the opening devotional from "King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 2 & 3", where the volume signifies an artist pushing against internal and external repression with necessary, confrontational force.
Halo's vocals only occasionally go back into attack mode, but "Years" is indicative of Quarantine's prodding and provoking nature and how it subverts the typical ideas of how we brand aggressive and intense music. The instruments of war are almost completely absent here: The digital dissonance is rarely abrasive, there's nothing resembling a true bassline, nor is there anything that scans as a snare or kick drum perhaps outside of the almost tropical pitter-patter outlining "Airsick", or the jetstream whir of "Thaw". If anything, it resembles the beatless, zero-gravity voids created by Oneohtrix Point Never on Returnal, and similarly, the extraterrestrial quality of Quarantine's terrain heightens your senses and makes your nerves sit a little more on edge to counter the unfamiliarity.
Though often melodic, it doesn't really ever come off as pop. My experience with Quarantine feels more like an interactive, multimedia affair, as though I'm listening to a record while simultaneously trying to solve a puzzle or challenge the CPU in a video game. I don't hear verses and choruses so much as Q&A, stimuli, and open-ended responses, challenges presented, accepted, and accomplished. I can't really hum the melody of "MK Ultra"; the thrill is in finally being able to trace its strange, boomeranging path in real time. The tension created by the juddering undercurrent of low frequencies and Halo's octave-shifted vocals on "Carcass" is unnerving enough, and her use of the phrase "my carcass" rather than "my body" intends to provoke an entirely different and gnarlier set of emotional responses.
Indeed, while much of Quarantine's futuristic production and man-machine interface conjures science fiction, much of the lyrical approach reads like scientific or Socratic method. Beyond the blurry delineation between devotion and revenge on "Years", what to make of something like "Holoday"? Structurally, it feels like an interlude, a free-time juxtaposition of scrambled circuitry and a high-pitched sample of Halo singing, "just wanna be with you!" like an errant, synaptic trigger. Is it a love song or a neurological study of the feeling? Likewise, it certainly has to be intentional that the titles signifying expressions of rapture ("Wow", "Joy") are given to compositions in thrall to the dehumanization of Halo's voice. The most pointed example of Halo's painstaking production appears on "Tumor": The illuminant vocal processing accompanying the lyrics, "Caught behind the wall of tears/ Distorted liquid image of you/ The signal keeps cutting out but one thing is clear/ Nothing grows in my heart, there is no one here," evokes a radiant sadness. Seconds later, stripped of all effects and affects, Halo menacingly deadpans to the object of her desire, "you are my target."
There are plenty of disarmingly pretty moments too on Quarantine, yet even those strive for unsettling effect, finding beauty in uncertainty, confidence in the embrace of the unknown. There are already subtle hints at discord during the spacey lullaby of "Thaw", milky synths and samples beaming in and out of an odd time signature as Halo sings in a strangely conversational timbre, "Don't get addicted to anything/ Just keep on walking/ One foot in front of the other/ Forward motion's the only answer." The closing "Light + Space" is Quarantine's most conventionally performed keys-and-voice piece and also the most gorgeous, though a rare glimpse at Halo's more lush, jazzy phrasing is dedicated to the admission that "words are just words that you soon forget." Coming at the tail end of a diffuse, exploratory second half, it's a disquieting and ultimately weighty epigram for Quarantine, a record created in the image of its author in its ability to dodge easy explanations and comparisons. After all, the greatest pleasure of Quarantine lies in its being a world unto itself, a self-contained vortex where influence is nearly impossible to project or extract, leaving only the alternately frightening and reassuring state of solitude.
