I was joking recently that electronic musicians have been self-isolating for years, so we are practiced at this. All my gigs were cancelled, and so time takes on a different quality. There’s something about all of this music I’m listening to that speaks to us slowing down – that speaks to this vacuum of urgency. It’s peaceful, serene, disembodied music to kind of get lost in.
The Italian ambient composer Gigi Masin is music for any time. I love sweet music that isn’t saccharine. Most music is just corny, and this edges towards that – there’s this really amazing moment before something slips into being bad taste. It doesn’t do full throttle with emotion and it’s more powerful as a result. All the things that are left unsaid ... it has a wistful quality is really powerful. That’s completely subjective, though, someone might listen to Masin and think it’s corny as fuck.
Playing Piano for Dad by H Hunt has this really beautiful cut-up feel, as if somebody was just sitting at the piano and trying to remember some jazz standards they learned as a teenager. They keep tripping, trying to figure it out over and over again. That process element is really nice – I love making recordings with audible damper pedal sounds, key sounds, the sounds of adjusting your chair. It’s very tactile, sensual music.
Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories, and Eliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort – they’re so easy to fall into. It’s deceptively charming music, even though it has a lot of dissonance. I love the empty spaces in Triadic Memories. There’s something really powerful when the notes punctuate the space, and in how beautiful the decay of each of the notes can be. Trilogie de la Mort you can get lost in. It reminds me of David Lynch’s obsession with electricity, it has that kind of spiritualised voltage feeling.
I’m also listening to Chee Shimizu and Charlie Bones’s NTS radio shows. I love the communal aspect of Charlie’s show, when people call in and have to sing the tune that they want to hear. I have my comfort albums, too: Newworldaquarium’s The Dead Bears; Rhythm & Sound’s With the Artists.
The through line with all this stuff is that it’s intimate music; it’s personal to me, or comforting. There’s this element of human touch, or that feeling of getting lost in time, and that is all super relatable to the current moment.
• Laurel Halo’s score for the film Possessed is released 10 April on The Vinyl Factory
