BORSHCH

Mariana Berezovska: You will be premiering Atlas as a live show on the first day of Berlin Atonal, followed by the National Hall in Dublin, the Barbican in London, and the Musikgebouw in Amsterdam. How will you bring the record to life for a live performance? Will it involve many collaborators, given that the record features multiple instruments and the voices of other artists?

LH: It will be a duo of me and Leila Bordreuil on stage. Realizing this record in a live setting is an interesting question because, in some ways, the record sounds “big” or spacious, and at the same time, it sounds interior or intimate. So, how do you strike a balance between that? I’ve done an ambient ambient solo piano set the past couple of years, and some of the album tracks have snuck their way in. So in a way this show will be an extension on the previous, a mix of acoustic piano, synthetic sounds and textures, with moments of improvisation with Leila. n. I’m looking forward to collaborating with her and seeing what sounds we can create.

MB: How do you envision playing the piano in front of a large Atonal audience, especially considering your relatively recent reconnection with the instrument?

LH: I’m not new to it. It’s interesting because, on one hand, the piano can be an intimidating instrument. It’s larger and heavier than you and possesses a certain foreboding presence as it resonates within a space. Also, the piano’s notes are discrete—you can’t manipulate the attack time or use sound design tricks to significantly alter the acoustic sound source itself. Of course, I can use all kinds of effects, but at its core, there will still be isolated note events that take place. So in that sense, it can be an intimidating instrument because, if you play the wrong note, you really have to play the wrong note twice. But at the same time, there is something deeply comforting about it because it’s something from my youth, so it feels comforting and familiar. And, of course, it’s fun to engage in sonic sleight of hand, creating clouds and plateaus with the piano at the core.

MB: How do you feel about premiering at Kraftwerk specifically, rather than at a “proper” concert hall, which can be a challenging space for a live instrument?

LH: I’m confident we’ll get the sound right. The space does have a wild natural reverb, which will be fun to play with.

MB: When it comes to reconnecting with the piano, considering the physicality of the instrument and the contrast with the scattered memory of being in various places, which can sometimes make you feel like you’re nowhere, could you share your past relationship with the piano? What’s the significance of the piano recordings in the album?

LH: I started learning piano when I was young, like many people. Being a maladroit child it was the one activity that I took to and became okay at. And I ended up going to a music school, and I studied piano. Once there I quickly became the disillusioned classically trained musician, wanting to reject whatever tradition and origin story. I had started to create new forms of musical kinship by doing college radio as well as joining bands, and free improvisation groups. 

I took a long break from the piano though. When I first started making my own music I was primarily interested in electronic sound sources to create texture, rhythm, basslines, and so on. I eventually reconnected with the piano around 2019, and more seriously in 2020 when I had a residency at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. They had a couple grand pianos, including one in a small study in the corner of the house. It was a dark and cold room, and inside this shady, dark room isolated in the Pacific Palisades I started teaching myself bits and pieces of jazz theory, harmony, 2-5-1 progressions, scales, what notes fit on top of which chord, all jazz beginner exercises, basically. And then, when the pandemic broke out in March 2020, it cut the residency short and everybody fled within a matter of two days, and the place was completely deserted. It started to feel extra haunted, everyone having left, but I stayed on for a few days longer, still playing piano in this large isolated house, I remember the fire alarm went off constantly. At the end my friend Julia Holter drove me to the airport, I remember there was no traffic, and it took 15 minutes to get to LAX. It was an unexpected and eerie time. 

MB: So you’ve been reconnected with the instrument since that residency in 2020?

LH: It’s something that’s become part of my life, yeah, as a centering or grounding activity, especially during the early pandemic days. Also unexpectedly during that year I was invited by Moritz von Oswald to join his new trio configuration [Collaboration between Moritz von Oswald, Laurel Halo, and Heinrich Köbberling in November and December 2020 in Berlin resulted in Dissent, released in 2021 on Modern Recordings]. It was a beautiful moment connecting with a longtime hero of mine while also engaging with the piano. I started to feel that this direction was appropriate for me.

MB: Do you believe that your connection with the instrument can be a physical anchor during the mental journey, especially when you’re constantly changing locations and everything else begins to feel adrift? Traveling between different places and lacking a strong connection to a specific physical location can create a sense of being nowhere. How does this connection with the instrument, which carries both physical and nostalgic aspects, play a role in grounding you and making Atlas?

LH: I relate to this idea of ‘an anchor’ because it almost became a form of meditation,where you do have to practice bodily presence that you don’t necessarily have to do when you’re sitting in front of a computer or even when you’re in front of some hardware, writing a drum pattern or working with samples or playing a synth. And while it has been a beautiful way of reconnecting my physical body to music-making again it’s also not been straightforward. I got this bad case of carpal tunnel at the end of 2020 and had to take a long break from playing. I still have tension in my right hand and can’t play for hours on end . So it’s interesting how reconnecting with a physical instrument is grounding, but also a reminder of one’s fragility, that the instrument or the body playing it isn’t necessarily an anchor or safe harbor. It’s funny because the record itself is quite disembodied, and it has this floating quality, but at the same time, it has elements that are quite earthy, and it’s probably the connection with the piano that inspires that kind of more earthy sound on the record.

MB: Atlas is described as “Road trip music for the subconscious,” with hallucinatory textures. What’s the role of engaging with the subconscious throughout the process of creating the album?

LH: I’ve been touring since 2012, and the period from 2017 to 2019 was particularly heavy. This was immediately followed by the pandemic years and not touring, stopping everything and having to take a hard, cold look at what I had achieved, where I wanted to go, and what kind of music I wanted to make in the future. I had been living in Berlin for several years, and I was ready for a change, but I wasn’t sure what form that change would take, so I tried different cities: I’d done a residency in LA, spent a few months in Paris, and went home to visit my family in Detroit. Last year, I moved to London. I was in this sort of travel mode and making this record the whole time that was happening. So this record was in a way a soundtrack to that journey to becoming less restless.

MB: When do you recognize that you’re prepared for a new album and have a clear direction in mind? How do the rapid changes impact you to hold onto these ideas while they take longer or take a different direction? Does this make you feel more free, anxious, or something else entirely?

LH: This is the first solo record I’ve had in five years, which is in our content-driven present a long time. I had a DJ-Kicks record, a soundtrack record [Possessed, 2020], and a collaborative record with another major artist [Dissent, 2021] come up during those five years. But sometimes it’s necessary to evolve as a person in order to evolve as an artist, and you can’t rush that. I have made a lot of work in this time, Atlas is just one piece of evidence, there’s solo and collaborative work in the pipeline still. 

MB: Collaboration has always been a part of your process. How did you approach collaboration for this album featuring saxophonist Bendik Giske, violinist James Underwood, cellist Lucy Railton, and vocalist Coby Sey, while it’s so introverted and self-reflective?

LH: The collaborative process was fairly natural. It started with Bendik as we’ve been friends for awhile and collaborated in the past. For a period of six months we shared a studio at the Funkhaus in Berlin, so it was easy to link and try ideas, including some score work in 2021 which later became repurposed as album material.

During that time I was drawn to using string libraries, as they can sound beautiful, imaginary, and impossible — you can use these incredible legatos with inaudible bowstrokes that could never happen in real life. Libraries can make it sound like you have 20 or 200 players on your record. But of course, having at least one, two or three acoustic string sources in the mix can make the imaginary sound a bit more like reality, and instil a sense of breath in the music. I had already recorded a fair amount of violin when I approached the amazing cellist Lucy Railton, to see if she was interested in improvising and trying ideas on top of these existing library string arrangements and violin recordings. I later got together with the violinist James Underwood in London just to try out some textual or melodic ideas together. It was funny because sometimes I would have notes, sometimes I’d sing the ideas in person or just send voice memos. It was a collage approach, to be sure.

As a fan I reached out to Coby Sey, whose vocals are on “Belleville.” I recorded this track in one take while staying in Belleville in Paris. There was a moment when I improvised and started singing, and I thought this would sound pretty if there was some crazy vocal stack to interrupt the “reality” of the piano recording. It feels a little bit cheesy to have “Belleville” as a title, but here we are. 

Perhaps there’s an interesting tension between fantasy and reality going on. With all of these collaborators, the album-writing process had a collage-like feel, recording acoustic instrumentation to layer with the synthetic,and then blending and melting the two together, creating something different or maybe a bit uncanny. And that’s something I’ve done in my music for a long time, but perhaps it’s more successful or potent on this record with the use of more acoustic instrumentation. And while the record has elements of the subconscious , interior thought processes and self-discovery, it also contains external voices and contributions, making it alive and physical. Perhaps in doing so a conversation is created between what is fantasy, what is reality, and how we apply values or assumptions to either. 

MB: It sounds like the process of creating Atlas was solitary and inward-looking, but at the same time, you have a multitude of stories and images swirling in your mind, almost like you’re directing a movie within your head. With all the collaborations, arrangements, manipulations, and instruments, it becomes the opposite of solitary in the end. Could you share what sources of inspiration you surround yourself with during this time?

LH: Currently I’m reading this book by Luigi Pirandello One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” The narrator of the book comes to the shocking realization that other people perceive you differently than how you perceive yourself, resulting in a psychotic break. It’s a very funny book, and I’ve been amused because there are echoes of that sentiment on this record, how the people around you can create or destroy a sense of reality

I was also reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and it was an inspiration for this record in how he so effortlessly created memories or civilization from scant but crucial detail, and how these short descriptions of hallucinatory and fantastical cities possess both ostensible historical basis and a sense of pure sci-fi fantasy pleasure.

I also watched several of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films while making this record (including Cemetery of Splendour, Blissfully Yours, and Tropical Malady). He’s an amazing filmmaker. His films are so beautiful and rich in atmosphere; they are often just gentle character studies, and can be dryly humorous and non-sequitur. There’s a heavy emphasis on setting; you can feel the humidity in his films and smell the nighttime air. I’d love to work with him one day, though he tends to work with the same composers and sound designers, which can happen in film. I often play music from the compilation album Metaphors, which contains 14 soundworks from his films.

MB: Atlas is the first release on your imprint, Awe, which is also the name of your NTS show, featuring soundtrack, minimalism, modern classical, and ambient music. Could you share more about your vision for Awe and your plans to collaborate with artists beyond music?

LH: I thought it important for this record to be the first release on Awe because the aesthetic and mood of this record are appropriate for the label, which has also been reflected in my NTS radio shows—this disembodied, heavy, but waves of light sort of sound. Perhaps they were all being developed at the same time. I hope to release other artists and collaborative projects on the label. I’m curious about expanding outside musical formats and working with designers, writers, and visual artists. And that’s the beautiful thing about creating a label, you generate a platform outside of your own work or identity.