“I used to think life is suffering,” Haley Fohr began to say. “But now I think life is change.” It’s a powerful statement coming from Fohr, whose music as Circuit Des Yeux has often leaned into distress: Her transcendent 2017 record Reaching For Indigo was inspired by a spiritual exorcism of sorts; 2021’s -io was a response to the reverberating trauma of experiencing a global pandemic. But her rapturous seventh Circuit Des Yeux record Halo On The Inside, out today via Matador, is different. Gone, largely, is her distinctive 12-string guitar; in its place, a thumping four-on-the-floor heartbeat and towering synths; it might be the first time Circuit Des Yeux sounds as at home on the dance floor as in a cemetery. Calling in from the UK while on tour supporting Low’s Alan Sparhawk, the chameleonic musician spoke to Stereogum about her existential approach to songwriting, her love affair with Ableton, and why she loves Scott Walker’s fart jokes.
“This is the first album I’ve ever done that doesn’t really touch on my trauma,” Fohr said of Halo On The Inside. Instead, she wanted to focus on embracing the flesh and blood, feeling grounded and embodied, excavating our animalistic impulses: “I love bands like Dead Can Dance and Siouxsie And The Banshees — post punk that marries the unspoken darkness with the celebratory realness of having a body.”. That new focus meant a change in her approach. It meant singing without concern for what she was saying, or if her vocalizations even formed words at all. “Everything is pretty improvised, and there’s a lot of made-up language,” she explained. “Cathexis” finds her stretching the syllables of her words until they detach from their meaning. Halfway through “Truth,” she breaks into a series of incantations, her voice ringing out in multiple pitches as if casting a spell. Even Fohr is still figuring it out: “Things just came out of me; I’m still curious as to where it came from and what it means. In hindsight, there are definitely little secrets and prayers.”
Change also meant working, for the first time, with another producer: Andrew Broder, aka Fog, who has helped shape the sound of Moor Mother and Bon Iver. Fohr described their collaboration as one long, deeply intimate conversation: “We talked on the phone every day for a year. I went to his house and had dinner with his family while we worked in the studio; it was really intertwined.” Having another voice in the room while she was recording helped her see the potential in songs she might have otherwise dismissed. In one case, he pushed her to keep the cavernous and slow-moving “Cathexis,” which takes its name from a psychoanalytic term describing emotional investment in another person. “He loved the track and loved the song, and I did not like that track for a very long time, until I realized what it was about,” she explained (as far as she can tell, the song deals with her experience dating other people and realizing she was compelled, with mixed success, to match their energies).
Her experience with Broder taught her that “you can make really serious music under non-serious circumstances.” Much of the album’s sound was born from approaching production with a “childlike mind” as she was teaching herself how to use Ableton for the first time. “A lot of this record was actually built on accidents. I would export something and it would be 90,000% slower accidentally, or there was an octave preset called “Before He Cheats” that I used on my voice a lot, just because I thought it was funny,” she recalled. “I was less precious.” She brought up Scott Walker, who used fart sound effects on his later albums as a way to “clean the palette.”
Following “Canopy Of Eden,” a song about possessing a kind of otherworldly strength, with the deliciously libidinal “Skeleton Key” (“Go on, take it off, and dance for me,” she sings in her velvety falsetto), then, is perhaps her way of offering listeners a palette cleanser: “The juxtaposition illuminates the dichotomy of the emotion.” Sensuality undergirds many of the songs across the record — a carryover from last year’s thunderous single “God Dick.” “It really encapsulates how I feel being a woman,” she explained. “We all have sexual needs and desires.” She sees “God Dick” as “bridge from the past into the future,” opening with the same symphonic harmonies as -io while a drum machine rumbles just beneath the surface. “I couldn’t help but worry that maybe this new record would make people feel excluded from my 12-string discography. This was a bit of a soft opening; a welcome back, if you will.”
Still, even backed by sequencers and synthesizers, she acknowledged that there is an inescapable heaviness in her work. “I’m talking to you and trying to add levity to what I do,” she said at one point during our conversation. “I don’t want people to be afraid of me. But the fact of the matter is, what I do is very spiritual. It’s all encompassing in a really emotional way for me. I feel like I’m my true self when I’m performing and singing.” To prepare for performances, she turns out the lights, meditates, practices vocal warm-ups, and, as of late, relishes putting on makeup: “I didn’t really identify as hyperfemme for most of my life, and I don’t really do at this juncture either, but there’s something really powerful about the transformation.” Beyond pre-show rituals, transformation, both lyrically and musically, recurs throughout Halo On The Inside: On “Cosmic Joke,” she goes from “no starts” to “new starts” in the span of a dirge-like verse; “Organ Bed” begins with chilling piano and what sounds like a melancholic chorus of whale calls before building into a propulsive post-punk groove; in its last third, as if revealing a final trick, it opens onto a galactic dance floor, synths ricocheting like aural strobe lights.
“I’m a very existential person,” Fohr told me. “It’s not fun sometimes.” This manifested in our conversation at every turn. When asked if she was worried about the use of AI in art, she casually posited something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since: “Maybe we were put on Earth to create AI. What if the human species is just a womb for this new species?” When discussing her upcoming tour, she said that it felt like “it could be the last one. Society is really on the break,” she continued. “People are broke. If you have the resources to see live music, mine or someone else’s, it’s worth the investment.” Halo On The Inside, then, is a rave at the end of the world, a gauzy and gory, lustful and luxe soundtrack to the last days of the anthropocene.
