Circuit Des Yeux - Reaching For Indigo album review

One of last year’s more curious albums was the self-titled debut from Jackie Lynn, who essayed a song cycle about a Tennessee country singer who flees to Chicago, gets embroiled in a cocaine racket and disappears from view. It turned out to be the work of writer-producer Haley Fohr, better known under her other alias of Circuit Des Yeux. Unlike the Jackie Lynn project, Fohr’s four previous albums as CDY have dispensed with narrative almost completely, instead offering impressionistic fragments and an emotional tone that wavers between ecstasy and despair. Reaching For Indigo is no less mysterious, its only thematic concession being some accompanying blurb about “a moment that fell down in the life of Haley Fohr on January 22, 2016”. Co-produced with regular collaborator Cooper Crain (Cave/Bitchin Bajas), it’s an intense listen that sets Fohr’s baritone against ruffled synths, acoustic guitar and piano. The quasioperatic Philo unfolds in grandiose style, the experimental drones of A Story Of This World Part II reach back to early 70s Can, while both Brainshift and Falling Blonde find a midpoint between the torchy minimalism of Anohni mand the arthouse musings of Nico.