Laurel Halo at Melbourne Recital Centre, Photo by Duncographic
A few hours before seeing Laurel Halo and Leila Bordreuil at Melbourne Recital Centre, I sent my friend an 18-minute voice memo. I was lying in the grass at Edinburgh Gardens. In the background, you could hear lorikeets chattering and wheels and boards smacking the concrete at the skatepark.
The skies were overcast, but it was warm for August. The wind – the nemesis of a cleanly delivered voice message – occasionally whipped past my face from east to west, but it was generally calm, and I had a lot to say.
I’ve been walking a lot lately. I’ll go out for a walk and start to feel better, so I won’t want the walk to end. I’ll get back home and notice the feelings and stresses congesting, then I’ll remember how much better I felt when I was walking. So, off I go again.
It can be hard sometimes. Life, that is. And it can be easy to find yourself stewing in the difficulties, hung up on if onlys and what ifs. You might be conscious of how unhelpful it is to be dunking yourself in rumination and making an effort to learn from what’s troubling you. But it still doesn’t make you feel any less beset.
A musician friend of mine is fond of creating what he calls “musical objects,” compositions that are intentionally non-personal in nature. They’re like a lamp or a coffee table, he says. They fill a space. But every one of them is a failure. Why? Because of course they reveal something specific about the person who made them. There is no escaping your subjectivity, even – or perhaps especially – when you’re trying to circumvent it.
Laurel Halo and Leila Bordreuil, Photo by Duncographic
During their uninterrupted 45-minute performance at Melbourne Recital Centre, part of this year’s Now or Never festival, Laurel Halo and Leila Bordreuil evoked a landscape in a permanent state of flux. Bordreuil’s cello drones drew a vibrating circle around Halo’s freeform piano playing, which was part Studio Ghibli, part Café del Mar. She’s a lyrical and harmonically bold pianist, but also pleasingly amateurish.
Halo had a mixing desk and digital effects unit beside her, and she intermittently cranked the delay or introduced a track of hissing noise that reminded me of the cheaply made projector my brother insisted we buy from Amazon. When the delay kicked in, the sound became fuller, more irregular, and occasionally quite tense. But no conspicuous beings inhabited the world they created, nor did either performer explicitly announce, This is who I am and this is how I’m feeling.
It was easy to lose yourself in the landscape, as you might do on a walk through city streets, past cafes and boutiques, down alleyways and past construction sites, through dog parks and past public pools, only to find yourself among the green grass and green birds.
Close to the end, Halo leaned over and briefly scatted into the microphone. It lasted no more than two seconds, but the impact was like a bolt of lightning. Or like receiving the message that you’d spent all day – or all week – telling yourself that it’ll be fine, you can deal with it, it’s out of your control anyway, if the message never arrives.
Laurel Halo and Leila Bordreuil performed at Melbourne Recital Centre, on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, on Friday 22 August.
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