Circuit des Yeux: Making Halo on the Inside

Across nearly two decades, American singer-songwriter Haley Fohr has built one of the most daring and emotionally resonant bodies of work in contemporary experimental music. Central to her conceptual core is an astonishingly deep baritone vocal, one of the most distinctive in modern music.

Emerging from Lafayette, Indiana, under the moniker Circuit des Yeux, Fohr’s debut LP Symphone (2008) was notorious for its lo-fi aesthetic, combining tape hiss and heavy distortion to create dense experimental atmospheres. Further releases such as Overdue (2013) and -io (2021) brought grand orchestral arrangements into the fold, as Fohr meditated on trauma, transformation and the vastness of human emotion.

However, her eighth album, Halo on the Inside, marks a radical rebirth. Co-produced alongside Andrew Broder, Fohr abandoned her signature 12-string guitar for dark electronic textures and pulsing rhythms. With Ableton central to her reinvention, the immersive soundscapes of Halo draw on Greek mythology and nocturnal solitude to locate beauty in change.

At what age did you realise you had this incredible voice, and was it innate or did it require a lot of developing?

I first came to know about my voice at around 10 or 12 years old. I was a very shy person, but felt my vocal coming through for the first time when a teacher called me out in school and asked me to sing a solo. It was always darker and deeper than most of my friends, and after I did the solo I enrolled in private vocal lessons and really developed it over the next decade. I’ve always made music as a way to accompany my voice, so although I'm classically trained vocally, my approach is actually quite ad-hoc. It all started with pots, pans and a piano, because that's what was in the house when I was growing up. Eventually, I bought myself a guitar on eBay for $15 - it was a piece of junk, but through that DIY approach I became more curious and eventually graduated with a degree in audio engineering.

Your debut LP, Symphone, was very lo-fi and uncompromising. Looking back, can you relate to what you were trying to convey and are you still on the same journey?

With Symphone, I really did want to record a symphony, but it sounded like it was coming through a telephone receiver. Back then, all I had was a four track with an internal microphone, and you can hear that, but in my brain there were all these cellos, strings, deep timpanis and drums. The latest album, Halo on the Inside, and its predecessor, -io, are very much that fully embodied. Looking back, it was all pretty existential stuff - I was young and grappling with emotions that I couldn’t really put my finger on. Maybe that's why I lean towards experimental music, because it's not so cut and dried and helps to reflect the confusion of navigating human existence.

Prior to Halo on the Inside, your sound was largely acoustic. At what point did you consider using software as a tool to aid your music-making process?

I’d say that the majority of my discography is analogue – I was still recording via tape machine up until two albums ago, and my DAW switch into Pro Tools around 2015 was pretty much a tape-op situation. I've always used acoustic instruments and employed outboard gear manipulation to create things that sound a little more electronic, but it wasn't until Halo on the Inside that I went in with the predisposition of wanting to create something that felt of this time - and a big ingredient in that was utilising the DAW as a creative tool.

Which is presumably where Ableton came into the picture?

That's where Ableton came into play, but I wasn't familiar with the program at all. I first noticed it in a live configuration because a lot of experimental artists are using it in their live performances and it seemed kind of amazing how I’d show up with all this gear and they’d just have a laptop and this whole orchestra of sound behind them. After trying out the free demo, I found that I was able to learn things quite quickly and so many options were taking me down deep caverns. After I started sidechaining and using Ableton’s effects and built-in instruments, I found that I was aggregating material so fast I was able to create stuff that felt really unique, then loop and sing over it. For the first time, the genesis of the songs came from the Ableton computer brain, which was completely new to me - I don't think I'd have been able to write the melodies and make the music in the way I wanted to without it.

Before we explore the production side, what emotional or conceptual themes are you exploring?

The album sounds quite industrial to my ears. I was living in Chicago at the time, having recently moved because the sounds of the city were really starting to get to me. I lived by a train station and wanted to alchemise the sound of the constant traffic and sirens into the music’s sonic background. I was also going through a breakup after dating someone for seven and a half years. Going into the album, I knew that it was going to be about, not necessarily loss, but a new identity shift and some pain related to that. There’s a sexual element to it, in that I had so much desire and really wanted to feel intimacy, both physically and emotionally, so Halo on the Inside is very thematically driven and each song is basically about love in one way or another.

And in what way were you able to add another dimension using Ableton?

It helped me to marry two worlds and see them as one. My producer, Andrew Broder, is very fluent in Ableton and definitely helped me to combine those acoustic and technological worlds. Exploring bass and sub bass frequencies is not something that’s easy in the natural acoustic world, and I also wanted to utilise strings, but within Ableton we were able to accomplish something very present, visceral and sculptural. Side chaining was a really big deal on this record, which basically means that one track is dynamically controlled by another. We did that a lot with some of the outboard synths, real drums and in-the-box drums, but some of the most exciting stuff was the vocal manipulation. Cutting, chopping and creating a tapestry out of sounds that come from my body until they’re very alien and rhythmic was a really fun process.

I’m sure you could have created the album using Ableton yourself, so why turn to an outside producer for assistance?

I knew going into this that I didn’t have any experience of making beats and wanted a plethora of options. I also wanted to use a producer to bounce ideas off for songwriting. I found Andrew because he’d produced an LP by an Indigenous singer called Joe Rainey who records pow wows on cassette. He took these very raw vocal elements and created a mix tape that combines beats with Alice Coltrane strings - elements that I was fascinated by. So I sent Andrew a DM and within a couple days he'd sent me a folder of 30-40 beats and we were off to the races.

Were the beats foundational to how you developed ideas?

A lot of the songs were written acoustically. For example, Organ Bed was written on piano, but other tracks like Megaloaner came from Andrew’s beat folder where he had a bassline and a beat and I just jammed over them. Once I had a melody and it was time to flesh out the track, I’d fly to Minneapolis to work with him in person. We did around three day sessions and had about 15 finished tracks by the end of it, but not all of them were right for the album.

Download the Live Set of Circuit des Yeux’s Organ Bed

Please note that this Live Set and all included samples are intended solely for learning and exploration purposes and are not to be used for commercial endeavors. Requires Live 12 Suite.

Was it difficult relinquishing elements of the creative process to Andrew?

The hardest part of collaborating with Andrew was erasing most of the stuff he did, which I felt so bad about. Organ Bed is a really good example of that process, because Andrew was getting so excited about it and I had to sort of rein him in and remind him of the intention of the song, which is about my cat and has a very soft core. At one point, it was almost like a dance track with all this arpeggiated glittery stuff on it, but I decided to delete 80% of that and go with a more atmospheric guitar and ‘80s pad sound. I like to think this record is timeless because of Ableton, but not in the same way that my other records are. For me, it’s like that movie Everything Everywhere, All at Once, where you’re just being hit by a barrage of stuff. The whole process was so Frankenstein, but creative accidents gave me a lot of gasoline.

Are you using your remarkable voice as a primary creative force, or in response to music you've already created?

I pretty much always have a melody and then I'm trying to find something to support it, but I like to use the voice in a textural, atmospheric way. Like a sound tapestry or full choir, it has to have some kind of movement. Up until Halo on the Inside, I’d recorded my vocals using a Neumann U87 going through BAE preamps and an Apogee interface. I really dislike compression on my voice and if I do comping I’ll only usually do two to five passes, so I like to keep things pretty natural, but I did these vocals with the help of a studio engineer and it was nice to have immediate feedback from someone who could help me try new things. There's a song called Canopy of Eden where the chorus has a whispered track over a full body normal vocal, but I was encouraged to lean into the Ks and the guttural parts of the words and I think it comes through in a really cool way.

Halo on the Inside also features a lot of multi-instrumentalists. Was this the first time you had the budget to make a more expansive record?

The budget I received from Matador was life-changing, and I like to pay my players well because I understand that they're giving me something for eternity. A big part of Andrew Broder’s production work was about allowing him to pick out contributors, and most of those sessions were either done in my absence in Andrew’s studio or musicians would send tracks independently. But if it wasn’t vibing I’d either change or not use them. Ultimately, it's about serving the song and getting it to where I want it to be.

You also employed the very highly-regarded mix engineer Marta Salogni, which sounds like a very wise choice…

Up until my previous album, I’d worked strictly with Cooper Crain. We were partners in life and music and there were a lot of advantages to that, but I’d heard about Marta from her work with Björk and was familiar with the music she’d made with her late partner Tom Relleen. Frankly, it's exciting as a lady to see other ladies out there who are also in love with tape machines and analogue delays –that whole thing seems very romantic to me! Not only that, but she's one of the kindest people I've ever spoken to and I was lucky that she was interested and had the availability. We’d worked remotely through COVID on -io, but this record was an opportunity to go to London and be there with Marta. Watching her work was absolutely inspiring.

Did you pick up any mixing tips?

One thing I don't think she'd mind me sharing is that she never solos anything - she mixes with everything in reference to everything else and I thought that was quite intelligent. She’d also just finished making a Depeche Mode record, so I was able to say to her, “I want this sound to sound like Depeche Mode!” and she’d take out a hard drive of their sessions, which was like something from the Make-A-Wish Foundation [laughs].

Follow Circuit des Yeux on Bandcamp and Instagram

Text and interview: Danny Turner

Photos courtesy of Dana Trippe/Nat Harvie