Review: Ash Fure and Laurel Halo at Pioneer Works

Everything seemed perfectly engineered for presence on Jun. 25 at Pioneer Works. The sun twinkled golden in the yard as people milled about, drinks in hand, and sat on benches to read or chat with their friends under twilight. Music hummed on loop, lingering in the air around us. We were there to see Ash Fure and Laurel Halo present two immersive performances: one born from the physical embodiment of sound, the other offering space for dreamy meditation — and both inspiring us to embrace the moment.

Both Fure and Halo have perfected the craft of enveloping music. Fure’s spatial compositions fill rooms with booming rhythms and rich harmonies; next to the stage at Pioneer Works, for example, her installation ANIMAL [a listening gym] invited visitors to enter a space outfitted with sculptures akin to gym machines and let her music seep into their bones. Her live presentation, ANIMAL [for body and sound], complemented the exhibit and opened the evening with space-shaking rhythms sculpted by the composer in real-time using speaker cones and a sheet of polycarbonate. Fure grasped the sheet and whipped it around, swirling it at different speeds to signal shifts in musical pace, pitch, and melody. Lights followed her, flashing from burnt orange to cerulean blue to strobe effects.

The piece had a clear structure that began with barely audible pulses that later burst in chaotic, sharp-edged fragments. The first time this occurred, the audience lit up, banging their heads and tapping their feet; as it continued, the pattern began to feel a bit staid, despite its cathartic release. Most engrossing were the different textures Fure conjured with each swipe of her sheet, ranging from deep Earth-like beats to shimmering high pitches, showcasing the spectrum of possibilities of her setup and the physicality of her music.

Halo, a composer, producer, and DJ, takes a pensive approach to immersion, pairing plumes of electronics with sweet piano melodies that unfold in waves. Her works are transportive, taking us out of our bodies and into the stars. Dim-lit lights set the mood for her introspective works for solo piano and electronics, which unfolded with ease; she took a delicate approach to her instrument, gliding up and down its keys. Poignant, simple melodies looped as clouds of electronics cloaked them in a gossamer haze; melancholy jazz harmonies and lilting repetition swayed back and forth like a breath.

Electronics and piano grew symbiotically, crescendoing and decrescendoing together — though at some points, the electronics overtook the stark simplicity of Halo’s playing and obscured the intimate feeling of the performance. The best moments came when they were stripped away, letting the piano live at the fore and allowing melodies to unfold with hypnotic gentleness. At the end of her performance, the audience stood up and cheered, lost and moved by the daze of her music.

While each set offered a different kind of experience, both felt deeply personal. Fure’s music was transmitted from her intense motions to the audience; Halo’s felt like a salon, an offering from somewhere inside the mind. Both left room for us to find ourselves in the mix, letting sound be a vehicle for whatever we needed that night — maybe it was the comfort of hope, or the visceral experience of sweating to the beat, or the melancholy of remembrance on a cool summer night. Whatever it was, they laid the room bare. By the end of the evening, we stumbled back into the quiet night, looking out at the New York skyline, drawn to each other and ourselves in the glow of the night.

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