Music isn’t just about hearing something, it’s about feeling something. We’re pretty sure Sam Howard aka Halls knows this. Because with White Chalk, taken from his album Ark, Howard creates something that makes hidden emotions surge through the body. There’s grace, calm, heavenly beauty, isolation and a sense of otherworldliness in this beautiful piece.
Taken from a live session recorded in London in the summer of 2012, complete with a small choir, this live take of White Chalk is compelling stuff.
You can hear the whole of Halls debut album on Soundcloud (here). Take some time out and give it your attention.
At risk of making a massive over generalisation there are two types of non-professional (ie not being paid a wage to create it and not being bound by a professional set of rules and regulations laid down by a governing body concerning ethics) new music blogs ( we’re discounting the listen once and then repost immediately buzz blogs from this generalisation as they’re a different breed again).
The first is the ‘fan blog’. This is essentially what Breaking More Waves is – writing about the stuff that makes us excited and then writing about it some more. Then writing about it again. Our hope is that by bombarding you with the artists we love you’ll eventually come round to our way of thinking. The second type is the ‘one recommendation’ type blog. Good examples of this in our country are A New Band A Day, The Recommender and also The Guardian’s New Band Of The Day column. These blogs tend to push forward something that has caught their ear, recommend them to you and then let you decide if you’re going to take up the mantle to follow the artist as they develop or not. They’re still fans, but are not going to blindly obsess over and over about certain bands on the blog. A good explanation of the ideology behind the ‘one recommendation blog’ was written in this blog post from Joe of A New Band A Day (together with a small comment from Breaking More Waves at the end).
Which brings us to Halls. We’re a big fan of Samuel Howard, yet you’d hardly tell from this blog. Rather like our post that included a letter of apology to Rachel Sermanni we seem to have failed in providing much coverage of his ambient and dramatic electronic work having originally featured him in February and March 2011. And so it is that we hang our head in shame. An utterly failed fan blog.
So let us make amends. Taken from his haunting debut album Ark comes this piece of ghostly celestial minimalism entitled White Chalk - for which a new video has just been released. Sparse, evocative and deeply moving, if an amalgamation of Perfume Genius, James Blake and Bon Iver sounds like your cup of tea, then come and sit at the table with us and we’ll make a brew. Maybe we’ll just post this track every day for the next week just to demonstrate our love.
Halls next live show is at Birthdays in London on Oct 30.
Ambient. A genre of music has evolved through the decades from high-brow studio experimentation to d-i-y bedroom electronica, but the fundamentals remain the same; low-budget, minimalistic sounds, with the emphasis on synths, samples, loops and lightweight beats. It’s more concerned with atmospherics than songs or melody. At its best the laptop wonder kids that are its architects assemble moving soundscapes far removed from the bedsits they create them in. Yet with its more recent blogospheric rebirth come numerous potential protagonists, too many of them being imitators rather than innovators, with music that’s too languid, too pale, too inconsequential, too washed out for anyone but the underground to embrace. Even one of the genre’s main modern sub-groups – chill wave - has found one of its prime leaders releasing a long player that is akin to a limp wrist slapping you with a wet blanket – this review by Paul Lester writing for the BBC says everything we would want to say about Within and Without.
Yet despite the genre firing more blanks than it does real hitters, there are a few who whilst not stepping outside of the boundaries of their predecessors, do what they do very well. One such artist is Halls (previously featured here and here) who nuzzled our ears with his druggy, ghostly beauty on tracks such as Solace and Chakra Drums. Now he’s turned his remixing skills to a band that a number of blogs including ourselves are getting cautiously excited about – Theme Park (pictured above). We’ve already described their song Wax as 'classy very English sounding pop', now Halls turns it into the musical equivalent of a gentle beat-laden haunted house.
In a time pressured world there’s a danger that the work of ambient and ghost-electronica minimalist Sam Howard aka Halls could pass by unnoticed, lost to a planet so caught up in itself it has no time to breathe. This would be a huge pity because these four minute artworks deserve all the time you have. Loop them over and over and listen to the soft crackling fuzz of sounds that intertwine throughout the three tracks on his new Solace EP (available to purchase from his website here) and find yourself taken somewhere else.
Following a lineage that includes Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, The Orb and Burial, Halls are creating something druggy, unfussy and free from the everyday clutter of life. Ambient music has sometimes been described as anti-music, often created for background atmosphere to another activity, but this is not the case here. Like diving into the deep ocean and never coming up again, this is music that requires you to utterly immerse yourself in its spacious quality.
Streaming below is the lead track from the EP, plus one of the b-sides Colossus. Halls plays a debut live show at the Lock Tavern in Camden on March 27.
Halls produce blissed-out, sombre and minimal electronica that hints at the ambient works of Aphex Twin or possibly James Blake with all the dubstep influence stripped away; it’s the stuff of mellow beauty. These subtly spacious tracks don’t feel the need to layer any more than is necessary, allowing each piece to float in and out of consciousness. Occasionally, such as on Kaleidoscope, a snatch of ghostly half-awake vocal will drift in, but in the main this is music that rejects all rock ‘n’ roll traditions –there are no ‘songs’, nothing to ‘sing-a-long’, just a gorgeously foggy soundtrack coloured and freeze-framed with electronic textures. Halls are like the softer, more chilled cousin of another laptop knob twiddling wonder-boy - Gold Panda - which probably explains why his remix work also includes one of Derwin's tracks - Marriage - you can download that below.
Halls is the solo project of one Samuel Howard from South London, we know no more than that – but then how important is a back story except to music journalists to give them something to write about when they haven’t actually got anything else to say? You can access more Halls material than the ones streaming below from his Bandcamp here.
