Sylvia Hallett -White Fog (Emanem)

This is one of my favorite discs in the Emanem catalog. Sylvia Hallett is, for my money, one of the most diverse but consistently interesting improviser/composers to come out of that loosely unified amalgam known as the British Improv scene. Her duets with Clive Bell have been beautifully transparent and strangely industrial by turn, and her solo discs for the Mash label have some roaringly funny and heartbreakingly intimate songs whose instrumentation exists just on the edge of conventionality; this doesn’t even begin to touch the multitudinous projects, for theater and concert, in which she’s been involved since the late 1970s.

White Fog is an entirely different beast. Closer in spirit to the instrumental Hallett/Bell duets but sporting lyrics, what Hallett calls “half-songs”, the discs exudes a chilly and semidetached vibe. The instrumentation is sparse and airy, sometimes damn near windy, a mixture of loops, rattles and ghostly slides and sputters.

The voice is mature, somewhat reserved except for key moments, the specifics of which I will leave to the interested listener to sort out. The characters exist, as I perceive them, in static moments that bespeak past and future conflict or isolation. In large part, these are not stories; they are tableaus, memories or visions carved, fleetingly, in the fog, absolutely brittle and seemingly ready to vanish. Ironically, this is how they achieve their greatest strength and longevity.

~ Marc Medwin