Lisa Lerkenfeldt – ‘Halos of Perception’ album review: a soundtrack to urban exploring
In 2023, the concrete crawl continues to not only gobble up green spaces but also subsume the very nature of our existence. It’s really rather easy these days to go a whole month without leaving the same single square mile radius of land where your cramped city domicile resides. As a result of this, now even ‘exploration’ paradoxically dwells within urban settings. This is the theme that Lisa Lerkenfeldt channels in her new album Halos of Perception.
In 1800, Sydney had a non-indigenous population of around 3,000 people. By 1851, the city housed just under 39,000. And it took until around 1925 for the city to surpass one million residents. For millennia, the sprawl surrounding it had been anything but concrete, and exploration was rife, but now those hungering for the awe of eyes setting sight on a new landscape and a bit of environmental escapism have to hunker down into the hidden recesses of the city’s underbelly.
The trend of urban exploration is a relatively new one all over the globe, but its oddness seems particularly apparent in Australia of all places. This is the realm where Lerkenfeldt’s new record takes place. The musician met with a member of an urban exploration collective and burrowed into the bowels of bohemia, drawing inspiration for new music from evenings reading by candlelight alone in the abandoned basement of some capitalistic stronghold or sharing a sack of goon with a friend in the ruins of Rozelle’s old tram station.
While the YouTube snippets we may usually see of the Christopher Columbus’ of the concrete world sneaking into a shutdown shopping centre might evoke more of a sense of angst and rebellion, Lerkenfeldt’s effort reframes that. Through luring loops and syncopated instrumentation, she makes the act of cosying up to a city’s architectural tombstones seem like a comforting affair—recapturing the reverie of exploration, period.
Littered on top of her underworld soundscapes are field recordings that enliven her tubular music with a visceral sense of the world that inspired it. This creeping reality brings an eerie edge to the dreaminess that seems very reflective of the feeling you’d expect when wandering through the curious decay of concrete nostalgia.
In fact, the Australian composer almost seems to have happened upon the perfect world for her work. What could be more fitting of classical instrumentation augmented with technology to create a new musical lens than the strange experience of old, new, and escapism colliding when it comes to urban exploration?
On Halos of Perception, this is finely tuned with subtle artistry. It’s rare for the comfort of ambience to reach such an actualised identity. As mad as it might be to say, the album genuinely places you somewhere about 20 feet beneath the pavement or else gazing through a cracked window 40 feet above it, and that makes for a listening experience both rare and alluring.
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