Circuit des Yeux, the brainchild of Haley Fohr, will be releasing her sixth album later this year on their new label home of Matador Records. Fohr had the intention of documenting “the hard work of joy” at a residency at Robert Rauschenberg’s Florida house over the winter of 2019—instead, she dealt with the loss of a close friend with a global pandemic following closely behind. The result is -io, which explores her journey through grief and her fascination with black holes; it’s “a place where everything is ending all the time.” It features a 23-piece orchestra recorded to tape last fall with Cooper Crain at Chicago’s Electrical Audio studio. After it was arranged and produced by Fohr, it was mixed by Marta Salogni (Björk, Holly Herndon). The first single shared from the follow-up to 2017’s Reaching for Indigo is titled “Dogma.”
The cyclical momentum is the major draw of the new single. The percussion musters a trotting pull, while a solitary guitar, something from a dusty Western, winds through in the background, searching. Fohr’s vocals are deep and intense as she sings, “Follow it around like a dog on a leash.”
In a statement about the single, she explained: “Where there is faith there is violence. The story of civilization is complicated and layered with dogmas. At each individual’s incentive lies both a beacon and an instinct. The fool follows the outer while the idiot chases her interior. Society is a necessary subversion of the self. It is through time that our quiet alarms grow with great intensity until emancipation through implosion or explosion become imminent.”
In the self-directed video, Fohr ventures on an enigmatic, spiritual journey. Watch it below.
