“The desert was outside my range,” wrote Don DeLillo in his novel Point Omega. “It was an alien being, it was science fiction, both saturating and remote, and I had to force myself to believe I was here.” This image is shared by the work of Lauren Helene Green, an artist who originally came to our attention as one half of Tan Cologne. First with Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico and then ‘Heretic Porcelain‘ on Labrador Records. Releases which captured the strange duality of the desert. A landscape unrivalled in both its physicality and ethereal charm.
“Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico is something of a gateway to a multidimensional version of the state,” we wrote in our review. “One where the organic and incorporeal exist side by side, and time is accordioned into a single present, eradicating the lines between past and future, earthly and extraterrestrial, science and divination.” ‘Heretic Porcelain’ further challenged spatial, temporal and spiritual lines, offering a sound where “the physical and spiritual blurs, the delicate and insolent too, the malleable and unyielding marbling into one.”
Lauren Helene Green is set to return this autumn with her debut solo album Outer Highway Realms on Royal Oakie Records. The record continues her exploration of desert living through a rich blend of folk, ambient and drone. A sound capable of evoking the nuanced and often contradictory moods of the environment, managing to be expansive and detailed all at once.
Indeed, lead single ‘Canyon Loop’ is described as “a collection of observations on New Mexico’s slow desert.” A song which draws upon the myriad of emotions and sensations experienced during morning reflections and sunset drives, eschewing the linearity of time to combine the landscape’s surreal dreamlike quality with more mundane, tactile activities like woodworking and gardening. It might clock it under two and a half minutes, but it seems to occupy a period far larger. A sense of conjured with sweeping tones, time indicated with angles of light.
Outer Highway Realms is out via Royal Oakie Records on the 7th October and you can pre-order it from the Lauren Helene Green Bandcamp page.
