UCC Harlo - Topos (2023)

Annie Garlid's second album as UCC Harlo is a meditation on the concepts of habitat and berth, comparing the nostalgia for an idealized nature of the past with a creative understanding of both urban and rural land in the present. "Topos" means "place" in Greek and also connotes a literary theme.

The album was motivated by Garlid's move back to the USA in 2018 after spending almost a decade in Europe; when she returned to her home country she was struck by its simultaneous familiarity and foreignness. During the pandemic, she was rooted in a single time zone for almost two years in a row, driving up and down the coast between New York and Maine. She became increasingly tethered to and entangled with a place that was both in her memory and in front of her eyes, more precarious than ever. The album reimagines the topography of the USA, sketching out a map free of man-made borders where metropole and wilderness are blurred into one another.

Based in New York City, Garlid is a writer, musicology scholar and classically-trained musician who has collaborated with Caterina Barbieri and Emptyset, as well as being a member of the Holly Herndon Ensemble.

She brings this experience to "Topos" in a number of different ways, expertly navigating the fertile ground between electronic and acoustic music, contemporary avant-garde and classical techniques. Her work as a writer and academic is also integrated this time around; while on "United" her vocals were mostly wordless, "Topos" developed using text she felt helped to deepen the impression of place. On 'Ocelot', an homage to Elysia Crampton aka Chuquimamani Condori, she reflects on the eponymous cat she was obsessed with as a child.

“Ocelot, you rush between the rare earth and the tree / between the margay and the sergal," she hisses in careful, spoken tones over woody rhythms, choral harmonies and sputtering electronics. It's not a million miles from Jon Hassell's legendary fourth world recordings, but Garlid isn't attempting to build an imagined world with her music, rather inviting the listener to notice what's here in our world.

The instrument that nestles at the center of "Topos" alongside Garlid's voice is the baroque viola. She's been performing and touring as a viola player for years, and is able to deconstruct its physicality as an instrument made of tree wood and gut strings, played with horse hair. The medieval influences that danced around her debut album are in the background this time around, but by using her instrument so anatomically she suggests centuries of push and pull between emotion and refinement. 'March 6' juxtaposes pizzicato strings with theatrical vocal phrases and hollow, natural rhythms, sounding like a neoteric nursery rhyme until it dissipates into labyrinthine, ornate melancholia. 'Riverbeds’ is a poetic reflection on the drought Annie encountered on a cross-country trip, and the lengthy 'Forest Floor,' a flooded study of wellness culture, evokes a viridescent mood with dewy crackles and movie score FM plucks that build into a powerful, bass-heavy crescendo.

For Garlid, "Topos" is an album about connection that reaches out across her community: her sibling Thea performs on vocals, while friends in New York and Berlin (Eve Essex and Rebecca Lane) play saxophone and flute, respectively. Drawing parallels between internal and external weather, Garlid explores our relationship with nature and each other and celebrates the presence of animals in our lives and imaginations. Her music is charged but hopeful: these aren't doomed laments to a dying planet, but segments of a chart that might help us contemplate the mystery in the present.