Levitating Fields by Hourloupe

Departing from the spoken word and avant-garde leanings of previous albums, "Levitating Fields," Hourloupe's fifth album, takes more traditional song structures to convey its dreamscapes and compressed hallucinations. “Camphor Tree Blues” transposes the story of a boy who survived Hiroshima’s atomic blast onto a Carter Family-style ballad. We meet a fortune teller left to “her loneliest imagining/in the purple bruise of evening/when she is out of tea leaves" and take account of Winslow, a ruined mansion in the woods, one part graffiti-scrawled, post-January 6 Capitol, one part ominous basement foundation.

Hourloupe's musical language once again includes a wide range of influences. Voices as different as those of David Berman, Johnny Cash, and Lou Reed can be heard. As with previous releases, "Levitating Fields" is rich with references to literature: the shape-shifting narrators of Haruki Murakami ("110 Olduvai"), the darkly surreal imagery of Charles Simic ("Cathedral Bones"), and the poetry of scripture ("Seer in the House").

Hourloupe: “I associate it, by assonance, to ‘hurler’ (to roar), to ‘huleler’ (to hoot), to ‘loup’ (wolf).”
—Jean Dubuffet

Hourloupe is a collaboration between writer, musician, and artist Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov.