Hali Palombo: Insane Rarities
Navel-Gazers #82 is an interview with Hali Palombo who is going to talk to us about Insane Rarities. It goes without saying that we can learn a lot by examining an artist’s earliest work - that is, if we can access it. Musicians often describe early throwaway material which they’d be mortified for anyone else to hear, and which we never do get to hear. Not Hali Palombo. Amused by her performance at the Colour Out Of Space festival in Brighton earlier this year, I found myself scrolling all the way to the bottom of her Bandcamp page - a thing I often do, seeking out an artist’s earliest work - only to find this collection. Borne out of “a brief interest in not really making music, but making noises and talking”, the twelve tracks on ‘Insane Rarities’ are presented exactly as they were spontaneously conceived however many years ago in the American midwest. And that’s a location which seems to emanate from these pieces, not only in the evocations of state fairs and weird snow and impound lots but also in manifestations of character, such as the deadpan monologue which interrupts what had been - up to that point - a remarkably earnest rendition of “Moon River”. That one wouldn’t be out of place on a Cheer-Accident album! There’s a generosity in putting this stuff out into the world and likewise, I appreciate Hali’s generosity in granting us this chat.
AC:Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! First could you tell us about your background, who are you and how did you get started as an artist?
Hali Palombo: Hi Andrew. My name is Hali Palombo. I am a, I suppose you would say composer from the American Midwest, among other things. I make compositions from found audio and field recordings (wax cylinder recordings, CB/shortwave radio being the primary two sources). I started somewhat late (26) after a prolonged period of existential floundering that consumed most of my youth.
I am a shortwave radio listener to a degree many would consider obsessive. I have been for maybe two decades at this point. I was holed up in my Chicago apartment sitting on my bathroom floor in the dark one night taking short audio recordings of bits of radio that I found to be interesting. At some point that evening, I observed that the recordings I took largely fell into two camps - textural stuff (static, morse code, various tones), and more subject focused (numbers stations, CB radio speech, etc.). I thought that textural audio and subject-focused audio might sound good together, might pair well. So I opened up Garage Band on my Macbook and started layering some of these sounds together to see what would happen. Before long, I had a handful of "songs" - very simple micro-compositions from these "textural" and "subject" sounds (plus optigan), that ended up being my first self-titled tape, released on a label called Midwaste. It was well received enough for me to start booking shows here in Chicago on a frequent basis. I started churning out releases (mostly self-released tapes) with hyperregularity (56 full length releases so far!) and just sort of never stopped.
AC: We’re here to talk about ‘Insane Rarities’, which is a collection of recordings from when you were 21 to 24 years old, prior to really starting with composition and releasing music as you’ve just described. Tell us more about what was going on in your life at that time, existential floundering and all.
Hali Palombo: That was a period of my life in which I quite resembled a little pinball bouncing around a machine. I had no idea what to do with myself. After high school, I went to community college for a while with some vague goal of going to a different college afterwards for maybe culinary arts. I was taking courses like food safety, hotel management and nutrition and smoking Al Capone cigarillos and Black and Milds (Wine flavor) on a picnic bench with my high school ex-girlfriend between classes.
AC: Were you actually aspiring to be a cryptographer??
Hali Polombo: Yes, I was! I am very interested in code breaking, ciphers, etc. I even have written my own ciphers for fun. The role of a cryptographer sounded almost romantic in a way - wading through an ocean of electromagnetic garbage and sifting through it to find hidden meaning. It's the vaguely sinister government-employed cousin of shortwave radio listening and field recording. ;
So at some point after that I met a videogame journalist online who wrote for a magazine called Kotaku, his name is Tim Rogers, on OKCupid I think. He came up to Chicago/Indiana to go to his parents' house for Christmas and I came with him because I had nothing better to do. This somehow escalated into me throwing away most everything I own and moving to Oakland, California where he lived for a while, working in vegan restaurants and a chocolate factory there, and then moving back to my mother's house a year later. Then I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Then I tried stand-up comedy for a little bit, lost interest and moved to Chicago with a vague goal of becoming a writer, which segued into music and audio.
Pretty much throughout that cluster of years I was always recording myself speaking extemporaneously about whatever and recording audiobooks (Jorge Luis Borges ((specifically "The Library of Babel")), the Old Testament and other parts of the Bible I like, Moby Dick, H.P. Lovecraft), writing a ton, singing, taking field recordings of random places I would drive to around the Midwest (I love to drive), and making funny videos (some of which went viral on Twitter!).
AC: I got an impression that the selections on ‘Insane Rarities’ are somewhat more personal and familiar to you than the ‘Junk’ stuff. The titles seem to indicate that, and I also notice the ‘Junk’ liner notes (“I don’t know what most of it is”). To me it also just sounds this way, but that could just be me making sense of it. Is ‘Insane Rarities’ a different kind of collection from those ones - something more personal or nostalgic, or whatever? - or is the opposite true, like it may as well be another ‘Junk’ (say, “Junk Zero”)?
Hali Polombo: Yes, I would definitely agree with that assessment. I find Insane Rarities to be less haphazard. I put a lot more effort into curating it than I did the Junk albums. The Junk albums are literally just junk I found on my hard drive. Unfinished tracks, 2 second clips of sound that I probably intended to make loops out of and then didn't (or perhaps did later!), silly techno and EDM experiments, recordings I took of musical toys, etc. On one of them, maybe Junk II, I did not even listen to half of the stuff I put on the album until after it was uploaded, sort of to amuse myself. Junk III is a lot of sound collage sourced from the film Exorcist 3 which I was obsessed with for a couple of weeks. The Junk trilogy I guess I'll call it was mostly supposed to be fun and funny and crappy and perhaps inspiring in a "picking through the dumpster behind an garage sale"-style way.
Insane Rarities is more personal and autobiographical in a somewhat abstract sense. When I listen to it through I feel a certain nostalgia for a point in time I do not care to return to. Some of the singing parts and instrumental parts were recorded specifically in a December from an age I cannot recall. That winter my mom had an old electric organ in her garage that I would plug in and tool around with. The cold warped the sounds and gave them a wobbly feel.
I know some of those recordings are on there perhaps layered under voice, and a couple of songs I wrote when I was very sad because I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I assumed no-one would ever hear them. I tried to include some shorter, sillier tracks as well to lighten the mood, like the first track which is sort of an insect disco loop that makes me laugh to hear. But yes, I would consider the album sort of an abstract diary of a specific time and place in my life, my rudderless early twenties, which sets it apart from the Junk things which are, as titled, mostly actual junk.
AC: I’m hearing animals on no fewer than three of these tracks (‘Queensland Fruit Fly Loop’, 10 Dollars Please, Illinois State Fair). What’s your relationship to these animals, are they musicians too?
The bugs within the fruit fly loop are from a sound pack I downloaded off of Soulseek, and on 10 Dollars Please more state fair hogs. The dog on that track is, if memory serves, probably this horrible pitbull someone in the neighborhood had when I lived in California that spent most of its time perched on top of a garage like a gargoyle, punctuated by periods of nonstop barking.
AC: Harp is a particularly interesting track. I’m guessing this is where we hear that warped organ? There’s also some kind of choral loop, along with a tinkling sound. I was in this elevator in Manhattan last week and there was a sound like that every time it opened. Remember anything about this one?
Hali Palombo: Yes! That is the warped organ sound I recorded in my mom's garage. Those choral sounds are actually taken from an optigan. You probably know what an optigan is but I will explain it for anyone who does not know. It's a peculiar instrument from the 1970s that plays sounds off of transparent discs containing concentric optical tracks (photgraphic representations of recorded sound). A light shines through the spinning discs inside the instrument, photodetectors read variations in light and turn them into audio. They're sort of primitive samplers I guess? They were manufactured by Mattel and I think were less for serious use and more for home entertainment (but I could be off about that). But the discs the optigan came with that contained these "sample banks" I guess I will call them featured recordings of actual musicians and instruments (and sound effects - those discs are REALLY cool). The choral loop you are hearing was recorded directly from an optigan that I fiddled around with at an antique shop downstate that was not in great condition and they only had a couple of discs. I later bought an optigan emulator VST (the M-Tron Pro IV) that is pretty loyal to the real thing that I use on lots of stuff to this day. I recommend checking it out, and no, this is not a paid advertisement! The tinkling sound is a little bell that was from a sound bank on that optigan emulator that had more "Christmasy" sounds on it - sleigh bells, jaunty audio loops... the track overall I wanted to give a Christmas-winter kind of feel, like a cold, crystalline snowy day.
Hali Palombo: LOL. I just relistened to that track and basically had a flashback. There was a grocery store near my mom's house in Warrenville, IL. I do not remember what it was called but the logo was a sun. I just looked it up and they changed the signage to make it look more "contemporary" and it looks sort of bad. Anyway. My mom sent me there a lot to get Funyuns (circular onion flavored chips that sort of have the mouthfeel of drywall) and cigarettes, and they played "Moon River" ALL OF THE TIME!!! which is an unusual choice for a grocery store. Admittedly the first time I heard it I cried a little bit, because it's a sad song about finding your place in the world which resonated with me. But after the 5th time it started to get very annoying. The recording of me singing it, which devolves into ranting on that track was taken in the cemetery near my mother's house that I would walk around in sometimes. In addition to being very sick of the song, in my early twenties I had a lot of pent up frustration in general. Undiagnosed ADHD will do that to you - you are overstimulated literally all of the time which leads to near perpetual irritation with noise, clutter, tedium. You are living with every sensory dial cranked up to eleven, so an annoying song at the grocery store might bother you more than other people. Once I was diagnosed and medicated those anger issues dissipated. Mostly. But I did a lot of ranting.
AC: I’ve been having nightmares the past couple of nights from that cover image. Is it from the circus or the state fair or what? Is it that blurry in real life?
Hali Palombo: It is from a Midwestern (Wisconsin, to be exact) tourist attraction called The House on the Rock! The House on the Rock is so hard to explain. I have an album dedicated to it. So in Spring Green, Wisconsin a very wealthy and eccentric man named Alex Jordan decided to build a strange and elaborate, I guess I will call it a museum, on a rock formation.
AC: Oh yeah I’ve heard of that place Hali! I’ll add it to my list of things to do. Also to my playlist I shall add ‘The Infinity Room’.
One off-topic thing before we start to wrap up. I was seeing if I had any footage from your set at the Colour Out Of Space festival earlier this year. I came up with this photo (attached), would you have anything to say about it?
Hali Palombo: That’s Yogi Bear! For my performance I decided the backdrop should be Slow Scan Television, which is an amateur radio thing where broadcasters transmit long sounds (they sound like squelches and beeps and squeals) that are decoded into images by radio listeners with software. The images load line by line, very slowly! I am obsessed with the process. I made my backdrop at that show video of SSTV, the images from old postcards from American resorts and hotels of the 60s and 70s transcribed into slow scan signals and then decoded by me. I loved that image of Yogi Bear saying hello, taken from a postcard of a campground in the Midwest called Yogi Bear’s Jellystone. I love cartoons! And I opted into the red light shining on me because I wanted to look evil.
AC: I forgot that they loaded slowly. That effect was, to me, comedic!
I want to especially thank you for being receptive to discuss a collection like ‘Insane Rarities’ for this series. I know that you have since released a number of proper albums on cool labels like Artsy and Chocolate Monk, which I definitely recommend our readers to check out as well. It’s always interesting to consider where creativity comes from, and we can learn a lot about that from dissecting an artist’s earliest work.
AC: Do you have any current projects to mention and or additional thoughts?
Hali Palombo: I am currently working on an album of children’s music that I received a grant from the city of Chicago to make. That will be released on vinyl in late 2027, so keep an eye out for it. It’s simply called Hali Palombo’s Music For Children.
Thank you for the interview and your thoughtful questions. I had fun!
