VIA PRESS RELEASE | Today, we bring you a brand-new Circuit des Yeux song and video, “The Manatee (A Story of This World Pt. III.” Recorded during the sessions for last year’s masterful and multi-layered full-length -io, “The Manatee” is a shift in mood—serene astral folk sewn up with whirring aquatic interludes.
Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr on “The Manatee”: At 4:30 A.M. on February 4th, 2020 a manatee popped out of the sea and stared directly at me. It was a charged 10 seconds. The experience stuck with me so much that I wrote a song about it. The music video (directed by Rudy Rubio) is a depiction of my own kind of manatee. I play a wet sea creature trying to make it work in a dry-land society. It is inspired by the scientific understanding that the manatee crawled into the ocean 50,000,000 years ago. The manatee is my reminder that intuition and two legs might be all a person needs to find a more hospitable world—perhaps an undiscovered place to call home.
Out now, -io is the sixth album and Matador Records debut by Circuit des Yeux (Haley Fohr). It is her most ornate and elaborate work to date—a set of compositions that nest the singer’s otherworldly four-octave voice amid a 24-piece string, brass, and wind ensemble. While Fohr’s music has never been short on ambition, these songs are striking in their brilliance and strangeness. On -io, Circuit des Yeux has delivered a work that is vivid, immense, and fully illuminated.
