Circuit Des Yeux on Narcolepsy, Working with Alan Sparhawk, and Hopping from Ship to Ship

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

I've always been highly intrigued by Haley Fohr's work as Circuit Des Yeux, and her latest record Halo on the Inside has some of her biggest sonic swings yet—which made her a perfect guest for the newsletter. I always enjoy talking to people who are specific and unique about their creative process and way of thinking, and as a result the resulting convo with Haley was extremely enjoyable. Check it out:

Your latest record has you making a bit of a left turn, sonically. Talk to me about that.
Going into this album, I knew I wanted it to be more electronic and industrial and lean into technology, computers, and machinery, because I haven't in the past. I've had a love affair with analog equipment since I was a teenager. Most of Circuit Des Yeux has been acoustic instruments, reel-to-reel tape, and going from there. Going electronic and using computers and such...I don't really know how to use them, so there were two challenges that came out of that. One was using a childlike mind, making mistakes, and rolling with it. Another was enlisting someone—a producer—to help lay the foreground. I wanted to take the weight off of myself of starting from scratch. Working with synths and machines that have presets—you're not digging your own trench. There's a road before you. I was just curious what would happen if I had a springboard.

For this record, I didn't really listen to much new music. I drew upon this really formidable part in my life—high school and early college, when I was super into post-punk and Throbbing Gristle—and it was really easy for me to naturally go there. With a lot of the songs, the bass line is louder than the guitar melody, and it's that gauzy goth zone that I really loved when I was younger.

Talk to me about working with Andrew Broder on this one. I've been familiar with his work since he was making music as Fog, so my ears perk up whenever I hear that he's worked on something like this.
He gave me a folder of a bunch of beats that he made and, that was really cool. With "Megaloner," I pretty much sat down and wrote the melody immediately just to his beat. He also enlisted all the collaborators, which are mostly from Minneapolis, so I took a co-pilot seat for the first time. He aggregates a lot of information and ideas where we had to meet in the middle and were actually editing a lot of things out. He's amazing. He's so good at every instrument that, a lot of times, I felt bad. I'd be like, "Thank you so much for all this amazing stuff—we have to delete 90% of it." I went to his house and stayed with him, and we'd do sessions and I got to meet his family. Most of the people on the record are his friends, and it was really sweet and community driven, so I appreciated that effort.

Talk to me more about collaboration when it comes to your work.
With Circuit Des Yeux, the kernel of everything is me chasing something inside of myself. I always write in seclusion. I like to be alone. I just enjoy it. So that's always where the inspiration strikes. It's usually something I'm struggling with, or an existential thought that I'm grappling with. When you hit a wall, that's when it's time to commune with the people in your life and get closer to the answer—and I really love that about music. I'm a bit of a social introvert, so for me, music is the conduit to have these larger conversations and really connect with people in an intimate way. That's why I usually work with people that I know in my life or admire. A lot of them are my musical peers. I've also learned that I'm the type of person where, when I work with somebody—even if it's just a bass clarinet line or something, I feel beholden to them, and I want them to get something out of our work together.

With the album before this one, I worked with maybe 40 different people in Chicago. I felt myself becoming really heavy with this empathetic responsibility I felt. Maybe that's why for this album, I wanted to free myself of any sort of internal pressure I might feel to pay someone's rent or try to take care of someone. Because, you know, music is eternal. And when there's a gig and transaction and payment involved, it's something a little heavier than that for me, and I can't help but feel like they've sacrificed or given me something that I could never repay.

You also changed your working routine for this latest album, working mostly in the middle of the night. Tell me about making that shift.
It didn't really feel like much of a choice. I think I struggle with finding structure in my life—but, you know, I like to play music. It's easy for me to get in the zone and find the flow. I was living alone, I kind of went through a breakup, that whole rigmarole, so there was a lot of reset in my daily routine anyway.

I also learned that I have slight narcolepsy—so my circadian rhythm is, like, 29 hours instead of 24 hours. So you have someone alone dealing with that, and eventually I just became nocturnal. It was kind of nice. At first, I felt a bit of shame to be sleeping when my loved ones were awake, and awake when everyone was sleeping. But once I let that go, it was pretty great. It's not like I had FOMO, where it was really nice outside and I was missing a beautiful sunny day or skipping someone's birthday party to work on a song.

Time moved faster, where I got into these really ridiculous loops of playing something over and over for an hour and ad-libbing to it. There was a lot of bad stuff, but where the good stuff came in was really funny and surprising to me. On "Truth," there's this ad-lib where I'm, like, speaking in a made-up language. Stuff like that would just kind of flow out of me—all these little mini-monsters that I didn't know I had. I really started to enjoy that process, and it took the pressure off.

Tell me more about being diagnosed with narcolepsy. How did that come about?
I'm living in a big loft, and it's expensive, so I wanted to use it and give back as much as possible. While I was making this record, I actually started a vocal workshop that I would do in my studio. Anywhere between five and 20 people would come every other week, and we'd pick a subject and do vocal warmups. It was really great and beautiful. I did it for half a year, and on the final session—they started at 7 p.m.—I was very tired the night before and fell asleep around 7 p.m. I actually woke up to people texting me saying, "We're here for the vocal workshop"—I'd slept for 24 hours straight. It really scared me.

I went to the doctor and did a couple of preliminary tests, and they said that they had a hunch that I maybe had some slight narcolepsy. But, to be frank, I did not do the sleep study. I'm not really interested in taking on the responsibility of that disability. I think I wouldn't be able to drive and do a lot of other things. So I took that information for what it's worth and I've tried to adjust my life to it.

One thing you mentioned in the press materials for this record was looking to rewind yourself to a time before fear. I'm really curious to hear you elaborate on that sentiment and what that's referring to specifically. When I see something like that, my brain kind of goes to COVID immediately, quite honestly.
I mean, COVID was traumatizing for everyone, and it really did put things into perspective. I don't think you're alone there, and I'm still considering that period of our lives and what it means for us now.

I've done a lot of self-help work and talk therapy through workshops, workbooks, and podcasts. As helpful as it can be to try to learn to love yourself, it's also so tiring and a bit of a double-edged sword—there's self-criticism, and trying to figure out who you are. With this record, I was really by myself a lot, and since I'm over a decade into my career, I am formally trained. As a vocalist, I went to school for musicology and recording. I have all these tools, and it took a lot for me to get past all that and find the child in me again—to be able to say that I don't care what anyone thinks about me.

I think a lot of my fears are wrapped up in identity. I totally obliterated my identity when I was making this album. I got a day job checking IDs at a whiskey bar, and I really pushed myself to untether myself from all these things that I felt made me. I was getting out of a long-term relationship—I was with this person for eight years—and that was another big part of that. It didn't happen all the time, but when I was able to make a memory that felt directly tied to when I was eight years old or something, it was like my neurons lit up. It was beautiful and peaceful, and there's some music on this record that were made during those moments.

Tell me more about the limits of working on oneself, because this is something I've heard a lot about in the last few years. In the general conversation of things, there was an increased focus on therapy and prioritizing one's mental health for a while, and I've seen some people surmise that maybe we've gone too far in that direction, where they either lose themselves or become too consumed with the self. I'm somebody whom therapy has helped quite a bit, but I'm interested to hear your perspective.
I think that where the real deficit lies is that it's all high-brain and upper consciousness—it's not very fun. I'm also into Carl Jung, dream work, and the subconscious, and having a debaucherous night and letting yourself enjoy life can be just as medicinal as this high critique that we've been prescribed. Maybe that's what I was missing. It's easy to point out that therapy and getting rid of the shame of mental illness is important work, but it's also been commodified so quickly.

Talking more about notions of the self, I want to hear you talk about your work as Jackie Lynn. I'm always interested when somebody makes art under a persona, especially when it's alongside another project they do, because it results in a bifurcation of who the artist is. I'm still anti-identity within Circuit Des Yeux, so this spiritual and amorphous idea of Jackie Lynn came pretty quickly and feverishly to me. I said it out loud to some Sony music producer I was randomly hanging out with in L.A. and he was like, "That's a dumb idea"—and I was like, "Well, this is exciting."

What I like about it is that it's a narrative, at least to me. It's very on-the-nose, and it's a trajectory that's easy to follow. It's fun for me to write from another perspective. I know there's probably some auto-fiction in there, but it really is me writing a story in my brain and creating songs, to fill each chapter. I made them with Bitchin' Bajas, and it's very old-school singer-songwriter—I show up with the guitar and play the songs for them, and they make the magic happen and arrange it all. It's very freeing and fun to me. I'm not stuck in the muck and mire of it all. I feel like this industry in particular is so obsessed with identity. "Are you queer? Well, let's run with that." This was my way of fucking around with that.

You recently opened for Alan Sparhawk on tour, and he played guitar in your band too. Tell me about what that creative partnership has been like.
He's a friend of Andrew Broder's, which is how he came to be on the record. It was an act of generosity. He was in town, he stopped by for maybe 15 minutes and laid down some guitar, he smoked a joint, and he left. When the record was done, I sent it to him and his managers in Chicago, and he came to Chicago and we met up a couple times. We're just really similar-minded people. He's very eclectic and adventurous, and he's also really self-deprecating. Being on tour with him, he's there with his son, and when he has a drummer, it's someone that he's known for 30 years. It's just people taking care of each other. He has his heart in the right place, and he doesn't get distracted by all the glamour. He's very sincere.

He's the one that approached me, and I was looking for a band to create, and he said he'd love to play electric guitar. Of course, it was an honor. I knew he was good at guitar, and when he plays live, his set spans genres and the human condition. It's so sad, and so triumphant. He's doing so much—he's pressing buttons, he's playing guitar, he's singing—and when he was playing guitar in my band, he was like the weather. He arrives like a storm.

There's always a structured improvisation in my live performance always, and every night it was like, "Okay, how do we signal to Alan to get out of this?" Because you can see that he's in this tunnel of creation—almost like a conduit. He added so much, not only as a personnel, but sonically. It was amazing. He's really vulnerable, you know? In this day and age, given what's happening in America, he's such a good example to people his age as far as what's possible.

Talk to me about the financial realities of being a musician and how that's changed for you over the years.
It's been tumultuous. [Laughs] I was very DIY the first eight years of my career, and signing to Matador four years ago definitely changed that for me. It gave me more resources, but it's a different structure. There's different expectations. To be someone with a band is very costly. My finances are a little more aligned with when I first started out. The only difference is, I have a six person crew instead of just me, so I'll always spend money on people. I think it's worth it, but, it feels fraught.

A visual that I've always seen is that I'm out at sea, and I'm jumping from vessel to vessel before they you know go under. Maybe at first I was on a raft, and then I found a speedboat. I feel very lucky to be with Matador, because they do give me a little bit of a bigger vessel—and maybe I have a life vest around me. But there's no telling when the tsunami is going to hit.