Half Asleep Released New Album “The Minute Hours | Les Heures Secondes”

Half Asleep is the solo project of Brussels-based singer-songwriter Valérie Leclercq.The Minute Hours | Les Heures Secondes is her sixth album to date. It was recorded at home with friends and took over a decade to bring to fruition. It is being released today through labels Humpty Dumpty Records (BE), and three:four (CH).

This is an ambitious album, more spacious and bold than its predecessors, often taking unexpected paths and detours. Built around Valérie’s guitar and piano, Half Asleep’s crepuscular acoustic universe is however still very much and recognizably her own. It is here augmented by a textured cello, a chorus of human voices, occasional dissonances and the dark turbulence of brass and reed instruments.

Borrowing from film and classical music, as well as less direct influences such as 80s D.I.Y. post punk, Brazilian music and even free jazz, The Minute Hours | Les Heures Secondes seeks out strong atmospheres. It speaks to us of cattle emerging from the mist, of the strata of intimate history piling up in our living rooms and of the magnetic call of electric pylons at nightfall.

The “hours” of the title – an homage to medieval ‘books of hours’ – point to the album’s narrative thread: each song is an exploration of what, whether minute or colossal, plays out in interstitial time – in that strange suspended time that exists between events.