As one half of the synth / percussion duo School Dance, Denver based artist Allison Lorenzen became adept at pulling beautiful vocal melodies across skeletal compositions, bringing barren landscapes into full bloom. On Lorenzen’s first solo outing, she enlists the talents of Madeline Johnston’s Shoegaze project Midwife (The Flenser) to root her spectral vocals, keyboards and slow motion percussion to the earthy loam of the terrestrial plane. A vale can be used to describe a valley or depressed place in earth. Poetically the vale has been used to personify a place of mourning and deeply felt grief. A place where light refuses to penetrate. On “VALE” we hear Johnston’s characteristic feedback and reverb drenched guitars pierce the middle distance between heaven and earth before Lorenzen’s aching voice plumbs the depths of this depressed place. During the crescendo Johnston’s easily recognizable, distorted vocals join Lorenzen’s to declare “I’m like a vale in the night”. A place of total black. Explorers descending into those places in us that we know are there, but are afraid to peer into.