BRUX bought the piano at the centre of her new record on Facebook Marketplace, for free, from a stranger who wanted it gone. It is a baby grand, slightly out of tune in the upper register, and it sits underneath almost every track on Halcyon Phase like a spine.
That unglamorous detail tells you more about the record than a press line ever could.
Liz Maniscalco has spent most of the last decade making music built for rooms full of strangers moving in unison. As BRUX, a name she adopted in 2018 after several years making glossy, synth-driven pop as Elizabeth Rose, she built a catalogue of breaks, halftime and deep tech that carried her from Fool's Gold Records to Deadbeats to LuckyMe, the label whose Hudson Mohawke-shaped sound she has named as a formative influence. She traded verses with Baauer and Surya Sen on "CA$HED UP", cut "How Could U" with Ninajirachi, and in January opened three of the six weekends on Fred Again's USB002 residency in New York, a booking she has called a huge turning point.
None of that prepared anyone for an ambient record. But Halcyon Phase was not made with anyone in mind.
It was sketched in Katoomba, a town in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, where Maniscalco found herself stuck through 2020 while Australia ran some of the strictest border closures on earth. She had already shipped a storage unit of equipment to a New York apartment she could no longer reach, keeping back only a single synth, a Dave Smith Prophet 08. "Limiting," she has said, "but also so liberating."
It took six years to turn those sketches into a finished record, mixed and mastered by Damian Taylor and released via Sources in February. The time shows. Field recordings, string parts and half-buried vocals sit against each other with none of the urgency of her club tracks, replaced by something closer to patience. One passage folds in a recording of an elderly woman describing her first acid trip, an odd, tender detail on an album otherwise built around hiking trails and long isolation.
"I'd always made music for shared physical spaces," she has said. "During that time in the Blue Mountains there were no clubs, no shows, only freedom to create."
What makes Halcyon Phase work is the same instinct that makes her club material work: a refusal to settle in one lane. Maniscalco once described her own sound as "formless," and this record, whatever else it is, still sounds unmistakably like her. She is now planning a small run of intimate New York shows to play it in full, a long way from the residencies and rave stages that made her name.
