Julia Holter


(Copyright © 2012 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )

Tragedy (2011), 8/10
Ekstasis (2012) , 7/10
Loud City Song (2013), 6/10
Have You in My Wilderness (2015), 6/10
Aviary (2018), 8/10
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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Julia Holter, a Los Angeles-based musician who had already flirted with John Cage on Cookbook (2009) and with musique concrete on Celebration (2010), was the epitome of the female singer-songwriter reinventing dream-pop for the digital age via Nico, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Enya , Grouper and Zola Jesus. The six songs on Tragedy (Leaving, 2011) are the musical equivalent of mystical revelations, each one appearing in an altered state of the mind and each one evoking a another incommensurable dimension.
Hence in the nine-minute The Falling Age the ghostly slow-motion primordial wail emerging from a revolving black hole of electronica that sounds like the soundtrack to birthpangs; and in the eight-minute Tragedy Finale the distorted carillon mutating into lethargic breathing to let her gentle zombie whisper trigger a waltzing death chant with the dense electronic drones and the piano in a way akin to a greatly decelerated version of Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom.
Her avantgarde libido jumps out of the ten-minute collage Celebration, a blend of a dozen different techniques, from skitting drum-machine beats to sparse chamber ambient music, from Bjork-ian balladry to melodramatic droning minimalism, from field recordings to abstract floating post-psychedelic vocals. So Lillies represents the perfect bridge between the two worlds: a confused rumble of found sounds, that moves from earthly chitchat to cosmic transmission, gets invaded by a deconstructed rap rigmarole, like a light version of Meredith Monk's vocal experiments, propelled by a techno beat and a harpsichord pulsation.
The shorter songs, namely the martial Nico-esque hymn Try To Make Yourself A Work Of Art and the gentle robotic lullaby Goddess Eyes, whose male counterpoint mimicks the rosary of Enya's Orinoco Flow, do not relieve the tension at all. They actually intensify whatever act of contrition Holter is performing inside her brain.

Holter opted for a less dramatic departure from the song format on Ekstasis (RVNG, 2012): shorter songs and more conventional singing. Ultimately, Our Sorrows, boasting Nico-esque exotic harmonium overtones, a military beat and a background of found voices, is just a soulful elegy (that ends in a lengthy coda of desolate Gregorian-Indian laments). Fur Felix is a charming glittering baroque slow-paced Enya-esque ditty. And In The Same Room is obviously her first shameless flirt with mainstream synth-pop. Goddess Eyes II sounds like a remix of Goddess Eyes by Laurie Anderson and Terry Riley. Four Gardens blends world-music, jazz-rock and electronic dance music.
Nonetheless, Marienbad exhibits a process of decomposition and recomposition, as a Renaissance-style sung in the register of a boys' choir slowly transforms into a driving Meredith Monk-ian game of recurring vocal patterns and into a driving overdubbed minimalist rigmarole.
The dilated hyper-psychedelic atmospheres of the previous album reincarnate as the eight minutes of languid drones of Boy In The Moon, whose ending ranks as one of the most harrowing musical renditions of the galactic void ever. The nine-minute This Is Ekstasis is actually a bluesy late-night ballad in disguise that decays into a surreal "la la" motif worthy of French film soundtracks of the Sixties.
This album is basically the poppy alter-ego of Tragedy: the same technique, but here they are administered to fully-formed songs. A sense of impending tragedy is indeed what this album inherits from the previous one.

Loud City Song (Domino, 2013), ostensibly inspired by Colette's novel "Gigi" (1944), marked a sudden drop in inspiration. Opting for an acoustic ensemble in place of her laptop, and for a slick production instead of bedroom atmosphere, Holter, most of the time horribly sedated, fumbles repeatedly in choosing the arrangements for her compositions. The sophisticated casting of cello, trumpet and harpsichord cannot elevate World much above the (very low) standard of slow torch songs. Maxim's I sinks somewhere between a Mersey-beat march and a dream-pop psalm. What could have been an interesting chamber coda, City Appearing, is ruined, yet again, by late-night soul-jazz embellishments. There is even a cover of Barbara Lewis' sleep-inducing Hello Stranger (1963), rendered as a whisper that glides into a nebula of electronic drones, an effect that borders on the most trivial kind of new-age music. What these polished arrangements deliver is a sense of arrogant pomp, not justified by the weak material.
She wakes up in the childish country-ish ditty In The Green Wild, but unfortunately she adds a drum-machine which gives the piece the feeling of Joni Mitchell in a 1990s disco. The pulsating Maxim's II has some merits, because the orchestra ends up (voluntarily or not) evoking circus music and at the same time a horror soundtracks, merging ideas from both neoclassical and jazz music. This Is a True Heart aims for catchy disco-pop that, at best, harks back to the lighter side of the movie soundtracks of the 1960s and, at worst, is simply lounge music masquerading as intellectual exercise.
This clumsy attempt at establishing herself as some kind of post-modernist pop chanteuse succeeds pretty much only in Horns Surrounding Me, introduced by a little bit of cacophony, propelled by minimalist-style orchestral repetition and sung by Holter billowing like mid-career Sinead O'Connor; but even that is a far cry from the magic of the first two albums.

The artistic regression continued on Have You in My Wilderness (Domino, 2015): Holter veered decisively into chamber pop a` la Beach Boys' Pet Sounds if not into mainstream pop. The highlight is the somnambulant melismatic Sea Calls Me Home that unfolds with a psychedelic John Lennon-esque pace (but with a raucous saxophone solo and Brian Wilson-esque harpsichords). The country shuffle Everytime Boots is pure entertainment, but very lightweight entertainment. There are intriguing instrumental ideas, like the disorienting symphonic vortex that ends Silhouette. And there is a well-intentioned variety of formats: the husky "femme fatale" delivery of How Long, Vasquez, a jazzy version of early Patti Smith's poetry in music, and Lucette Stranded on the Island, a chamber lied with strings and piano. Ultimately, however, there is too much filler (the lush single Feel You, Night Song, Betsy on the Roof).

Julia Holter followed up three years later with a double-disc 90-minute album, Aviary (Domino, 2018), that dispelled any doubts about her talent and inspiration, a parade of elegant, opaque, and sometimes jarring, dreamscapes. Long floating vocals, dramatic drones, distorted violin and chaotic percussion generate the psychedelic vortex of Turn the Light On, a shocking overture. The eight-minute Chaitius bears traces of Renaissance music, but buried beneath anarchic violins and operatic vocals that chase each other in a house of mirrors, until the piece becomes a sort of disembodied pop-jazz shuffle with a myriad instruments floating independently. The eight-minute Everyday Is an Emergency is first a disorganized sonata for buzzing bagpipes and then a tender piano elegy. The metamorphoses of the seven-minute Underneath the Moon are particularly disorienting: first she whispers over delicate polyrhythms and instrumental noises, and then she drives a dense swirling march, and then any semblance of coherence disappears in a syncopated, dub-infected, glitch-y soundscape. The emotional impact of these shifting compositions is best demonstrated by Voce Simul, which pits a nebula of chamber instruments, notably a oneiric trumpet, against ethereal vocals that play a minimalist game and eventually get lost in a jungle of echoes: what is left is pure angst. These are compositions that are hard to fit into a predefined structure, that slip through the cracks of categorization. Other songs are more cohesive and less cryptic, and nonetheless encompass a broad variety of arrangements, from solo piano to orchestra. Another Dream blends placid organ drones and tinkling synth for a dreamy Enya-esque lullaby that ends in a terrifying black hole. The somber mechanical lied of Why Sad Song glides over atmospheric chamber jazz. Words I Heard is a slow, meandering, orchestral Bjork-ian elegy. The neoclassical In Gardens' Muteness has only a modest piano accompaniment for her austere chant. I Shall Love 1 is no more than a singalong that, despite a brief instrumental intermezzo of classical strings, repeats the same refrain over and over again in a somewhat festive crescendo. The specter of Nico wanders around the most funereal of these lieder, for example the droning, suspense-filled I Would Rather See. The most accessible and linear song is the timid ballad I Shall Love 2, that sounds like a slow-motion version of Sunday Morning from the first Velvet Underground album. There are missteps, and perhaps this should have been a shorter album. A nocturnal trumpet lament showers Colligere in melancholia but a river of strings and trivial vocals ruin the mood. The only lively song, in fact a gallopping one, is Les Jeux to You, but far less engaging than the rest. Overall, however, this is a powerful work of music, incorporating pop, jazz, folk and classical music, a work that reaffirms Julia Holter as one of the most visionary composers of her generation.

(Copyright © 2012 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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