Julia Holter - Bodily Metamorphoses

It's unusual, more than difficult, to explore the complex sonic archetype that Julia Holter offers up to our perception — more than a style, it's an attitude, a forma mentis that takes experimental music as a starting point for a broader, more complex elaboration. An authoritative example of stylistic independence in recent years, the Californian composer nonchalantly combines a refined avant-garde approach with a pop sensibility, one that has developed in particular over her most recent records. She's the fearless young woman who abandoned her composition studies at the University of Michigan because the teaching structures were too orthodox; she's the passionate reader of Greek tragedy, enlightened along the path of John Cage's minimalism and the infinite harmonic possibilities of contemporary music. Today, she's ready to step fearlessly into the chaotic world of artistic gossip, barely ruffled by the probing gazes of onlookers. And she assures us she won't be intimidated by success, and will never go as crazy as Justin Bieber.

Playing in LA

Born in Los Angeles on December 18, 1984, Julia started studying piano at the age of eight, at a school where she also learned the techniques and structures of classical music. This allowed her to develop a greater attention to orchestration, which she would soon translate into her own compositions, often rich in detail. Music, after all, runs in the family: her father even played live with Pete Seeger, and she grew up listening to Steely Dan, the Travelling Wilburys, Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday — although she has said her first idol was Bryan Ferry, and that she was fascinated by the weird side of the Beatles' music. Her first recordings were submitted for review to the California Institute of the Arts, funded by Walt Disney. This experience brought her into contact with electronics and new musical technologies; she never much cared for composition, finding its structure too limiting for a creative art form. Meanwhile, she developed a lyrical instinct poised between the academic and the esoteric. Production and mixing are entirely her own work.

After finishing her studies, Julia took up teaching, with a particular focus on disadvantaged children. Her experience as a tutor (a kind of support teacher) proved full of stimulation — the kids' ideas were fresh and inventive, and helped shape her creative imagination. Her music is full of literary references, though Holter doesn't want to overstate this aspect, not believing it essential for the listener to be aware of the origin of the lyrics. Her later work would also show a shifting approach to lyrics: on Tragedy they form a clearly defined story, while on Ekstasis — based on a text by Euripides — they're merely a pretext for a looser, more independent web of stories, unsurprisingly so, since the tracks were recorded over a very long span of time (4 years).
It was Stephen J. Rush, a professor in the university's digital music ensemble, who introduced her to the minimalist sounds of John Cage, which Holter cultivated by pairing them with a particular passion for field recordings. Out of this background came her first project, “Cookbook”, a performance based on a piece by John Cage, “Circus On”. The chosen venue was a 1920s church converted into a club, where Holter made numerous field recordings, with dialogue and sounds meant to recreate the atmosphere of Cage's work. “Cookbook” is built around a mesostic (according to Wikipedia, a variant of the acrostic in which, unlike the acrostic, it's the letters, syllables or words at the center of each line, rather than at the start, that spell out a name or phrase), taking shape from a reading of a cookbook. Every gesture is accompanied by a sound matching the object or action described in the spoken text; Cage's project leaves plenty of room open for the performer's freedom.
Meanwhile, drawn in by the mystery and allure of Los Angeles, Holter frequented an art gallery (The Wolf) where unusual collaborations between artists would spring up. With Ramona of Nite Jewel, in particular, she staged some interesting performances. But while everyone else looked to the future, she turned her attention to an ancient literary universe: that of Greek tragedy.

Euripides in an avant-pop sauce

After a couple of experimental projects (the live performance Live Recordings and the EP Celebration), Julia Holter made her full-length debut with the six transcendental revelations of Tragedy, a kind of concept album inspired by Euripides' tragedy “Hippolytus”, in which the great playwright of antiquity staged a drama of love. An ambitious yet never pretentious work, in which most of the lyrics come directly from Euripides' text (arranged not chronologically but according to a “sonic” logic), the album opens with an “Introduction” that acts as an unsettling evocation of some primordial pain (in a foggy atmosphere, a horn call, the sound of a siren, a soprano's singing, the hiss of a cassette recorder and Holter's own moaning materialize one after another).
The essence around which the whole record revolves is the idea of a dreamlike, esoteric avant-pop, built on the layering or clashing of different techniques. These shadowy moods persist through the first minute of “Try To Make Yourself A Work Of Art”, which soon turns into a martial ceremony where the filtered voice is set against mournful wind-instrument puffs, ghostly masses of sound and a metallic trilling. Elements of a scene (not only a mental one) that suddenly vanish, swallowed up by a black hole teeming with mystery. More than unease, though, this gives rise to an overwhelming need for protection, so that “The Falling Age” veers toward a melancholy ballad of the celestial spheres, transfigured, through a slow and gradual modulation, into a droning vortex that lets polished shards of strings (courtesy of the CalArts New Century Players ensemble) and piano echo in the background.
The vocal “ghost” of Laurie Anderson (the one from “O Superman”, to be precise) cradles the hypnotic synth-pop of “Goddess Eye”, a track that's substantially more “recognizable”, especially compared to the last three panels of the work. First comes a “Celebration”, in which the collage-like degree of abstraction of the “Introduction” is deepened and refined, letting echoes of modern-classical and dream-pop run across the tape, along with drum-machine flutters, piano chimes and languid sax textures (Casey Anderson). Then, a “Lillies” that opens in a chaotic, urban mood and morphs into a sobbing chant propelled by a kraftwerk-esque beat. And finally, a touching “Finale”, in which her whisper becomes the ultimate source of a supernatural choir, the last outpost of a thoroughly intriguing musical adventure.

A new form of ecstasy

Buoyed by critical attention, Holter set to work on her second album, passionately embracing the formula of mantras. The artist explores the energy of vocal modulation with no hint of the divine, producing a new form of ecstasy: Ekstasis (2013).
The Californian songwriter continues her exploration of the cultural suggestions of the Greek world that already inspired her debut, projecting them into a multiethnic world music (Africa, India, Old Europe) made up of field recordings and percussion more precise than a metronome. Solid and well structured, the layered, complex harmonic creations cross neoclassical music with languid vocal drones and pop elements that slip free of the logic of note progression, with refrains and off-beat pauses.
Ekstasis takes the listener by the hand, leading them inside an orchestra of synths, through walls of sound pierced by angelic-toned cries. Everything seems to flow without any fixed stylistic identity; the piano taps gently like rain on water, and the music turns ethereal through a pure game of sonic illusion. Holter fits together pieces of sound that the mind perceives as notes. At times it feels like listening to Jon Anderson and his “Olias Of Sunhillow” on “Four Gardens”, while the harmonic lines of the Bee Gees' “Holiday” color the suspended atmospheres of “Moni Mon Amie”, and it's not uncommon to come across Celtic music and avant-garde flourishes reminiscent of Laurie Anderson.
There's psychedelic music steeped in vocal drapery on “Our Sorrows”, but also a melancholy blues on “Boy In The Moon”, where Julia drops her voice a register to explore the dark side of cosmic suffering. But the true apotheosis is celebrated on “In The Same Room”, which sails for three minutes over predictable electronic beats and infectious pop scents before breaking free in the finale with flashes of sonic landscape. “Marienbad”, amid the sounds of a Fender Rhodes and harpsichord, weaves together the folk geometries of Linda Perhacs with the avant-garde of Arthur Russell, while the more demanding, cerebral pages of “Goddess Eyes I and II” avoid any trace of intellectual self-indulgence. It's suggestively porous music, where harmonic gaps leave room for the imagination, while eclecticism knocks at the door with the varied colors of “Four Gardens”. Here the instruments multiply without losing the ethereal, dreamlike touch that dominates elsewhere; the sax seems to briefly disrupt the apparent calm, only to then lead the listener into the richest, most festive page of the album.
Ekstasis is a sonic projection that transcends its basic elements and creates a new archetype of esoteric music.

Gigi in the metropolis

Between the intriguing bedroom songs of the kaleidoscopic Tragedy and the transcendental sound experiments of Ekstasis, the American musician's luminous talent had already shown itself without a shadow of doubt, but what wasn't yet clear was her ambition. On her third album, Loud City Song (2013), Holter abandons her esoteric structures to embark on her first journey outside the world of avant-garde lo-fi, confidently stepping, without fear, into the fragile world of pop. Fully aware she's undertaken a sonic revolution that carries real risks, Holter presses on undaunted by the blaring horns and unsettling pauses that give "Maxim's II" its sonic identity. Beauty has married imagination, mystery has become accessible, variety has taken hold of melancholy landscapes and turned them into small symphonies.
Even as the harmonic lines become more fragmented, spontaneity and candor never disappear: the characters of Loud City Song's post-modern musical move with apparent effortlessness through the fantastical world of this captivating tale. Vigorous horns, percussion rich in upbeats, and dazzling orchestrations trace the intimacy of these soundscapes, making them more urban and less pastoral. The opening notes of "World" seem to capture in an instant all the pictorial charm of Robert Wyatt; every word is a sigh as the orchestra and horns play with scattered, knowing notes of an unfinished symphony. It's the paraphrase of a recurring dream in "This Is A True Heart," another delicate page that restores tenderness to the project. Holter's voice has never been so clear and present, a force that lets her command the exuberant romanticism of "Maxim's I" before the chaos of trumpets and footsteps ushers in terror and ecstasy with the spectral, mesmerizing "Horns Surrounding Me," which fuses Kate Bush and Siouxsie Sioux.
The album's more organic, literary dramaturgy makes room for bolder, more defined jazz incursions: the folk-jazz of "In The Green Wild," poised between cabaret and post-modernism, is one of those delights that can be dressed up a thousand ways without losing its shine. There's also the ethereal soul of "Hello Stranger," Barbara Lewis's big 1963 hit, which Julia transforms into a complex, seductive, poetic symphony, before arriving at the intense finale of "City Appearing."
Rich in metaphor and symbolism, Holter's album-as-story bears more than a passing resemblance to Laurie Anderson's splendid theatrical-musical adaptation of "Moby Dick" — an artist with whom Julia shares many attitudes and artistic ambitions. The record is in fact inspired by "Gigi," the 1942 novella by writer Colette, first brought to the stage by a debuting Audrey Hepburn in 1951 and later to the big screen by Vincente Minnelli in 1958.
Refined, vibrant, wild and evocative in a way that feels both fresh and modern, Loud City Song is an artistic triumph that leaves no one indifferent.

The music of the Los Angeles composer has by now become a total language, thanks to a structure that breaches the harmonic secrets of John Cage only to set them free again, restoring a metaphysical tone through an instrumental choral quality that in her earlier work was only hinted at. A surreal corner where Gigi relives the anguish of success and finds comfort in the moral value of beauty and the purity of feeling.

Sound as language

In this ongoing evolution toward song and the esoteric celebration of sound, we get the most direct album yet, where songwriting and the pop dimension become the new challenge. Have You In My Wilderness (2015) is a thematic album, where music itself is the real trait d'union, and the voice is the first element to stand out with unprecedented timbral nuances, no longer hidden behind layers of refined, elaborate sound but proudly front and center, in balance with an instrumental fabric that for the first time narrows the distance to the world of singer-songwriter music.
Cole M. Grief-Neill's production is modern and essential, closer to the lyrical transcendence of Ekstasis; everything superfluous has been eroded and abandoned to let an apparently limpid sound flow, though one worked and developed to the point of obsession and exhaustion.
The opening notes are disorienting: Holter channels Judee Sill on "Feel You," but mystery and ambiguity are always lurking behind the pleasing lyrical lines. Like Laurie Anderson, Holter drags learned harmonies into the arms of popular music — an echo that's not just musical but lyrical too, evoked in "Silhouette," where Anderson's famous "Language is a virus" becomes "Language is a play," almost underlining a subtle evolution of contagion between art, literature and music.
Once again, a story by Colette provides the spark for evanescent, visionary sonic flights: the intriguing hybrid of crystal glasses used as percussion and monologues that become an almost ambient backdrop make "Lucette Stranded On The Island" one of the record's most charming tracks. Holter pushes past the limits of passion on "Betsy On The Roof," which on a Kate Bush album would sound like a moment of emotional relief, but which in Holter's rarefied, chilly pop feels almost like an intrusion, while drone and gothic elements seize by the collar that sonic existentialism that Nico turned into art on "How Long?": here the orchestra flows solemnly like a mini-suite by Henryk Górecki, while the vocal splits itself between solitude and absence.

Elegance seems to be her new sonic archetype: the Parisian atmospheres of "Everytime Boots" and the surf immersion of "Sea Calls Me Home" share the same breath as the timeless melody of the title track and the superb "Vasquez," one of the absolute high points of her career, where the avant-garde takes on the colors of neoclassical, kraut-rock, jazz and phonetic vocal structures à la Robert Ashley.
With Have You In My Wilderness, Holter brings pop art back into the arms of its ultimate recipients — the audience — celebrating its beauty and purity.

Having set aside the considerable critical acclaim of her previous album, Julia Holter returns with In The Same Room, a record that's part of a wider Domino project aimed at releasing a series of live concert albums recorded to the highest technical standards. The album testifies to the American artist's evolution, from the esoteric, avant-garde atmospheres of her early work to the intriguing pop miniatures of her last two albums.
With an unusual line-up (viola, keyboards, bass and drums), the Los Angeles musician reinvents elements of her repertoire, producing a predictable and at times slightly sterile simplification of her intricate instrumental textures. There's little point in parsing or highlighting the differences between the studio and live versions; more interesting is noting how the repertoire retains its own artistic character, even though some of the experimental edge of the original, elaborate arrangements has been lost along the way.
Julia Holter takes the opportunity to refine her skills as an interpreter, leaning into minimal, velvety arrangements. Though stripped of many of their timbral nuances, the songs don't seem to lose their inherent lyrical power: the folk-jazz of "In The Green Wild" becomes a poetic noir ballad, while "Betsy On The Roof" and "So Lillies" seem to swap their place in time to delightful effect. Strangely enough, it's the live renditions of tracks from Have You In My Wilderness that sometimes leave you puzzled, perhaps because the album was recorded live in the studio (the famous Rak Studios) without a real audience present.
In the end, the sometimes wistful tone of In The Same Room, while winning and convincing, makes for a quick and painless listen that's easily filed away, leaving listeners eagerly awaiting further confirmation of the sublime instincts that have defined the American musician's catalogue so far.

Meanwhile, in 2017, Tragedy was also adapted into a multimedia theatrical work, "Tragedy" (2017), in collaboration with Yelena Zhelezov and Zoe Aja Moore, along with the Wild Up collective.

Arriving after a long period of reflection, interrupted by yet another of her gems, "Visions" (a touch of classy, feminine psychedelia, a sincerely dreamlike modern anthem) featured on Linda Perhacs's album "I'm A Harmony" (2017), Aviary is the fruit of a promise kept: "It doesn't mean I'll make music that sounds like this again."
Holter returns to the scene of the original crime, plunging art-rock impulses back into the primal experimental attitudes of her early work, taking her cue from a piece of writing by the famous Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan: I found myself in an aviary full of screaming birds.
What ancestral fears and what solutions Julia offers her audience is impossible to say — not because the artist refuses to provide answers, but because Aviary is an album about chaos, about cultural confusion; indeed, Holter herself describes its sound as "the cacophony of the mind in a world turning to liquid."
Forever caught between introspection and expression, the music seems almost to mock itself, rarely settling into defined shapes. Almost all the tracks were born from improvisations recorded alone over the span of two years (2017-2018), then encased in sonorities that seem disparate but are in fact the fruit of the artist's most recent musical passions: medieval music and Alice Coltrane.
More than a simple opening track, "Turn The Light On" is a celebration of the ritual nature of contemporary artistic representation: rock concert, ballet, theatre and classical music blur together in a chaos of instruments and sounds, scratched by Holter's liberating vocals. And this is the constant threat hovering over the fifteen tracks: fifteen pieces not without flaws and mistakes, because life itself is a sequence of triumphs and defeats, joys and fears. It's narrative coherence, more than musical coherence, that Aviary is really after. Even the lyrics fall victim to the same chaotic syndrome, drawn from a mix of scraps recovered from forgotten notes, ecstatic thoughts, and lines lifted from ethnic poetry and medieval writings.
Musically, the album could be boiled down to a hallucinatory, chaotic mix of Robert Wyatt, Kate Bush's "Aerial" era, Laurie Anderson and Alice Coltrane, resulting in a spirituality so intense it renders any comparison superfluous. Split into two parts, the album alternates vitality and languor between apocalyptic visions (global warming on "Whether," viruses lurking in melting polar ice on "Les Jeux To You") and oases of meditation ("Voce Simul" and "Another Dream") that remain trapped between loneliness and despair.
It's hard, if not impossible, not to spot at least three or four future classics among these tracks: the avant-funk digression of "Underneath The Moon" (a post-futurist "Sign Of The Times"), the overwhelming cascade of lyricism in "Word I Heard," the brilliant classical-medieval transgression of the ambitious "Chaitus," and the dark, uneasy solemnity of closer "Why Sad Songs."

What remains: a series of fascinating sonic and vocal landscapes that reveal fresh nuances and rare, exquisite details with every listen — "Another Dream," "Colligere," "In Gardens' Muteness," "I Would Rather See": illegitimate children of the same instincts that once pushed the Cocteau Twins into the arms of Harold Budd.
It's always the concept of beauty that is the ultimate goal of these compositions; whether they're abrasive or transcendental makes no difference, except insofar as that difference is perceived and glibly filed away as "experimental." There is, in truth, nothing revolutionary or innovative about Aviary; the unpredictable nature of its compositions stems from the desire to depict chaos, a subject that can hardly be entrusted to the song form. What makes the project so compelling is Julia Holter's choice to walk the same path with the same intensity and the same margin for error as illustrious predecessors — Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, Sun Ra, Joanna Newsom — delivering to the audience something living, tangible, and, as Warhol would say, pop, despite the far-from-populist nature of these ninety-plus minutes of chaos and harmony.

The years following the release of Aviary proved especially turbulent for Julia Holter: ongoing health problems for some band members as well as personal issues (for a period Julia was unable to sing) disrupted her creative routine, while the predictable creative stasis brought on by the pandemic pushed the artist into deep reflection on her role as a musician.
Fortunately, these were also the years in which her relationship with Tashi Wada solidified and she found the joy of motherhood; for Julia Holter, it was also a chance to leave behind her stormy relationship with Matt Mondanile (Real Estate, Ducktails), which had ended years earlier with her filing a report against her ex for threats and violence: the artist has said she feared for her life.

Julia's room

The release of Something In The Room She Moves (2024) breaks a six-year recording silence (the sole exception being the soundtrack for the film Never Rarely Sometimes Always), with a title borrowed from the Beatles (whose songs Julia adopted as lullabies for her daughter) and an obvious nod to the stasis brought on by Covid-19. The album is a hard slap in the face to the logic of hyper-productivity serving the needs of streaming, and of visibility at the expense of quality — a record conceived with an ethic that belongs to the past, marked by a naivety, an intellectual daring, an attention to imperfection rather than aesthetics: an artistically winning choice. Beyond the futuristic waltz seasoned with woodwind acrobatics, fretless bass and analog synth cries on "Spinning," this is without doubt the album in which the seduction of pop music is pushed furthest to the margins. Each of the ten tracks evokes emotions and suggestions that could be described with an absurd number of adjectives, but what sets Julia Holter's music apart from other wizards of postmodern architecture is the substance of the compositions. Within the three minutes and forty-nine seconds of "These Morning" lies the art of rhythmic movement without any recourse to drums or percussion, a dreamlike, pulsing track that, with just a few chords of electric piano and sax, situates itself somewhere between David Sylvian and Joni Mitchell, eventually turning into a pagan-tinged mantra that Julia Holter intones with an insistent lyrical loop: just lie me, just lie me, just lie me…
Ask yourself how many artists today can afford the luxury of singing a cappella with just a handful of sparse notes and subjecting them to such rich chromatic variation without giving in to the predictability of gospel ("Meyou") — but don't expect an answer; the immeasurable is an art granted to only a chosen few.
The title track exemplifies the deconstruction and abstraction that the American musician has turned into a contemporary, popular musical language: like Kate Bush on "Aerial," Holter delights in melodies that never fully resolve, letting them spin and hover in icy atmospheres that slowly catch fire with the sound of sax and electric piano, the latter locked in an endless intergenerational dialogue with massive synth and flute sounds.
Tenderness has never run so deep, so intense, so aching: the voice becomes an instrument in the splendid jazz-noir ballad "Materia," or drifts with unprecedented spirituality and sensuality through the poetic, pained "Who Brings Me," whose closing notes bring the album to rest. The stylistic diversity lends light and shade to the dark jazz-folk romanticism of "Evening Mood," which teems with echoes — from Sun Ra to Kate Bush, from Mark Hollis to Björk — in the slow-burning fusion of jazz, prog, folk and neoclassical that is "Talking To The Whisper."
Holter's skill in balancing pop and art music is clear from the album's very first moves: the lyrical minimalism of "Sun Girl" carries on a tradition rooted in blues, developed through jazz, and underpins the cultural and social contemporaneity of rap. The whole album is a constant interlocking of tradition and renewal, composition and improvisation, icy emotion and fiery outbursts — an ocean of sounds and possibilities inherited from the past and handed down to the future. It's on "Ocean" that this creative process is represented in full: Chris Speed's clarinet is first altered to take on ethnic overtones before shifting into tones halfway between drone music and experimental electronics, while the voice stays in the shadows, as absent as black is from darkness.
Julia Holter reminds us that art without risk or daring has no reason to exist, and she does so by handing us one of the boldest albums in recent memory.

In 2026 comes Materia, an album that works as a companion piece to the excellent Something In The Room She Moves. Julia Holter reimagines its least flashy yet most visionary track, "Materia," inspired by the complex, revolutionary figure of the nun Hildegard von Bingen. Reworking its understated, visionary sonic textures is yet another act of love for an art form that manages to stay detached from the rigid logic of music as mere consumer product. The reinterpretation first unfolds on "Materia 2" through a contamination of dreamy drum-machine impulses and the arrival of a second voice, that of Jessika Kenney. Following that, "Materia 3" performs a deframentation that slows and loses the hypnagogic vein of the second chapter until it becomes bloodless, skeletal and fleeting.
A deliberately fragmented album, Materia drifts between electro-ambient and art-pop with the same icy class as ever. "The Laugh Is In The Eyes" sounds as if it could have come from an unreleased collaboration between Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, alternating the magical sound of flute with an aching bass solo. Even more ambitious is "My Lost One," an art-pop whisper fed by ethereal textures and a supple bassline that rises up to become majestic. This brilliant art-pop substance had already been partly previewed by the single "Fantasy," a delightful sampler of sounds and rhythms in which Virginia Astley and Ryuichi Sakamoto seem to walk arm in arm, before the track fades into twilight tones.
But the real highlight for anyone who loves the artist's more transcendental side arrives with the ten minutes and sixteen seconds of "My Twin." Music boxes, electronic pitch-bends, floating synths and trembling, strange rhythmic patterns give rise to an unusual symphony for found instruments. Improvisation takes the reins of the harmonic geometry, once again crossing those borders with contemporary music that Julia Holter had already learned to tame in her own imagination back in the days of Ekstasis. The track unfolds as a succession of notes and undefined sonic spaces that seem to lock together almost by chance, eventually reaching an ecstatic, shifting structure that evolves with astonishing naturalness, yet remains original and even unsettling.
That Materia is a companion piece to what was expressed on the previous record is obvious; what's truly astonishing is the sheer number of ideas for an imaginary, fairy-tale chamber-jazz orchestra. This is a dynamic yet diaphanous, intangible record, a deliberately unfinished work that brings to light a sometimes fleeting beauty that escapes traditional categorization to become pure sensory experience. Materia thus reveals itself not as a simple epilogue, but as an open threshold onto the radiant future of an artist who has made her own vulnerability her greatest creative strength.

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