Something in the Room She Moves by Julia Holter (2024)
Andrew Poppy
Julia Holter is a vocalist, musician, songwriter and composer. Her signature articulation is a soft, conversational, sung, confessional voice. The first time this got me was its confident fragility on “World”, the track that opens her album Loud City Song (2013), and this vocal quality appears throughout the new album Something in the Room She Moves (Domino).
It’s most clearly heard in track 4, “Materia”, a solo performance, sung, mostly in free time (tempo rubato), in a reflective mood, with silence marking out each musical gesture as a discreet phrase. She occasionally ‘ghosts’ the vocal line or places a few chords to suggest a harmonic context, using the iconic Wurlizer electric piano sound. No other instruments or musicians arrive. I’m holding my breath, it feels like a single improvised ‘live’ take. This sense of spontaneous performance coming through the speakers is intriguing.
Other tracks have a similar thoughtful vocal intoning of melodic shapes, accompanied by electric piano, but in these pieces, other musicians and instruments join, their music sometimes arranged, sometimes improvised. This alternation of solo voice with ensemble establishes a drama, a dynamic and brings a different kind of listening.
The opening track 1 “Sun Girl” includes flute, sax, bass guitar, percussion, as well as synths, but the performances are always collapsing into an abstract electronic ground or silence. It is the studio construction that holds me as much as the instrumental or vocal performance. The voice still winds a thread through the piece, but the different sounds and textures are always held together, artificially mediated by processing and balanced.
The track opens with a gentle, swinging, rock-a-bye chant “sun, girl, sun, girl”. Out of the seed kernel of this chant a lyric emerges. A kind of time-lapse photography transforms the words to reveal a change of perspective that the presence of a child might bring. “Sun girl sun girl / Sun may, some girl / Sun maze, some girl / Out run, dream day / Dream day, guess game / Guess game / Someday, some girl implicates me / Placing sudden daylight on me / Place me, drag me / Move me, sun girl”. Later in the song a second chant appears. “My dreams as I dream in golden yellow.” It’s harmonised and layered, blurring the articulation and moving the ear towards a textural experience, a dream world beyond language.
Fluidity and transition are thematic principles of the whole album. Sliding between fixed pitches is part of the character of the fretless bass guitar, and it has an upfront presence in the mix and arrangements. Holter’s vocals also use this scooping up to, and away from, fixed pitches. And synth sounds effortlessly glide between one pitch centre and another. Witness the keyboard pitch-wheel dips and dives in the opening seconds of the record.
What I love about the sequencing of the ten tracks is the way the compositions “Meyou” and “Ocean” (tracks 5 & 7) form two pillars in the album’s architecture, surrounded as they are by songs. They speak directly about Holter’s identity and skill as a contemporary composer and shine a light into the songs and the album’s values.
“Ocean” is a trio for double bass, electronic keyboards and clarinet. It’s a drone piece, without voice, slowly processing through a series of harmonic states. It would sit well within a programme of contemporary compositions by Éliane Radigue, John Luther Adams or Daniel Lentz. I love its presence in an album of songs. Here Holter uses the Yamaha CS-60 and Nord Stage keyboards exploring the envelopes of sustained sounds. The synths occasionally betray their keyboard articulation when the attacks of the electronics gash the sustains; brush marks suddenly bouncing across a smoothly primed canvas. The track achieves a drama and dynamic shape with these moments. Then the rasping and scrapings of the bowed double bass playing at the very top of its range is caught in the reverb and is joined by the clarinet, blending and humanising the electronic tones. The experience is of a beautifully balanced and focused performance.
“Meyou” for four unaccompanied voices explores three vowel sounds in transition using the single coinage: “meyou”. The composition moves out from a Hildegard- like plainchant solo phrase. Then the other voices join in a loose unison. The piece deploys the mouth harmonics that the voice uses to make vowel sounds. It’s playful; they’re having fun! As if the ‘filter scan’ capacity of the mouth is teasing an electronic device about its understanding of the world. Then, like the double bass of “Ocean”, each vocal articulation gradually becomes unstable, introducing distortion, breaking down the phrases into something looser and more mysterious, before the piece closes with the solo voice.
There is a history of bands throwing down an experimental gauntlet or foregrounding sonic construction for its own sake. After the perfect sequencing of Radiohead’s The Bends album, “Fitter Happier” on OK Computer is a bump in the road that only becomes clear with Kid A and Amnesiac, where the ambition of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood starts to corrode the myth of the ‘rock n roll’ band. The abstract ‘flip side’ of David Bowie’s Low is a consummate move for the vinyl disc and cassette tape of the 1970s, when turning it over was a fundamental part of domestic listening. The two different faces are perfect for a chameleon.
But what happens on Something In The Room She Moves is different. There is no awkwardness. The first time I played the album, without looking at the sleeve info, it played right through in the way The Necks or Morton Feldman records often do. It achieves this through the deft handling of each discreet moment in the construction of the tracks and album. As a listener my awareness of performance, composition, arrangement and improvisation are constantly moving from foreground to background. It’s not a hard-edged constructivist thing but psychedelic and supple. It’s really something that she moves: a very satisfying and beguiling aesthetic experience.
Julia Holter – vocals, Wurlitzer electronic piano, Yamaha CS-60, lap steel guitar, producer
Elizabeth Goodfellow – drums, percussion
Devin Hoff – fretless bass, double bass
Chris Speed – saxophone, clarinet
Tashi Wada – Prophet-6, bagpipes
Maia (aka Sonjia Denise Hubert Harper) – flute, piccolo
Sarah Belle Reid – trumpet, electronics
Ramona Gonzalez, Jessika Kenney, Maia, Mia Doi Todd – vocals
Kenny Gilmore – co-producer, recording and mixing engineer
Andrew Poppy is a post-minimal composer, musician, vocalist, writer and record producer with a unique body of work and collaborations. False Walls released Ark Hive of A Live, a 4 CD set of recordings by Andrew, along with a 128-page book. Andrew’s most recent album is JELLY.
