The LA-based composer and multi-instrumentalist talks to The Independent’s Helen Brown about medieval hocketing, bagpipes, and why she’s still ‘terrified’ in rehearsals.
“When Julia Holter speaks, she sounds more like a stoned-out valley girl than a cerebral, experimental musician who sings about ancient Greek verses, modernist poetry and medieval monks. I have to close my eyes to properly drift into the abstract sonic universes she creates, so it feels weird to be meeting her in the resolutely no frills lobby of a North London hotel.
But the 34-year-old Californian’s mind appears enviably untethered to the cheap, faux-leather seating and the dull fug of instant coffee. Or, indeed, to my questions. She was performing late at the Hackney Arts Centre last night, and still feels ‘fuzzy’. I imagine her skull is still vibrating with feedback after performing songs from her fifth album, Aviary (2018), reviewed as a ‘good kind of apocalypse’ by Rolling Stone and ‘an ordeal’ by The Observer.
Written in response to ‘all the internal and external babble we experience daily’, the album, says Holter, is an attempt to reflect ‘that feeling of cacophony and how one responds to it as a person – how one behaves, how one looks for love, for solace. Maybe it’s a matter of listening to and gathering the seeming madness, of forming something out of it and envisioning a future’.”
Stream Julia Holter’s ‘Aviary’ below and catch her liveperformance with Tashi Wada at Rewire 2019 onSaturday, 30 March. Learn more at Julia Holter Duo.
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→ https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/6icpwcJQWK4nq9Xilk4yRu
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