Mistletone

Artwork by Rick Milovanovic

JULIA HOLTER TOUR DATES:

• MELBOURNE: WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 6 @ The Toff w/- The Orbweavers + Dear Time’s Waste (NZ) + DJ King Sim. Tickets on sale from Moshtix online, phone: 1300 GET TIX (438 849) or Moshtix outlets including Polyester (Fitzroy & City). Presented by Triple R.
• SYDNEY: THURSDAY FEBRUARY 7 @ York St Church w/- Kieran Ryan + Dear Time’s Waste (NZ). *Please note venue change. All tickets purchase for Paddington Uniting Church are valid for (the even more beautiful) York St Church, located in the heart of Sydney at 3 York Street (right above Wynyard Station). Tickets on sale now from Moshtix. All ages. Doors open 7pm. Presented by Mistletone, The Gate, Spunk Records and FBi Radio.
• BRISBANE LANEWAY FESTIVAL: Friday 1st February @ RNA, Fortitude Valley. Tickets + lineup info here.
• SYDNEY LANEWAY FESTIVAL: Saturday 2nd February @ Sydney College Of The Arts, Rozelle. Tickets + lineup info here.
• MELBOURNE LANEWAY FESTIVAL: Sunday 3rd February Footscray Community Arts Centre. Tickets + lineup info here.
• ADELAIDE LANEWAY FESTIVAL: Friday 8th February Fowler’s Live and Uni SA City West Campus. Tickets + lineup info here.
• PERTH LANEWAY FESTIVAL: Saturday 9th February Perth Cultural Centre. Tickets + lineup info here.

Mistletone, Triple R and FBi proudly present Los Angeles singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Julia Holter, touring Australia for the first time. Julia Holter’s lush, absorbing compositions juggle ideas from the pop and classical worlds, melding field recordings with baroque pop and hypnotic melodies. Julia will perform her exquisite songs as a trio, her stately piano accompanied by cellist Christopher Votek and drummer Corey Fogel. Fresh off a string of shows with Sigur Ros, playing the Andy Warhol Museum and appearing alongside Poland’s Sinfonietta Cracovia Orchestra at the Unsound festival in Krakow, Julia Holter’s live show is a swirl of ethereal beauty and classical atmospherics which will take your breath away.

Julia Holter’s songwriting stems from a mythological reverence of that which is incomprehensibly beautiful. Her Eating the Stars EP (2007) was a first attempt at musically transcribing this beauty, while discovering the honest enjoyment of unadulterated creativity. The anonymous authorship and shimmering gold detail of medieval illuminated manuscripts particularly inspired the ornately-orchestrated pop song mystery of Stars. Her debut album Tragedy (Leaving Records, 2011) embraced similar strains of shimmer, but used sparser textures in a narrative context.

Julia’s second album, Ekstasis (released locally by Spunk Records to glowing acclaim across the board) marked a return to the playful searching of Stars, but guided by newly-learned disciplines, slightly better technology, and nearly limitless home recording time. Formative experiences at Cal Arts studying with Michael Pisaro and in India singing with harmonium under guru Pashupati nath Mishra marked a slight detour in what started as a more traditional composition route. The trajectory leading to the creation of Ekstasis suggests her thirst for knowledge and experience.

While Ekstasis reflects the conventions of her classical training, the album is also uncannily, if unknowingly, poppy. Julia’s approach to crafting the songs of Ekstasis centered around what she describes as, “open ear decisions: what seemed to sound best for that moment.” This blindness to reference unintentionally steers Ekstasis along the experimental pop spectrum most commonly associated to New York’s Downtown music micro-universe of the 80s, specifically the works of Laurie Anderson and Arthur Russell.

With the blindness that leads Ekstasis, there are also many compositional methods at play. “Marienbad” was built while playing around on a Fender Rhodes with imagined imagery of topiary gardens and scenes from the song’s film namesake in mind. The entirety of “Boy in the Moon” – the Casio SK-1 noodles, melody, and lyrics – was improvised over a seven minute catharsis. The melody and lyrics for “Four Gardens” were written spontaneously while rearranging an older song on a loop pedal for a live performance. “This is Ekstasis” contains a bass line built from a medieval isorhythm technique, allowing it to maintain a sense of repetition, but shift slightly with every turn.

With each song, there is a unique story and approach, but all are united by the magnetism of the medieval manuscripts and Julia’s “desire to get outside of my body and find what I can’t define.” It took Julia stepping outside of her solely self-written and recorded body of music to engage fellow Los Angeles musician and friend Cole M. Greif-Neill (Nite Jewel, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti) in the final phase of Ekstasis.

Cole’s input added perspective and brought out the greatest sonic potential that each song secretly contained. Julia says, “The first time I heard his mix of ‘Marienband” the garden became so rich. Suddenly there were bright greens, the statues’ edges defined, the fountains pouring…”

Ekstasis is an album indulged in these beautiful, simple, unfolding life mysteries. “All of these fleeting images and muses are so important,” says Julia. “As with the manuscripts, when I see them, I hear voices. I am continually following the voices in the gold leaf. I can’t know them, but I will follow their beautiful song.”

• “And at the center of all this time travel stands Julia Holter, pulling in references and sounds from everywhere and shaping them into a music that’s both haunting and life-affirming, something to make you dream and think.” – PITCHFORK BEST NEW MUSIC (Rating 8.6)
• “Julia Holter has created a radically new world from a crystalline Venn diagram of sound.” – NPR