Mistletone

Mistletone proudly presents Julianna Barwick, touring Australia for the first time. Brooklyn-based solo artist Julianna Barwick creates music which is at once orchestral, choral and meditative, using her voice as an instrument to create soaring, capacious chants and mystical invocations. Totally captivating and moving, Julianna has been compared to the likes of Philip Glass, Brian Eno, Panda Bear, Stars Of The Lid and Cocteau Twins.

JULIANNA BARWICK TOUR DATES:

Saturday January 14: Sugar Mountain Festival, Melbourne w/- Deerhoof, Tune-Yards, Shabazz Palaces, Thee Oh Sees, John Maus, Sun Araw, Prince Rama + more. Tickets on sale via Ticketmaster or phone 136 100.

Sunday January 15 + Tuesday January 17: Sydney Festival @ The Famous Spiegeltent, Honda Festival Garden, Hyde Park. Tickets on sale from Nov 9 on the Sydney Festival website or Ticketek.

Wednesday January 18: The Toff, Melbourne w/- Wintercoats + Superstar. Tickets on sale now from Moshtix – phone: 1300 GET TIX (438 849), Moshtix outlets including Polyester (Fitzroy & City) or online here.

Thursday January 19: MONA FOMA 2012: Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art’s Festival of Music and Art. Tickets on sale now from the festival website.

Friday January 20: Adelaide Festival Centre Sessions @ Space Theatre. Doors 6:30pm, all ages. Tickets on sale now.

JULIANNA BARWICK makes sublime, ethereal, pastoral folk music, with heavenly harmonies and weaving sonic architecture. Julianna’s experimental soundscapes are in part informed by her experience growing up in Louisiana and Missouri, singing weekly with her church congregation and school choirs. Her loop-based compositions replicate the soaring textures of a large choral group using only her voice, a loop station and some occasional instrumentation.

Julianna’s amazing new album The Magic Place (out now on Mistletone Records / Inertia and available on mail order) is a nine-piece full-length album of magic and solace, bursting joy and healing tones. Like Sigur Rós’s ethereal glossolalia, there’s a very particular joy in listening to Julianna’s music. Free of the constraints of narrative and traceable language, it’s the same joy in giving yourself over to opera in a foreign language, of letting go of your pesky rational mind and allowing the feeling to come through in the voices and performance.

“So beautiful it might indeed reach the ear of heaven” – SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (4 stars)

“Singing in church choirs while growing up in rural Louisiana, Julianna Barwick loved how it felt to be in the middle of the chorus: in harmonious unity, swallowed up by sound. Her music attempts to recreate that sensation solo by using a loop station — an effects unit that layers sounds infinitely — to become a one-woman choir. Her ambient music is peer to fellow loopers such as Animal Collective bro Panda Bear and somnambulist droner Grouper but it’s very much its own thing. Barwick constructs opaque audio atmospheres from swarms of heavenly harmonies and cloudy drones, making music equal parts canonical and environmental. After two records testing these waters (2007’s Sanguine and 2009’s Florine), Barwick is the master of her idiosyncratic domain on The Magic Place. Named after a childhood birch, in the branches of which she would retreat into fantasy. The LP taps into imagination and escape, its rapturous suite of tone-songs — with apt names such as Envelop and Cloak — suggest cinema, the subconscious, transcendence, the firmament, heaven and any other realm of mystery and mysticism.” – THE AGE (4.5 stars)