JULIA HOLTER: 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.
Mistletone, The Gate, Spunk Records and FBi Radio present Los Angeles singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Julia Holter, touring Australia for the first time for Laneway Festival and playing a very special, all ages show in York Street Church on Thursday February 7 as part of The Gate’s Sound/Light/Stone series – which presents incredible music and lighting in a beautiful 1850s church.
Julia Holter’s lush, absorbing compositions juggle ideas from the pop and classical worlds, melding field recordings with baroque pop and hypnotic melodies. Described by Drum Media as “elusive and ethereal, fascinating and immersive”, Julia’s exquisite songs could not have a more perfect setting than the historic surrounds of York Street Church, where she will perform as a trio, her stately piano accompanied by cellist Christopher Votek and drummer Corey Fogel.
A rising star of independent music, Julia Holter’s lush, absorbing compositions juggle ideas from the pop and classical worlds, melding field recordings with baroque pop and hypnotic melodies. 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.
A CalArts graduate and a Los Angeles native, Julia grew up in a musical family. Her father plays guitar and once performed with Pete Seeger. Her mother, Carole Shammas, is a prominent academic and currently holds the John R. Hubbard Chair in History at the University of Southern California. Besides playing and recording music, Julia tutors students and works with a nonprofit organisation for teenagers in South Central Los Angeles. After graduating from CalArts, where she studied composition, Julia contributed songs to multiple compilation albums in 2008. The following year she began playing with Linda Perhacs’ band.
Julia’s debut EP Eating the Stars (2007) was a first attempt at musically transcribing her mythological reverence of that which is incomprehensibly beautiful, 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. In 2010, she released a CD-R titled Celebration and a collection of live recordings. Her debut album Tragedy (Leaving Records, 2011) embraced similar strains of shimmer, but used sparser textures in a narrative context. Inspired by Euripides’ Greek play Hippolytus, the album was named one of NPR’s Best Outer Sound Albums Of 2011.
Julia released a second album, Ekstasis, in March 2012 on the RVNG label in the USA and Spunk Records in Australia. The mesmerising music video for album track “Moni Mon Amie”, directed by Yelena Zhelezov, was also released in March. Ekstasis drew comparisons to works by such artists as Laurie Anderson, Julianna Barwick, Kate Bush, Joanna Newsom, Grouper, and Stereolab.
Julia spent three years making Ekstasis, whose title comes from the Greek word meaning “outside of oneself.” The album 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.”
For her Sydney show, Julia Holter will be joined by Kieran Ryan, Melbourne songwriter and one half of now split indie rock group Kid Sam, who has recently released his first solo album under his own name on Spunk Records. The record was made with the help of friend and producer Myles Wootton (The Panics) and has a much wider and more expansive sound than that of the much acclaimed 2009 Kid Sam release, showing Kieran’s versatility as a singer and songwriter. With the help of fellow Melbourne musicians Jessica Venables (Jessica Says), Nick Venables (Jessica Says), Luke Benge (Sikap Sempurna), Annabel Grigg (Oh Mercy), Kelly Lane (Skipping Girl Vinegar) and engineer Matt Voight (Cat Power, Geoffrey O’Connor) the result is a lush world of lyricism in a vast, and inviting sonic landscape.
Opening the evening will be Dear Time’s Waste, the musical alter-ego of Auckland-based Claire Duncan, whose intense performances juxtapose saintly vocals against enigmatic instrumental ambience. Steeped in the gothic permanence of early Cure and the cloud-skipping gaze of Garlands-era Cocteau Twins, Dear Time’s Waste’s new album Some Kind of Eden (recently released on Spunk Records) works in a playful orbit, dancing between the lightness and weight of experience with cold purpose and red desperation … The record follows on from Spells with a formidable sense of exactitude, a concrete precision echoed by the stringent monotony of electronic beats and pulsating textures in conversation with a malleable voice that surges and pulls with the demands of every instant.
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 dreamy pop beauty and classical atmospherics which will take your breath away.
- “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
