Since releasing her last studio album Aviary back in 2018, the balmy troubadour, memory wanderer and stranded silhouette Julia Holter courted the world of film by composing the score for Eliza Hittman’s award-winning drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and writing and performing a new live soundtrack for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent landmark The Passion of Joan of Arc with the 36-strong Chorus of Opera North, a piece described as an ‘immense sonic tapestry’ of medieval chants, bells and organs. Through rippling warmth and dark lustrous reveries she reimagined the Keyboard Fantasies of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, while featuring on tracks by Anna Calvi, Old Fire and Call Super plus her frequent collaborators Devin Hoff, Mia Doi Todd and Ramona Gonzalez of Nite Jewel. And from memetic phobias to moss-green curtains and the smell of conifers, she elaborated the song cycle Behind the Wallpaper with Alex Temple and Spektral Quartet, a heady blend of Elizabethan music and nineteenth-century Romanticism, Weimar cabaret and contemporary indie pop which was one of Culturedarm’s favourite records of the past year.
The concept of a studio album took on new meaning this time around, as the artist who has typically prepared keys and voice demos at home, often using these vocal takes as part of the finished project, now found herself renting out a local recording studio where she not only tracked her vocals but in a flush of words elaborated her stream-of-consciousness lyrics.
Partly this was down to the birth of her daughter – a new padded presence around the household, who inspired the song ‘Sun Girl’ on Something in the Room She Moves while a snippet from her ultrasound session, filtered through a phaser to sound like a hi-hat, is embedded within the underwater atmospherics of ‘Evening Mood’ – and partly it was due to a bout of coronavirus as recording time approached. Described as an album with a ‘corporeal focus, inspired by the complexity and transformability of our bodies’, the gilded spring of new life is counterbalanced by the mute permanence of loss as Something in the Room She Moves is dedicated to the memory of Holter’s nephew Calder Powell, while over the past few years the singer also said goodbye to her grandfather at the age of 100 years old.
‘Sun Girl’ opens the album as a summer incantation, dappled and playful over the soft-hued psychedelics of the ensemble, which for Something in the Room She Moves includes Maia on the flute and piccolo, Chris Speed on the saxophone and clarinet, Dev Hoff on fretless bass and double bass, Sarah Belle Reid on the trumpet, Beth Goodfellow on drums and other percussion and Holter’s partner Tashi Wada on synthesizers and bagpipes. Freely associative, after the first burst through the florist’s door the track foregrounds Maia’s woodwinds and Goodfellow’s tripping percussion supported by Hoff on bass, Holter who adapts her familiarly woozy Moog and Mellotron plus her grandfather’s old lap steel guitar, and Wada on the bagpipes and Oberheim OB-X8 plus field recordings, a heady bouquet whose headlong swirl finds a moment of clarity in the singer’s echoing refrain ‘My dreams as I dream in golden yellow’, upon whose first permutation she unfurls a canvas smudged and daubed as the band refuel and set out for their next picnic spot. As an ode to a buff and citrusy warmth, ‘Sun Girl’ unfolds as one breath.
‘These Morning’ on the other hand proves something of a throwback to Holter’s earlier records with its halting delivery and frayed-curtain synths, an almost spoken-word piece burnished by the brassiness of Reid’s trumpet and electronics, but amid all the cooing the iceberg cometh on a track which takes its musical cues from ‘tall fjords’ and ‘night chills’.
Several of Holter’s earlier records – like Tragedy with its ‘Goddess Eyes’ and snatches of Euripides, Ekstasis which takes the cyclical structures, sharp geometries and skewed memories of the film Last Year at Marienbad as its theme, and Loud City Song which was inspired by the musical Gigi – seemed to bear conceptual trappings which might at once serve as an inroad to her music or keep the listener at careful remove, though Holter herself says she is simply more open or diligent when it comes to referencing her sources. Still a sense of theoretical archness has sometimes masked the sheer materiality of her music, with its woozy synthesizers, swooning vocals and occasional doo-wop scatting or countryfied airs, the gently explorative nature of her approach to composition, and the enveloping quality of her sound, which varies compellingly from album to album and has never been so warm or as humidly moist as it is here. The title of her album stems from the downtime of the pandemic, arriving spontaneously as she was naming a demo track on Logic Pro, inspired by the slinky amour of the George Harrison-penned ‘Something’ after hours spent watching The Beatles: Get Back documentary film.
So the title track, an outpouring of that original demo, opens with a heaving plumpness which becomes more sinuous by turns, for a song which might well be construed as a comment on the artistic process, stranded by writer’s block or spurred by the slow surreptitious emanating of the subconscious, dwelling on the preponderance of beach scenes or ‘green’ scenes in her work, the artist paring one’s fingernails after adding that last layer of decorative coating, as cymbal swells and cherubic synths give way to an intrepid flute.
‘Materia’ hearkens back to Holter’s earliest forays with its baroque imagery and reverb which pushes her voice into the staggered background, a hall of mirrors. ‘Meyou’ – a simple closed compound like ‘Lovesong’ or ‘Notget’ – turns from its plainsong opening into a form of overtone singing in multiple parts, apparently influenced by Holter’s work with Laura Steenberge and Catherine Lamb as the vocal trio Triangulum, here after an impromptu studio invite featuring the voices of Ramona Gonzalez, Jessika Kenney, Maia and Mia Doi Todd.
The solemn sparsity of ‘Meyou’ flows into the revolutionary whirl of ‘Spinning’, which opens with a neon-electric bass thud with a short envelope and clopping percussion which sounds like an amplified water droplet as it falls and splashes into a ceramic sink. Swapping ambery warmth for a kaleidoscopic panoply of colour, the song draws from the French writer and poststructural critic Hélène Cixous, with Holter citing the following passage from Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off:
the night vibrates, I see with my ears, I advance into the bosom of the world, hands in front, capturing the music with my palms, until something breathes under the pen’s beak. (I’ve just written these lines eyelids closed as usual, because the day and its huge light keeps us from seeing what is germinating.)
Conceived therefore as a night song which also bears traces of Robert Wyatt’s ‘Sea Song’ with its ‘foam-crested brine’ and fleshy moonlight, dappled drunkenness and late-night lunacy, the track embraces the ripeness of the after hours as Holter twines concepts of deliciousness, omniscience and becoming. Dwelling within chance as the darkness runneth over in slopping fashion our day-cracked and sunspoilt cup, the music video for ‘Spinning’ directed by Giraffe Studios emphasises the momentum of the piece, the lurching heave of the percussion proving once more incantatory beneath spectres of woodwinds and winnowing woodwinds, with Holter lost inside the billowing tent of her skirt on the teetering precipice of a parachute which still might be.
By contrast the song ‘Ocean’ proffers a sunrise through atmospheric refraction, waxing and waning on the horizon as it dances steeply bathed in its own light. Much of Something in the Room She Moves features the Yamaha CS-60, a stripped-down version of the Yamaha CS-80 of Vangelis and Blade Runner fame, and there is a warped metallic quality to the music here, that strange admixture of sleek futurism and makeshift, well-worn or hand-me-down pliability which moves with a synthetic wobble. That sound is complemented by Tashi Wada’s synthesizer of choice the Prophet-6 and Dev Hoff’s fretless bass, which is capable of the deep sonorousness of an upright while also bearing the trademark buzz of its ‘mwah’ and thrum.
The bowings and scrapings of Hoff’s bass provide the counterpoint to a beautiful instrumental on ‘Ocean’, which from saline or brackish surrounds reaches lower earth orbit as the night sky glooms in delicate airglow. The song segues fittingly into the first twinkling moments of ‘Evening Mood’, which is soon taken over by a faltering, sweltering drum beat.
On ‘Evening Mood’ the singer is caught hopelessly between the golden hour and the gloaming, as she repeats the lines ‘The dream is sweet’ and ‘Let’s not say it’s over just yet’, lingering languorously over but caressing for just one breath the face of a lover, a vespertine flower which blooms only in the evening, as spiralling and sometimes plangent clarinet, the enveloping clash of a ride cymbal and Dev Hoff’s ambling bass both burnish and sustain the frisson. While the recurrent nap times of early parenthood soon give way to a monopoly on our screens, Holter still managed to draw inspiration for the liquid production of ‘Evening Mood’ from the Hayao Miyazaki film Ponyo, a story of transmutability which stars a magic goldfish.
Julia Holter possesses a rare way of tripping discursively or intuitively through her voice, creating that sense of faltering, headlong momentum not only word-to-word but syllable-to-syllable, and as the ensemble reaches a crescendo around her on ‘Evening Mood’, her lilting repetition of ‘my girl’ in the chorus proves one of the most exquisite moments in her entire catalogue.
‘Talking to the Whisper’ maintains a steady drone and a static top line, which weaves its way between a shuffling drum pattern and the bounding strides of Hoff’s bass. Together they provide the song with an almost ominous backbeat, which threatens to stalk off into the distance but just about holds its course or finds its way. Perhaps it is a heartbeat or a hand brusquely unbuttoning a blouse or pair of trousers, because ‘Talking to the Whisper’ abounds to my ears in a covert and sometimes despairing amorousness. The track becomes untethered with a flurry of woodwinds following the carnal ‘knowing’ of Holter’s lyrics, and the song is then characterised by this winnowing, fluttering flute before Chris Speed brandishes a bronze and burnished saxophone, imbuing the closing moments of ‘Talking to the Whisper’ with a coarser friction.
Interestingly enough in an interview with Tone Glow the artist has described ‘Talking to the Whisper’ as ‘the song for me that is most about grieving and about love in general’, a conflux which the final line of the song – ‘Love can be shattering’ – keenly lays bare. And after throwing a little light on our collective pathway, ‘Who Brings Me’ which closes the album is a lullaby which turns beguilingly sultry, one last gushing outpour of ‘algae and foam’.
