While the Spektral Quartet set down their bows and strings last year, drawing the curtain on more than a decade of live performance, the violinists Clara Lyon and Theo Espy, violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen still had three recording projects on a stately afterburn.
First up on New Amsterdam Records, the quartet paste and bind with Julia Holter for Behind the Wallpaper, a song cycle by the composer Alex Temple which embodies themes of alienation and transformation through a succession of discrete scenes.
Blending elements of indie pop, Weimar cabaret, Elizabethan music and nineteenth-century Romanticism while set between such disparate locations as an eerie science park and a masquerade ball, an early standout in ‘Tiny Holes’ is on the subject of memetic phobias and imaginary diseases, with the composer Temple adding:
Julia Holter’s music has a stylistic fluidity and vulnerability that made her the perfect choice for this dreamy, unsettling story. The piece tells the tale of someone undergoing a mysterious transformation and ultimately finding a home in another world.
Some of the dreamy or gauzy imagery in these songs was inspired by Temple’s experience of gender transition. There is a porousness to the album even though its component parts cohere as catchy and imagistic moments or reckonings, within the broad tradition of the art song. Thus at the other end of the cycle Spektral Quartet and Holter unfold the strange somnambulism of ‘Jolene’, which drifts through moss-green shutters and translucent curtains to evoke with sweetness and pungency the smell of conifers and summer rain.
