{"id":9027,"date":"2015-10-05T14:29:44","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T17:29:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/culturedarm.com\/?p=9027"},"modified":"2018-08-19T15:37:28","modified_gmt":"2018-08-19T14:37:28","slug":"julia-holter-have-you-in-my-wilderness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/julia-holter-have-you-in-my-wilderness\/","title":{"rendered":"Julia Holter – Have You In My Wilderness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Julia<\/a><\/p>\n

Four albums into her career, Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> is Julia Holter\u2019s most impassioned work to date, brightly tender and intimately confrontational. With her vocals vividly\u00a0inhabiting the centre of her\u00a0songs, she bounds briskly in the\u00a0foreground and fearlessly comes in close, sometimes pulling sharply away from one side\u00a0or with fingers that fail to clasp, but with a glance that fixes and stays.<\/p>\n

Holter is without a contemporary: her compositions are\u00a0uniquely exacting and esoteric. She may be\u00a0considered\u00a0alongside Laurel Halo<\/a>, Holly Herndon<\/a>, and Julianna Barwick, all hardworking female musicians who sculpt complex, multi-layered sounds, with ambient textures set against moments of harsh discord; and more loosely, Bj\u00f6rk<\/a>, Grimes<\/a>, and Joanna Newsom<\/a>, all of whose reaches extend far beyond music, ranging widely across the arts and still summoning with each new album a set\u00a0sensations highly personal and discrete.\u00a0In\u00a0recent years, perhaps the best counterpart to Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> is Grouper\u2019s Ruins<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 which in its stripped-down\u00a0way, focuses equally on the piano and the sea. All of which does little more than to suggest that Holter is within a pantheon of women at the forefront of modern music.<\/p>\n

But if there is one musician with whom Holter most closely shares, it is John Cale. It is that strange and captivating combination of elements: a classically-turned mind with a ready aptitude for the baroque or more delicately ornate, which at the same time tends towards music\u2019s sharper edges, featuring drones and dissonances, and with oblique lyrics which serve as portals and frames.<\/p>\n

Her first three albums were explicitly conceptual: Tragedy<\/em>, built around the extended track \u2018Goddess Eyes\u2019 with its line \u2018I can see you, but my eyes are not allowed to cry\u2019, was based on Euripides Hippolytus<\/em>;\u00a0Ekstasis<\/a><\/em>\u00a0was compelled by the 1961 Alain Resnais\/Alain Robbe-Grillet film Last Year at Marienbad<\/em>; and Loud City Song<\/em>\u00a0was inspired by the 1958 musical version of Gigi<\/em>. So Holter\u2019s art is full of the cinema and literature as much as it draws from other musical sources, and she has consistently cited illuminated manuscripts as an influence on her work, and pulled\u00a0into the worlds of her songs lines by Colette, by Virginia Woolf and Frank O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n

Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> bears traces of Christopher Isherwood\u2019s The Berlin Stories<\/em>, of Colette\u2019s novella Chance Acquaintances<\/em>, and of Scott Walker\u2019s ballad \u2018Duchess\u2019. But it\u00a0eschews the narrative thrust characteristic of Tragedy<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Loud City Song<\/em>\u00a0to emerge as\u00a0a looser series of interconnected pieces. These share certain themes and locales, the repeated imagery of the beach, of waves, and of swimming, and they are populated by lone figures, half-seen, the sites\u00a0of uncertain relationships and brief dalliances, summoned from the still-present near-past. But each offers something of its own story and follows its own momentum, ebbing and flowing between phrases, the stimulation of a specific moment and setting.<\/p>\n

Holter is joined for Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> by her regular collaborator Cole Marsden Greif-Neill, who produced the record, and by a group of Los Angeles musicians including\u00a0Christopher Votek on cello, Andrew Tholl on violin, Chris Speed on saxophone, Danny Meyer on saxophone and clarinet, Devin Hoff on bass, and Corey Fogel and Kenny Gilmore on percussion, most of whom also appeared on Loud City Song<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2018Feel You\u2019<\/a>\u00a0opens Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> with its turning clavinet and cooing, before Holter\u2019s voice carries over resolute percussion with a suggestive account of a trip to Mexico City. Warm and wet, Holter is both the demure woman in her raincoat, waiting patiently with fluttering chest for a glimpse of love, and the mysterious soul\u00a0of the song\u2019s myth.\u00a0\u2018Feel You\u2019 opens out and surges with strings before immersing itself again, closing with a spoken-word passage and a final return to the hook, \u2018I see a flashing light \/ I\u2019m blinded by it (the possibility) \/ It\u2019s impossible to see \/ Who I\u2019m waiting for \/ In my raincoat\u2019.<\/p>\n

It is a tantalising and ardent evocation, and following this urban opening \u2013 in this sense a continuation of Loud City Song<\/em> \u2013 Holter relocates\u00a0for the wilderness of the album\u2019s title, which is the coast. \u2018Silhouette\u2019 shuffles and slinks forth coyly, before climbing to a crescendo of keys and swirling, overlapping\u00a0utterances.\u00a0On \u2018How Long?\u2019, Holter deepens her voice and sings slowly amidst a developing chamber of sound, pulling away in the second part\u00a0as the accompaniment halts\u00a0and introduces the reverberating refrain, \u2018All the people run from the horizon\u2019.\u00a0A distant\u00a0bass is dolorously plucked.<\/p>\n

Holter lingers over words just long enough to suggest secrets, and to render musical patterns anew. \u2018Lucette Stranded On the Island\u2019 \u2013 the first of three pieces lasting more than six minutes\u00a0\u2013 is an elegant shanty, with jangling bottles and the misty ocean air, as Holter begins, \u2018I call my name aloud \/ Looking for what I remember \/ My name I know \/ I love going to the movies\u2019. The song tells a tale of a woman marooned in place\u00a0and in romance. Its lines become interwoven with the plaintive refrain \u2018The birds can sing their song\u2019, in a manner at once droll and richly expressive \u2013 and reminiscent Einar \u00d6rn\u2019s bathtub<\/a> \u2013 the swooping of gulls and the frolicking of mermaids.<\/p>\n

\u2018Sea Calls Me Home\u2019 \u2013 one of two songs on Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> reformulated from 2010\u2019s Live Recordings<\/em> \u2013 opens in the bright morning, with Holter declaring \u2018I don\u2019t need no one to follow\u2019. Pushing against propulsive percussion and jaunting harpsichord, she announces \u2018I can\u2019t swim \u2013 \/ It\u2019s lucidity \/ So clear!\u2019, before waterfront whistling and a scalding saxophone-led jazz break precede a quieter close, as treading water she listens to \u2018hear small words from the shore \/ No recognised pattern\u2019.<\/p>\n

As its title indicates, \u2018Night Song\u2019 marks a shift at the halfway point of Have You In My Wilderness<\/em>, as we exchange blue skies and the sea salt breeze for something darker, sober and enclosed. \u2018Night Song\u2019 is the most overtly sexual track on the album, sweeping strings and padding synths underlying Holter\u2019s direct address: \u2018Fingers situate themselves \/ In dark\u2019, and in an eloquently haunting vision\u00a0\u2018I throw \/ A box-full of oranges \/ Syrup seeping out \/ Searching for a season smell\u2019, as she desperately requests \u2018Show me now \/ Show me your second face\u2019. And she is left to wonder and lament, \u2018What did I do \/ To make you feel \/ So bad \/ What did I do \/ That you would make me feel \/\u00a0So bad\u2019. Her delivery is careful and voluptuous, subsumed by the night.<\/p>\n

Beginning with skewed bell chimes\u00a0before\u00a0striding forward on drums, \u2018Everytime Boots\u2019 is a departure for Holter, immediate, wide-eyed and wondrous\u00a0with a smoky country feel. The sultry, soft-lipped opening of \u2018Betsy On the Roof\u2019 is immediately offset\u00a0by the exclamation \u2018\u201dUh oh!\u201d \/ She said \/ \u201cUh oh!\u201d\u2018, in a song\u00a0whose dynamics jar and switch from phrase to phrase. It builds and drives and pulls apart on the poles\u00a0of an enfolding vocal, crashing cymbals, and the screeching noises of the street. Holter offers an entreaty to the title character, stating \u2018I\u2019m standing here on the ground, Betsy\u2019, and asking \u2018Won\u2019t you please \/ Tell me the answer \/ You know the answer\u2019, alternately tight and full-throated. Her piano dwells and the song\u00a0ends.<\/p>\n

\u2018Vasquez\u2019 \u2013 loosely based on the life of the nineteenth-century California bandido Tiburcio V\u00e1squez, after whom the Vasquez Rocks were named \u2013 sounds like In a Silent Way<\/em>-era Miles Davis, with loping, looping, rumbling percussion, whirring patches of synthesized sound, spare bass, and\u00a0unfolding saxophone. It conjures a grand and scattered space.<\/p>\n

The urge to run, sometimes to but mostly from something \u2013 from the sun, from a crowd, but most of all from an encounter, from a love\u00a0\u2013 has been a constant gesture throughout Have You In My Wilderness<\/em>, present\u00a0on \u2018Feel You\u2019, \u2018How Long?\u2019, and \u2018Night Song\u2019: a play for freedom and escape in fraught yet supple balance with the sense that the songs enact the resolution to stay and attempt recourse. The title track and the album\u2019s close,\u00a0\u2018Have You In My Wilderness\u2019 opens with the far-off field sound of birds, then a choral melody and Holter comes in encompassing the heart of her song:\u00a0\u2018Shake me awake! \/ Am I the man you see \/ Through your mystery eyes?\u2019.<\/p>\n

Roles are reversed, as Holter adopts\u00a0the perspective of a man seeking the embrace of his unsteady longed-for female partner. He is graceful and forlorn, offering promises, \u2018You\u2019ll see lightning cascading \/ Pronouncements of our love\u2019; but as love drifts and the music returns to the surf, over the \u2018shoo-wop\u2019, sawing strings, and sparse clangs of the piano, the ensuing climax is both accusatory and self-excoriating, as the lover repeats\u00a0a losing challenge, \u2018Tell me, why do I feel you running away?\u2019. It is a dramatic and\u00a0unforgettable close to an abiding work of art, ruggedly warm and beautifully wrought.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\"Have<\/a><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n