Julia Holter's work is like something you dreamt of once, with snatches of classical composition, speckles of electronic music and quixotic vocals. Her three records, Tragedy (2011), Ekstasis (2012) and this year's Loud City Song, burst with a sense of epic living and dreaming, with each record a kind of musical exploration of love. Classically trained, Holter left CalArts a confident musician, a multi-instrumentalist with a vision, an unusual, nuanced voice in a noisy, cluttered world.
Much of Loud City Song is about that noise and clutter, and how in this period, less interesting information – advertising and gossip, for example – are presented in louder terms.
“You mean that superficial things are louder than important things? Yeah. I agree that a lot of things are loud these days. I guess people were probably saying the same thing during the industrial revolution.We have to adjust to the noise of our time. I love the city and its noise, but the noise these days isn’t even always audible – it’s just loud in a metaphorical way. There’s advertising everywhere because we are always on our phones and looking at the internet and seeing ads all over the place, even if they are technically silent.”
So it makes sense that Holter looked to the past for inspiration for her latest work; and a different kind of noise: Gigi the musical.
"I grew up watching Gigi," she explains. "I never would have expected to write something inspired by a musical, but I thought the general situation – an individual feels oppressed by society's expectations of her – was something easy to transfer into any time or place. The first song I made for the record was originally going to be on Ekstasis. It was what is now Maxim's II, and was inspired by a scene where Gigi walks into a bar and everyone stares at her and gossips – really theatrical."
Ultimately, Gigi is about the purity of true love cracking through cynicism, elevating the inherent mystery of true feeling. Holter's work meditates on this and songs such as Hello Stranger and City Appearing exist in a complete atmosphere of love.
"A sense of mystery is very important to me, in all my things. It's impossible for me to make something that is completely logical. City Appearing is about the whole city discovering truth and love all at once,and having a huge celebratory orgy! And Hello Stranger is a love song by Barbara Lewis that I used because the vague nostalgia-of-love subject matter resembled the subject matter of the song I Remember It Well from Gigi, where two middle-aged people remember – but don't remember well – a love affair they shared decades earlier."
Loud City Song was the first album Holter recorded with an ensemble of musicians. "I love working with people. I can be a real control freak and so collaborating on a piece can be refreshing.You have to let go of your hang-ups with certain things and just try stuff.
“I recorded demos for all the songs, and then Cole Greif-Neill [the producer] and I talked about ways to make them come true with nice equipment and performers. I arranged parts for some players and we recorded the instrumental parts in six days in a nice studio with a great engineer. Then Cole and I spent months coming up with my vocal and keyboard parts. Mixing was so fun too, I loved working with other people and am looking forward to doing it again.”
Her second record, Ekstasis, was embraced by European audiences and during that period she toured relentlessly – a change in pace from Los Angeles, a place where a lot of good music can get lost.
"Definitely. It was exciting to be under the radar for years, and while it is true that LA is a great place to create, it is also a great place
to be hidden, which can be good or bad depending at what point you are in your career."
Studying composition was useful, acting as a kind of muscle memory for her work.
“I try to be oblivious to it, because I don’t want it to affect my process as I do things very intuitively, but sometimes to be intuitive, it’s easier to have some limits provided to you as well, to help foster creativity. A few years of keyboard harmony, and certain classical piano habits, definitely affect the things my hands come up with, as frequently the hands just hit certain patterns on the keyboard and that’s how I write.”
Another touchstone for Holter is the notion of the image, which seems just as important to reach as a certain melody.
"Yes my work responds to imagery a lot, and the moving images in film too. I don't try to recapture the image, but I just build off it. A lot of times I will come up with a simple poetic situation – with In the Same Room there are two people in a room, one remembers but the other doesn't – and then I'll sit at my piano and try to realise it, with a piece of paper to write on and a recorder to record the stuff I come up with on the spot."
Holter's mentioning of poetic situations brings to mind her own interest in poetry,and some of her tracks, such as World, are essentially poems set to music.
"I haven't written poetry in a long time,and I don't think the poem I wrote about Gigi was necessarily very good, but it definitely made me think more about the story. But honestly, a lot of my recent songs start as 'poems' and then I write the music afterward. I think that once you put music to a poem like I did with World or City Appearing, the poem is no longer a poem, and, in a way, the words are no longer words, they are just part of the music."
This disassembling of form takes Holter into a space where English electronic music composer Delia Derbyshire meets the Cocteau Twins, and suggests both an acknowledgment of rules and their destruction, just like two of Holter’s other influences: composers Robert Ashley and Morton Feldman.
“I’m not sure if they have a clear thread, but there is a combination of boldness and beauty. It’s experimental music in the best way – not forced. It’s what I like the best – a focused play. I love the way Robert Ashley lets any voice just pour stuff out, but it’s all kind of in his way somehow. And Morton Feldman’s music always sounds really beautiful to me, but it’s dissonant and sometimes very long, so each moment may be beautiful, but it’s the overall experience of those sounds over time that is probably the most rewarding.”
Holter’s use of her own voice resembles a kind of outpouring, and it is perhaps the most mysterious instrument of all. I tell her that she seems to be going further down the rabbit hole of vocal experimentation.
“ The rabbit hole of the voice!” she laughs. “I actually started writing music for instruments only, and then voice sometimes. I wasn’t a performer, just a composer, but gradually I got more interested in recording myself, and that meant I had the privacy to try out stuff, and that’s how I realised how much I love to sing and to express myself with my voice.”
Holter's creative influences are as diverse as her music: Frank O'Hara, Joni Mitchell, Roxy Music, Miles Davis, Gustav Moreau and now Linda Perhacs, with whom Holter has worked. Perhacs is best known for her exquisite 1970 record, Parallelograms – an inventive psychedelic folk composition that seems more like an invocation – and it is clear to see the two composers share a sympathetic space.
"I met Linda through an internet radio station in LA called Dublab," Holter explains. "They put on a lot of events and put on one for Linda that was her first show ever. They asked me to participate and perform her song Delicious, so that's how I got to know her music, and I met her at the show.
“She told me she was working on some stuff and we started meeting up to try to discuss recording ideas. We also started performing. She has worked with a lot of other people on this, but I have been with her ever since, sometimes playing important roles in arrangement but sometimes just making an appearance on keyboards and vocals. Her music is unlike anything else out there. It’s incredibly beautiful, and she comes from such a pure place.To me she is like a sage these days, looking at the changing world and expressing her thoughts about it.”
