LA musician pops up in an empty house to play ‘Moni Mon Amie’, a track from her recent album Ekstasis.
Interview: Julia Holter
thestoolpigeon.co.uk
“TRAGEDY is one big blob, whereas with Ekstasis, the songs are all individual little blobs,” says Julia Holter of her two albums to date. Yeah, and Da Vinci’s sketches are scribbles and the Mona Lisa is just some brownish area with points.
In March, the 27-year-old part-time music tutor released her second album proper on New York label RVNG INTL. Ekstasis is a crystalline record that’s as spacious as it is kaleidoscopic, recalling the work of Laurie Anderson — who Holter says she hadn’t heard until the comparison kept cropping up — Julianna Barwick, Leyland Kirby and current collaborator Linda Perhacs, a cult folkie from the Laurel Canyon era. Holter’s description of how its “blobby” structure relates to that of its predecessor, last year’s more drone-based Tragedy, completely underestimates the beguiling artistry of a record that’s already been hailed as one of 2012’s best, and which has moved some to call her “a new American maverick”.
Ekstasis’ critical success has made Holter seem ubiquitous in recent months. But it’s only her second full-length release in a musical career that started 11 years ago, when a young Julia started meticulously scoring pieces on paper, convinced that was how to approach music. “I had a sense of going through the motions of the academic world — my mom is a professor, so I thought that was the thing to do,” she explains.
She later studied at the University of Michigan — where recent Hyperdub signing Laurel Halo was one of her classmates, though they weren’t especially close — and the experience has earned her the reputation of being formally trained. She squirms and says, “I was thrown into a private lesson with a teacher each week, which on one hand was great, but on the other hand was horrible. I had grown up on pop music and played classical piano, but I didn’t listen to very much classical music until I was about 14, so this way of working made me write very stilted music.”
In fact, it was her time working on the college radio station that taught her the value of being part of a like-minded group of people, something she strove to recreate when she returned to LA, meeting Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez, and the aforementioned Perhacs.
Another experience which shaped her was the time she spent in India learning to sing from a guru. “I was there for a month because of college,” she says. “This incredible older guru and I would do this really intensive singing. We couldn’t really communicate in each other’s languages, so we would sing back and forth. I had never really sung much before — and I bought a harmonium when I was there, too — so I always think of that time as when I started performing more, and feeling comfortable doing so.”
This idea of sensory and communicative deprivation is one that inspired Ekstasis. While Tragedy was based around Euripides’s play Hippolytus, its successor has no such concrete influence. “There’s often this obstacle that you can never figure out,” she says. “On ‘In The Same Room’, there are two people trying to figure out when they were together — sitting in two chairs and talking. I’m interested in the hopefulness of situations like this, where there’s an obstacle denying a possibility that you need to figure out. It’s really exciting.”
That thoughtful streak extends to the way Holter records. “Some people make music with no soul, which is not okay,” she adds. “I make stuff in my bedroom with all my own instruments; I put a lot of soul and heart into the record — but I used to intern at [record label] Human Ear, and I would get sent things where I felt that people were just shitting all over the microphone.
“People need time. It was good for me because I had a lot of time before I had any attention. That’s important, to have time to not worry about what other people think.”
