Julianna Barwick - Healing Is A Miracle

A Closer Listen

Juliana Barwick‘s The Magic Place was our Album of the Decade, so we were extremely excited to hear that she would be releasing a new album in 2020.  Barwick’s music has always suggested healing, but on this set the association is front-and-center.  The entire world is in need of healing right now, and the LP could not have arrived at a better time.  Inspired by her wonder at the human body’s capacity to repair itself, Barwick gathered some like-minded friends to record a series of grateful, peace-filled pieces; the result is a celebration of hope.

We included the opening track, “Inspirit,” in our article, “Ten Tracks That Sound Like Summer.”  There’s a bit of the siren in Barwick’s voice, and the video’s images of open sea encourage the connection.  As Barwick walks and occasionally runs the shore of Iceland, the camera follows from above.  The phrase “from above” is forever linked with Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s essays and aerial photography, all meant to increase environmental awareness ~ something we’re certain Barwick and her Icelandic collaborator Jónsi support.

Two angles dominate the visuals: Barwick looking out at an abundance of natural beauty, and the videographer Joel Kazuo Knoernschild gazing down at Barwick.  There’s a metaphor to be found in the second: a bird’s eye view is akin to greater perspective.  When we are subsumed by worry and anxiety, we’re temporarily blinded to the passage of time.  Injuries heal; pandemics pass; nations find peace.  Barwick calls us to thoughtful examination, hoping to center us through sound, to still the disquiet that prevents us from moving forward.  “Inspirit” means “to encourage.”  A visual glance at the word also implies an inner spirit, the promise of inner peace.  When combined with choral layering, organ-like bass and the miracle of the LP title, “inspirit” also suggests the spiritual life.  Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the first guest is Mary Lattimore, who plays the harp on “Oh Memory.”

The intensely peaceful title track washes over the listener like the cool, cool sea: sonic healing in the form of a lullaby.  The healing power of music is its own miracle.  When Jónsi enters the picture, the tone turns euphoric, with birds singing and Katie Malia dancing on a variety of terrains.  The tempo-driven electronics arrive like an awakening.  After this, Barwick guides listeners to an oasis called “Safe.”  Maybe we’ll get through this after all.  Maybe our trials are only temporary.  Is it possible?  Barwick makes us believe that it is.

The set’s loudest segment arrives late but passes swiftly at the end of “Flowers,” as if to acknowledge the wound.  By the time Nosaj Thing helps to ferry listeners to the land of “Nod,” new skin has already begun to form.  The electronic pulses that have been appearing every other track draw the album to an uplifting conclusion.  But in the final 45 seconds, it’s only Barwick, filled with awe, singing to us from the other side of the breakers, encouraging us to swim.  (Richard Allen)

The Quietus

In an interview late last year, Louisiana-born musician Julianna Barwick offered up some sound advice. “You need to think of ways to combat the evil and the state of earth wherever you can,” she suggested. “And enjoy life, because life is still really wonderful, it really is.”

Her first album in four years, and her debut on Ninja Tune, Healing Is A Miracle feels like an out-and-out distillation of that line of thought. Inspired, title and all, by how the body heals itself – the so-called ‘miracle’ of the title – it’s a sublime panacea at a time when entertaining anything resembling hope almost feels tempting of reproach.

As is Barwick’s wont, not least on 2016’s Will, the slow crest and fall of Healing Is A Miracle isn’t so much a journey as a full-scale rove far beyond. Like being softly guided by the hand, behind the veil and yonder, opener ‘Inspirit’ has all the widescreen oomph of the THX Deep Note, only stretched to four minutes of swarming ambience. “Open our heart, it's in your head,” Barwick repeatedly incants. Saturated in spacious room reverb, and sat above clement drones à la latter day Stars of the Lid, these seven words, simple yet purposely obscured, double up as a vivid opening canticle.

Recorded in the wake of a move from New York, where she had lived for sixteen years, to Los Angeles, Healing is a Miracle is easily Barwick's most intimate – and intentioned – foray in years. Having said that her move to the West Coast was informed by a need for a place that “inspired joy and delight again,” Barwick’s fourth album feels like a transliteration of one person reconnecting to the source. “It was emotional,” she said, “because I was recording music that was just from the heart, that wasn’t for an ‘assignment’ or project. It brought me to tears a little.”

The sentiment is nigh on touchable. Nearly yogic, driven by a breathy, open-hearted wax and wane, ‘Safe’ and ‘Flowers’, with its shuddering, low-end surge, are but two highlights here. As elsewhere, looped vocals and balmy synth shapes become as one, equal parts pure clarity and moony obfuscation. But despite its openly personal provenance, some of the very best moments here are unions with old friends. Featuring Jónsi Birgisson of Sigur Rós, ‘In Light’ is an outright peak. Evolving from shards of noise to a sweeping meld of machines and sounds of nature, it feels like Julianna Barwick in full bloom. And while ‘Oh, Memory’, boasting experimental harpist Mary Lattimore in her element, lands a gossamer punch; closer ‘Nod’ makes for a fitting benediction. Alongside Jason Chung (aka Los Angeles-based electronic producer Nosaj Thing), Barwick delivers a quintessential Ninja Tune cut, all slo-mo, splintered beats and backwashed vocal refrains.

Emerging from its spell to discover Healing Is A Miracle clocks in at just over thirty minutes long legitimately feels like sleight of hand. Time isn’t simply suspended – it’s bent and widened beyond recognition. Like trying to retrieve the last fading figures of a dream upon waking, these are sounds, prepared and presented as songs, of a realm just out-of-reach. But it’s to the here-and-now – back in full view of the veil – that Barwick seems to want to lure us to. With the right perspective to help foster it, it’s there where one can truly feel hope again.

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Pitchfork 83

Juliana Barwick’s revelatory new album asks us to picture healing at a moment when the task feels impossible.

The Guardian 60

(Ninja Tune)
The Louisiana-born musician’s ambient fourth album is a ravishing affair

The aural equivalent of a Mark Rothko painting, the work of Louisiana-born, Brooklyn-based Julianna Barwick loops her voice in layers of soft, radiant texture to build an effect of sacred-feeling simplicity. Her fourth album is inspired by a return to instinct. If it feels less ambitious than its predecessor, 2016’s Will – which explored acoustic settings from a Moog factory to a motorway underpass – it’s also more ravishingly beatific.

Inspirit ripples a reverbed melody over a bass synth that thrums like an interplanetary pipe organ, while the wordless keening of Wishing Well waxes and wanes like a lighthouse beam in fog. Hints of shadow keep Barwick’s bliss from becoming one-dimensional: pulses of vocal fire out like radar blips into a darker, emptier space in Flowers, while the album’s title track has the feel of a gothic afterworld, This Mortal Coil finally shuffled off.