Julia Holter - In the Same Room

The Quietus

'Does the soul exist in modern society?' asks Jean Seberg's character in Godard's film A Bout de Suffle. LA resident, Julia Shamas Holter asks the same question and makes the sonic case for an affirmative answer.

Music, and art in general, have always served as a sort of tuning fork for our personalities. We wouldn't survive without aligning ourselves with something that comes from a place of truth. And in times when that concept is seriously degraded, we need the kind of music that, with a true heart, carefully excavates whatever rings genuine from a vast inner hall of mirrors. Such is the music of Julia Holter – putting on masks to better grasp the truth beneath, defiling through a dazzling set of different, unfolding characters: while singing them into life, she is equally transcending and finding herself. As evasive to categorisation or comparison, as such singular and eclectic contemporary pop composer can get, Holter thinks of herself simply as someone who writes romantic songs. But far from reveling in emotional or sensual exaltations, her goal always reveals itself to be some kind of benevolent subversion.

Holter seizes the means of musical seduction to lure listeners closer to truth; to deconstruct the fleeting feelings and re-think our romantic notions. Are we also in a post-true romance age? Has romantic love become something obsolete and anachronistic, risky investment in emotional cost-benefit analysis and unnecessary drama we would rather avoid? The greatest enemy of the capitalist plague of self-interest is love, and while nobody would picture Holter's intricate musical enchantment as revolutionary call to arms, to reaffirm love and depth, to charm unawakened souls is to fight a good fight. Holter's soul archaeology is capable of inspiring much-needed seismic shifts in our internal landscapes, before we can hope for any external changes.

Holter's latest recording, In The Same Room, named after a song from her second, Ekstasis, continues on the aesthetic progression of the two most recent albums, exploring more delicate and fluid nuances of sonic romanticism. With this record, she has the honour (or task) of opening the new live studio sessions format on Domino's infant Documents imprint. Inspired by legendary BBC sessions, a series of irregular live recordings will follow evolving arrangements of their touring artists.

Anyone acquainted with Holter's live performances will be well aware of their uniqueness, variety, rearrangement and paradoxical sense of highly controlled spontaneity – always leaving room for her tremendously flexible band to improvise on a whim. Musicians featured here are Corey Fogel - drums/vocals; Dina Maccabee - viola/vocals and Devin Hoff - stand-up bass, shaping her bedroom recordings into orchestral compositions on a lush and dynamic spectrum.

As on Have You in my Wilderness, Holter's impeccable vocals are at the forefront, evolving from composer's eloquent use of voice as acoustic instrument, with striking musicianship as vocal author, into a singer perfecting the craft. In The Same Room gives us more intimately friendly insight into the beguiling world of Julia Holter, seen here as thoughtfully poised and careful not to intimidate the listener, making this breezy recording a good entry point for novices in Holter's catalogue.

Superbly recorded at London's RAK studios over the course of two days, immaculate performances, while not offering the many radically re-arranged renditions that Holter's fans might hope for, show cleaner, decluttered, even-tempered arrangements full of nuanced craftsmanship and sublime melodic harmony, while not lacking in cathartic finales. The intensely intoxicated atmosphere of the original albums is replaced with spacious and elegant, subtly illuminated minimal sound of unashamed beauty, captured here on the finest quality recording of Holter's music to date.

The first notes of an unrecognisably slow-paced 'Horns Surrounding Me', with intriguing background interplay of a purely classical set of instruments, suggest a certain sacrifice of power to harmony, that underlies this whole session. The instruments are no longer chasing the poor subject, who has now found peace, reflected in Holter's almost ironically languid vocal delivery, erasing anxiety of the original version and perhaps rightfully reminding us of 'how soft a heart is'. The preciousness of her poetics is remarkably captured in high fidelity, but cinematic depth of sound is lost: Holter's songs are like audio scripts for masterpieces of poetic cinema that don't exist, inspired by bits and pieces of previously existing stories, made into imaginary soundtracks where music is not descriptive background, but the movie itself. “I’m basically into creating movies that are albums as opposed to albums that are like sound from movies,” Holter herself once remarked – though it's worth noting that she also recently soundtracked the new Miles Teller film, Bleed for This.

Holter has always been a conceptual storyteller more than a confessional songwriter, so as a whole, this set lacks a greater unifying conceptual frame to give it the cohesive power of purpose. But individual renditions do stand out: the excellent rework of Tragedy's 'So Lilies' shows us how a song is built up from scratch, starting as bare; the echoed vocal interplay of Holter and her viola player Dina Macabee, riding on the skeleton of Reichian minimalism, a percussive build up gradually fleshing out the song into a supremely harmonious flow with medieval accents that accelerate to a discordant finale.

'Lucette Stranded on The Island' and 'Betsy On The Roof' are emotional highlights of great empathy towards these female characters. There is unusual resonance in Holter's work with specific female experience, under represented in critical discourse and sometimes unfairly maligned in that part of mass feminist tradition, that – in a hurry to become part of male, logocentric symbolic order – ignores the complexities of individual subjectivity. Focusing on feminine condition as a group, it rushes to erase gender differences and appropriate everything to social conditioning, before doing the inner work of self-realisation and full acceptance, needed to strengthen feminine identity and balance the polarities.

Any essentialism aside, while not being exclusive to biological womanhood, the French feminist school of thought points to 'L'ecriture Feminine': specific feminine psycho-sexual order, rooted in the semiotic microcosm of fluidity, stream of consciousness, playfulness etc. – all strong hallmarks of Holter's impressionistic art, in which she deeply internalises everything around her and transforms introvert anxieties into highly articulated poetic amusement. Always triumphing against the world limiting her self-expression.

The French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva explored, in depth, this still-alien concept of feminine genius in her trilogy on three remarkable women – one of them Holter's great inspiration Colette, the writer. And there are parallels one can draw between the particular artistic languages of Colette and Holter: they both inscribe their singular identities into their art and create a unique alphabet of tactile, fragrant, sensory worlds made into thought. Both Holter and Colette meet in poetic regions of thought where sense and sensuality, ideas and instincts, are joined. Poeticism of language, rather than its rhetoric function interests Holter: whilst oblique and never explicitly subjective, she captures the universal value of her unique experience, otherwise hidden; her voice illuminates darkest corners of her wilderness, she navigates with felicity and curiosity, serving as a tool of reclaiming her total self.

One of the more interesting re-inventions of the voice can be found in the stretched out dynamics of 'Vasquez', with warped vocals going trough some kind of a rebirth midway. Kristeva sees female experience as tied to rebirth, in non-linear temporality from the perspective of the cyclical economy of the female body, in which life is not a linear march from birth to death. Holter's song structures follow meandering logic of rebirth and reinvention – her art is full of profound estrangement that can be read as experience of feminine decentralised perspective, emerging into male logocentric symbolic order, where she is a stranger and outsider, a community she is a part of but doesn't belong to. Holter makes such displaced perspective her greatest strength.

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Holter’s pop-like melodies are often piano-heavy, sometimes backed by harpsichord, and her ethereal vocals are always a source of warmth. In the past she has worked with electronics rather than studio musicians. Now she plays with a three-piece live band, as charming tunes collide with stuttering rhythms under her otherworldly guise. Without the space and tenderness with which Holter works, this would likely be too much to swallow.

This awareness for tenderness settles no more so than in this live album, the first of Domino Records’ ‘Domino Documents’, an irregular series of live studio recordings 'designed to capture the ever-evolving arrangements of Domino artists and their bands in high fidelity'.

Here Holter tactfully re-works older, already thoughtful songs, into even more considered tunes. There is no new material here, but that doesn’t matter - the varied scope of her work continues to evolve nonetheless.

The live recording tackles songs right back to her debut album. ‘So Lillies’ first appeared on 2011’s Tragedy. Now, the original seven minute-long track is rid of the background noise and city-scape introductions. Holter’s vocals are looped, not quite phase-shifting Steve Reich-style, but something to that effect, while retaining the joyfully scatty knack of the original. There is a fragility too, as these live recordings uncover even more delicacy behind Holter’s already incredibly considered arrangements.

Much of the material on In the Same Room is from Holter’s most recent record, 2015’s Have You In My Wilderness. On ‘Silhouette’, the once drawn-out “He can hear me sing” becomes a wonderfully staccato beat, punctuating the freer-flowing piano backing. Holter spits out each syllable, yet each still resonates as a poignant memory of the relationship between love and music, or the association of sounds and people - if that is what Holter is singing about. It’s often hard to tell. But it rarely seems to matter.

Once the full romanticism of the piano kicks into force, the once-reclusive song becomes fiery. This nature of pulling a song about for live recording suits Holter’s improvisatory nature. While her voice is sometimes almost inaudible over the delicate instrumental arrangements, it still manages to be the driving force which pulls the number along.

Also amongst these recent songs is ‘Feel You’, which, for the mainstay, departs very little from the tone of the original recording. This new version relies on harpsichord just a little bit more. Added viola later in the track add a congenial warmth to the proceedings. For a listener hoping to happen upon rare gems or surprise alterations in this kind of ‘live’ album of ‘reworkings’, ‘Feel You’ may disappoint. But this says far more about the unfaltering ingenuity of the original than it does about the originality of conception on this new record.

‘In the Green Wild’ originally featured on 2013’s Loud City Song, its kooky twangy opening transforming into an eery slow dance number. The song’s re-working becomes delicately jazzy, as a spellbinding piano counter-melody manages to find a rare groove. Holter does scatty and jolty well, but the rare foray into something danceable adds a tangible aspect to this music. It’s rare, and not strictly necessary, but welcomed when it arrives. Stand-up bass adds a real walking beat to the wonderful line “There’s a flavour to the sound of walking no one ever noticed before”. The track wavers between haunting viola, dissonant piano and steadily warmer vocals. It’s at once beautiful and disconcerting: and that suits Holter down to the ground.

Holter’s voice shines. As ‘In the Green Wild’ shows off a natural flickering between brightness and eeriness, ‘Lucette Stranded on the Island’ displays the depth of her range, and on ‘Vasquez’ it’s the half-talk, half-song chatter which gives so much charm.

Julia Holter’s is a talent best shown stretched, pulled-out and free-flowing in live performance. This recording environment suits her just right.

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The essential fibers of Julia Holter’s compositions are sturdy yet pliable, amenable to shifts in contour and color. “Goddess Eyes” first appeared on 2011’s Tragedy in subtly exultant form; Ekstasis, released the next year, featured both a blocky rejigging and a retextured version. And on an EP that year, an acoustic “Goddess Eyes” revealed the patient ballad earlier obscured by static. They track Holter’s inclination towards clearer vocals and ensemble ingenuity. It’s as if, as time passes, she’d rather reimagine a song than retrieve its original spirit.

The 32-year-old Los Angeles artist’s latest release, In the Same Room, is a live studio recording of songs largely from her ravishing last two albums, 2013’s Loud City Song and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness. Some of the players—drummer Corey Fogel, violist Dina Maccabee, and bassist Devin Hoff—are familiar from Holter’s touring outfit and those two records, the strength of which owes much to the musicians’ intuitive, often idiosyncratic groove. In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning.

“Horns Surrounding Me,” on Loud City Song, features a backbeat and shades of terror. It’s nearly arrhythmic on In the Same Room, a mélange of cymbals and viola. Its darkness evokes calm instead of anxiety. The spiraling outro on In the Same Room’s “Silhouette,” meanwhile, intensifies its impending madness. It’s among her most stirring vocal performances, full of melismas on the brink of abandon. “Lucette Stranded on the Island,” sung from the perspective of someone left to die by her lover, makes the earlier version’s noisy climax seem overdone. Unadorned, we hear Holter mid-disenchantment, amorous going on helpless.

Holter has said that producer Cole M. Greif-Neill insisted on bringing her vocals, less thoroughly treated than usual, to the fore of Have You in My Wilderness. In the Same Room, though, lacks that record’s saturated backdrop, leaving Holter’s voice as palpably present as each of the instrumentalists (whose subtle dynamics enliven “In the Green Wild.”) That completes an impressive arc for Holter: from an interior, hermetic-seeming artist to one who can unlock the nuance of her compositions in live ensemble settings.

Which is why I wish In the Same Room—which does feature a couple redundancies, like a familiar “Feel You”—retooled more pre-­Loud City Song material. All but two songs are from her last two albums: “Betsy on the Roof” first appeared in similar albeit hazier form on 2010’s Live Recordings; and, more significantly, “So Lilies” returns from 2011’s Tragedy. In place of the album version’s field-recordings and interference, there’s pattering percussion and hesitant bits of melody. What would more of these predominantly electronic, in-the-box recordings sound like as band arrangements? With Holter’s restlessness to reprise, we may yet find out.