Foggy Notions presents
Julia Holter
The Button Factory, Dublin
December 10th, 2024
“My heart is loud,” Julia Holter sings on her sixth album Something in the Room She Moves, following an inner pulse. The Los Angeles songwriter’s past work has often explored memory and dreamlike future, but her latest album resides more in presence: “There’s a corporeal focus, inspired by the complexity and transformability of our bodies,” Holter says. Her production choices and arrangements form a continuum of fretless electric bass pitches in counterpoint with gliding vocal melodies, while glissing Yamaha CS-60 lines entwine warm winds and reeds. “I was trying to create a world that’s fluid-sounding, waterlike, evoking the body’s internal sound world,” Holter says of her flowing harmonic universe.
“What is delicious and what is omniscient?” she sings on “Spinning”, the album’s incantatory centerpiece. “What is the circular magic I’m visiting?” Or as Holter put it: “It’s about being in the passionate state of making something: being in that moment, and what is that moment?” She found it anew on Something in the Room She Moves, singing in somatic frequencies.
Julia Holter is a composer, performer, and recording artist based in Los Angeles. Her interest in sonic mysteries has led her to record in various settings--in her home, outside with a field recorder, and in recording studios—as well as to perform live, often with a focus on the voice and the space between language and babble. Holter’s music is multi-layered and texturally rich, often featuring an array of instruments played by an ensemble of creative musicians. She has amassed a body of work that explores melody within free song structures, atmosphere, and the impulses of the voice.
Julia released her latest album Aviary on Domino Records in 2018. Since the release of her previous albums Tragedy (2011) and Ekstasis (2012), Loud City Song (2013), and Have You In My Wilderness (2015), she has performed at venues and festivals throughout the world, including Europe, North & South America, Mexico, Asia and Australia. Julia was recently commissioned by the Chorus of Opera North to compose a score for the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which she and the chorus performed to picture at the Barbican in 2022. She has also written music for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and scores for the TV show Pure (2019), the films Bleed for This (2016) and Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), and for the documentary on the singer Karen Dalton, In My Own Time (2020).