“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.
After a string of dream pop albums that established her searching voice in independent music—from 2012 breakthrough Ekstasis to Loud City Song and Have You in My Wilderness—Holter released the sprawling and thrillingly experimental Aviary in 2018. Since then, she has scored films like Never Rarely Sometimes Always, performed a commissioned live score for The Passion of Joan of Arc with the Chorus of Opera North, and collaborated with her partner, the musician Tashi Wada, who plays synth and bagpipes on her new album. Something in the Room She Moves is a remarkable progression in Holter’s oeuvre, synthesizing her free, improvisatory energy with her signature eloquence.
Recent years brought about for Holter an existential focus on human connection, amid the staggering change that came with the death of loved ones (including her young nephew, to whom the album is dedicated) and the birth of her daughter. On Something in the Room She Moves, Holter vividly processes the complexity, gravity, and awe of this confluence of experience, from the playful abandon of “Sun Girl” and the oxytocin rush of “Evening Mood,” to the willful denial in “These Morning” and the apocalyptic embrace of “Talking to the Whisper.” She calls the music “sensual,” “flowing,” and “nocturnal”--a testament to how love, with all of its challenges, “reroutes neural pathways.” The cover art by Holter’s childhood friend, artist Christina Quarles, highlights the multiplicity of intimate connection: are the figures embracing or in battle?
Holter’s new album includes some of her most lucid and audacious compositions, like the minimalist vocal piece “Meyou,” which fuses together the voices of Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez, Jessika Kenney, Maia, Mia Doi Todd, and Holter to form a beautifully-imperfect unison. The stark, starry “Materia”—performed by only Holter with her Wurlitzer—is a “mysterious love song” musing abstractly on a “rough womb” and an “appetite unerring.” “I was interested in the materiality of the body,” she says, adding that “material” etymologically comes from “mother.” The visceral synth instrumental “Ocean” finds Holter drifting on her Nord, overdubbed with a Yamaha CS-60, double bass, and clarinet.
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