Designed as a follow-up to “Something in the Room She Moves”, “Materia” offers a new occasion for the Californian musician to scour her sonic material, blending weightless pop with ambient explorations.
The Laugh Is in the Eyes. A suspended voice stitched with layers of synths and bass: a sumptuous track that opens Materia, which borrows its name from one of the tracks on Julia Holter’s previous album, Something in the Room She Moves. And it presents itself as a continuation. Yet there is no question of dragging it out or simply recycling leftover sessions: this is a new inward journey, a nearly fetal comfort, offered by the Californian musician. For evidence, My Lost One with pink Floydian reminiscences and a Fantasy which, while not reaching the Georgian chant of Meyou found on the prior record, was conceived as an incantation, in Holter’s own words. Crescendo followed by decrescendo, this incantation seems destined for the skies with merciful, alas variable benevolence — but without leaving her own room.
She, who told us a few years ago that she loved nothing more than working in the studio, which allowed her to dive into “a parallel universe”, has not lost that taste for sculpting music, for the heartbeat entwined with vocal weaving. The breath, too. Marked by a Covid from which she took a long time to recover, Holter told us she had thought a lot about breathing during the conception of Something in the Room She Moves. A concern that manifests on Materia, with pieces that inspire… and exhale. Witness the ten-minute My Twin, somewhere between Laurie Spiegel’s electronic experiments and Robert Wyatt’s oblique reveries: sounds appear, skim alongside each other, then fade in a slow drift where the music seems to recompose itself in real time.
Texture Becomes an Event
“The day wanes; the night increases, remember! / The abyss is always thirsty; the clepsydra runs dry”, wrote Baudelaire in L’Horloge. Thus, the brief Clepsydra, a charming paradox for a piece bearing the name of an antique instrument used to measure time, serves as a reminder of how texture, for Holter, becomes an event. And that a song is never quite finished, protean ad lib. For evidence Materia 2 and Materia 3, variations around the track that was initially meant to lend its name to Something in the Room She Moves, before Julia Holter ultimately found it too serious. The second assembles itself in fragments while the third pushes the austere purity even further. The tree often hides a forest, and a song a whole album. Hence this curious sensation, while listening to Materia, of recognizing a landscape whose outlines would, nevertheless, not be exactly the same.
Materia (Domino/Sony Music). Release on August 21.
