With her dreamy new album inspired by the 50s musical Gigi, Julia Holter is seeking sanctuary from the modern world
Sometimes, when people try to explain to Julia Holter the way her spectral, seductive electronic music affects them, they tell her it's a little like falling asleep – being on the cusp of consciousness and grasping at indistinct things. Holter tries not to be offended. "Putting my audience to sleep isn't what I'm going for," says the deep-voiced, LA-born 28-year-old.
Methods she used to make her new album Loud City Song , her third, were anything but sedate. To record Horns Surrounding Me, for instance, the album's thumping, needling third track, Holter climbed on to a roof in Echo Park, the LA neighbourhood where she lives and works, and played tag with a friend. The noise of a running, panting man that introduces the track was recorded on a wireless mic.
You wouldn't necessarily know it from listening to Loud City Song once (or five or 10 times, actually), because Holter doesn't telegraph her ideas, but Horns Surrounding Me is typical of the album in that it aims to deal with celebrity fixation and voyeurism, with what Holter sees as undue loudness and crassness in cities and societies.
"It's about feeling bombarded by the loudness of gossip," she says. "When you go on Huffington Post, the most popular stories aren't really about the world, they're about Kim Kardashian's weight. When I happen to turn on a television, the advertisements are the loudest thing."
The running, panting man on Horns Surrounding Me is meant to be someone fleeing from photographers. The surrounding horns of the title – trombones blare, saxophones run scales – represent unruly paps. Holter whispers: "Chasing after me..."
Holter was a classical composition graduate who taught piano and worked as a tutor in an after-school programme when her last album, Ekstasis , was released on the indie label RVNG in 2012. It was a critical hit, beloved in particular by UK reviewers when Domino Records released it over here. Holter was placed approvingly among a group of female electronic soloists (Grimes, Zola Jesus) then thriving.
"I'd been making music for six, seven years," says Holter. "But in LA you can play for ever and no one around the world will hear you." She was caught by surprise by the success of Ekstasis (she pronounces the word carefully and sort-of-ancient-Greek-ly: "ecks-tah-cease"); it launched her on a year-long tour. When we meet in London, in early summer, she is just back from gigging in Beirut.
The new album, she says, was born directly from the last. While finishing Ekstasis, she'd watched Lerner and Loewe's 1958 musical Gigi . A particular scene, in which characters gossiped and gawked at Leslie Caron's title character (in the Parisian bar Maxim's), prompted a song. There was just about enough time to include it on Ekstasis before she handed it over to the label. "But it felt random. I couldn't explain to myself where the track fitted. So I thought I better make a whole record around it instead," she chuckles.
It became Maxim's 1 and Maxim's 2, the central tracks on Loud City Song, which are grouped with other songs inspired by Gigi, such as He's Running Through My Eyes, a pulsating, disorientating ballad. It was penned in response to a love song in the musical, Say a Prayer for Me Tonight. Did it feel risky to rest so much of her album on this one (relatively obscure) source?
"It's just the way I've always made music," says Holter. "I started writing music as a composer in school, in the classical tradition. And a lot of people [in that tradition] don't write their own texts. When you write a song, you set music to texts a lot of the time. You use previous material. To me, the process of art is very much a process of translation, of borrowing. It's impossible to write something on my own."
She says that in the past she has resorted to writing mesostics (tricksy poems, their content inspired by formal rules) to help conjure lyrics. "I like balancing a chance procedure with aesthetic choices. There are certain things [when making a mesostic] you can't control, which are chosen for you – but then you also make decisions about how to connect words that have been chosen. And those words come from the subconscious. It becomes like a collaborative game between your subconscious and chance. To me, the mystery in there is rich and exciting."
It might account for the dreamy, inscrutable quality that Holter's fans admire about her music. And perhaps it keeps this reserved songwriter at a remove as well. She seems buried unusually deeply in her albums; you get little sense of her when you listen to Ekstasis or Loud City Song.
"I don't think it's very interesting, or fun for me to write confessional music," she shrugs. "At least not right now – it's not where I'm at. Not that there aren't dramatic moments in my life, but what would I say? 'I'm going to have an interview... I feel hungry... I'm going to drink some tea?' If I wrote about my life it would be kinda boring."
Timed ideally, Holter is caught by a yawn. She apologises. She's not long off the flight from Lebanon; she's jet-lagged. The music isn't meant to put anyone to sleep. Touring it around the world, however, is another matter.
Loud City Song is released by Domino
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by Tom Lamont via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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