Artist : Julianna Barwick
Album : Nepenthe
Year : 2013
Genre : Indie
Quality : 225kbps / 44.1KHz / Joint Stereo
Source : CD
Playtime : 0h 41m
Size : 70.80mb
Label : Dead Oceans
Catalognr : DOC069
Tracklist:
01. Offing 3:15
02. The Harbinger 5:50
03. One Half 3:41
04. Look Into Your Own Mind 4:36
05. Pyrrhic 4:20
06. Labyrinthine 4:33
07. Forever 5:30
08. Adventurer Of The Family 2:57
09. Crystal Lake 4:23
10. Waving To You 2:36
Releasenotes:
Growing up in rural Louisiana and then later on a farm in Missouri, Julianna
Barwick was a preacher's daughter at a church whose organ got very little use.
"We would always sing a cappella," she explained in an interview a few years
ago, "And instead of instruments we would clap or sing in rhythmic rounds." A
curious kid and a bit of a loner, Barwick showed a precocious fascination with
the human voice. Her hobbies included harmonizing with random sounds, making up
songs about whatever she was doing at the moment, and singing long, loud notes
in hollowed-out spaces like parking garages and inside the trunk of a giant tree
just to see what the echo would sound like. "It sounds kinda psycho, I know,"
she admitted in our interview, but sometimes "I would sing to myself and get so
lost in it that I would cry."
Actually, it doesn't sound that crazy; it's very easy to become lost in the
music that Barwick now makes as an adult. Over the span of her career, from her
imaginative 2006 debut LP Sanguine up through 2011's dazzling breakthrough The
Magic Place (the name is a nod to that aforementioned giant tree trunk, where
she'd unwittingly discovered reverb), Barwick's gradually refined a process that
is at once inventive and incredibly simple. She sings short, reverb-drenched,
often wordless vocal fragments into a loop station (though she made the loops on
the painstakingly lo-fi Sanguine using just a guitar pedal) and layers them into
luminous compositions that feel like the aural equivalent of an airplane ride
through a cloud. Toweringly sublime yet invitingly human, her music has an
uncanny power to transform whatever space it's played in. It can make a cramped
apartment feel like a high-ceilinged cathedral, or-- when she plays in one-- an
actual cathedral feel like a gear-cluttered basement show.
Following the warm reception of The Magic Place, Barwick's approach has often
been compared to ambient pioneers like Steve Reich and Brian Eno or the
conceptual vocal artist Meredith Monk, but something about her music remains
approachable and deeply personalùmore intuitive than academic. Even as Barwick's
songs become as polished and ambitious as those on her third full-length album,
Nepenthe, they've managed to retain a certain playfulness and an openness to the
process of discovery. It deserves mention among the best and most artful ambient
music being made today, but Barwick's work still feels like the realization of a
dream left over from childhood, made by someone downright giddy that she has
finally figured out a way to sing a round song with herself.
Sanguine, the 2009 EP Florine and The Magic Place all conveyed a sense of
serenity found in solitude, which is maybe why her collaborations with other
artists have been such a mixed bag. Her records with Ikue Mori (for RVNG's
FRKWYS series) and Helado Negro (as the duo OMBRE) have been solid, but a 2011
remix EP (featuring versions of Magic Place songs reworked by the likes of
Diplo, Lunice and Prince Rama) basically just underscored how beside the point
it is to remix a Julianna Barwick song. Her music is so pure and reliant on
moments of quiet that another artists' presence often overwhelms. So Nepenthe
was a potentially risky move: It marks the first time she's worked with other
artists on one of her solo albums. And we're not exactly talking anonymous
session guys here: she recorded it with Sigur Ros collaborator Alex Somers
(members of m·m and the string quartet Amiina also contribute) at Sundlaugin,
the band's famed Icelandic "swimming pool studio." (As a kid Barwick probably
couldn't have even imagined what sort of natural reverb you can get out of an
abandoned swimming pool.)
Thankfully, Nepenthe sounds like a step forward for Barwick, a noticeable
expansion in scope that still honors the sensibility that made her early records
so unique. Somers' lush production gives her music a larger and crisper depth of
field, making it that much easier to get lost in its many overlapping folds. The
structures of some of her tracks have become more complex: The billowing "The
Harbinger" finds drama in the movement from crescendos to moments of quiet and
back again, while the misty incantation "One Half" feels (true to its title)
like a seamless fusion of two separate arcs. (For once, there's even discernable
lyrics in that song, but their purpose is purely phonetic, like words spoken in
a strange dream.) But even in its most epic moments, one of Nepenthe's greatest
virtues is restraint. Given free reign in one of the most spectacular studios
imaginable, Barwick didn't go all kid-in-a-candy-store on us here. Nepenthe is a
modest evolution-- the work of an artist growing, smartly, to scale rather than
adding on needless bells and whistles or pushing prematurely past her limits.
It's also more emotionally complex than her past work. The Magic Place was a
slice of pure, unfiltered bliss, but the songs on Nepenthe ache and yearn. Album
opener "Offing" hovers like thick fog over a remote pond, while Amiina's strings
drone and growl ominously throughout "Pyrrhic"-- these songs are still ethereal,
but they're stormier clouds than Barwick's conjured before. On a few tracks,
Robert Sturla Reynisson from m·m plays a guitar that, true to his post-rock
pedigree, sounds more like a tiny spaceship or the noises made by a comfortingly
unthreatening alien. But it's Amiina's presence that's particularly harmonious
with Barwick's overall aesthetic. They're creative with the sounds they get out
of stringed instruments, which allows Barwick to use them in a way that says
something more complex than "[insert orchestral grandeur here]." They often feel
like an extension of her own voice. "Waving to You", the muted, palliative
finale, fits in so well with Barwick's vibe that it took me a few listens to
realize it's the only song on the album without vocals.
Barwick claims she went to Iceland with nothing written ahead of time. This is
how she's always worked, from her childhood experiments up to The Magic Place--
tapping into the vibrations of the present, and turning them into something that
is somehow both enduring and impermanent. You sense feelings of longing and
unease all over Nepenthe, which makes it a less blissful place to spend time
than her previous album. But that also makes it a much more cathartic listen,
and perhaps a more rewarding one.
http://pitchfork.com - 8.5 / 10 - Best New Music
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