JULIA HOLTER

Julia Holter’s Tragedy album was included in several 2011 year end lists, including NPR, WIRE, FACT, and Boomkat’s #1 album of the year. Julia Holter’s second album, Ekstasis, is a collection of songs written and recorded across the span of three years in Los Angeles, California. Ekstasis marks a return to the playful searching of her 2007 Eating the Stars EP, but guided by newly-learned disciplines, slightly better technology, and nearly limitless home recording time. Holter’s songwriting stems from a mythological reverence of that which is incomprehensibly beautiful. Stars was a first attempt at musically transcribing this beauty, while discovering the honest enjoyment of unadulterated creativity. Holter’s critically acclaimed debut album Tragedy (Leaving Records, 2011) embraced Stars strains of shimmer, but used sparser textures in a narrative context. While Ekstasis reflects the conventions of her classical training, the album is also uncannily, if unknowingly, poppy. Holter’s approach to crafting the songs of Ekstasis centered around what she describes as, “open ear decisions: what seemed to sound best for that moment.” This blindness to reference unintentionally steers Ekstasis along the experimental pop spectrum most commonly associated to New York’s Downtown music micro-universe of the 80s, specifically the works of Laurie Anderson and Arthur Russell. With the blindness that leads Ekstasis, there are also many compositional methods at play. “Marienbad” was built while playing around on a Fender Rhodes with imagined imagery of topiary gardens and scenes from the song’s film namesake in mind. The entirety of “Boy in the Moon” - the Casio SK-1 noodles, melody, and lyrics – was improvised over a seven minute catharsis. The melody and lyrics for “Four Gardens” were written spontaneously while rearranging an older song on a loop pedal for a live performance. “This is Ekstasis” contains a bass line built from a medieval isorhythm technique, allowing it to maintain a sense of repetition, but shift slightly with every turn.