These female-fronted acts conducted an ethereal, out-of-body experience for the sold-out crowd in Hackney earlier this week – ultimately healing and warming the soul from the winter coldness.
The up-and-coming music producer and DJ Ah! Kosmos (a.k.a Başak Günak) set the evening’s tone with an intriguing combination of Eastern European-tinged electronic sampling and a range of live instruments, from guitars to saxophones. After some impressive online reviews of her latest LP Beautiful Swamp, my expectations were set particularly high for this support act: the results, however, were slightly mixed. Whilst the addition of the live saxophone helped bolster the atmospheric tones of her tracks, the later incorporation of guitar did little in the way of this. Contributing a rather lacklustre guitar performance in some parts, it detracted from the electronic sequencing conducted by Günak. In spite of this, her substantial light show and grasp of intricate electronic beats flowing regularly into one another was certainly commendable – the suggestion must be made, however, for her to incorporate more brass instrumentation and heavier bass tones within her music to enhance the evolution of her tracks.
For the main course of the evening, though, served the American singer-songwriter, record producer, composer, and artist – Julia Holter. Having released her most successful 5th LP to date Aviary this past October, Holter has laid down a new marker for an ancient genre: classical. Her intellect in combining classical and baroque musical tropes with art pop and ambience music was something which proved spell-binding as a record listening experience. Her live set ultimately reflected much of the same.
Stepping into the fray of the stage, Holter’s angelic white dress set a precedent for her evening’s set – synonymous with her heavenly musical ambience and ethereal sonic landscapes conjured particularly through her recent LP. ‘In Gardens’ Muteness’ commenced the proceedings with a brooding solo performance from Holter, allowing the minimalist piano refrains to mimic her beautiful vocal patterns. Thereafter, Holter invited the 5 other members of the ensemble to join her in this fray with their clamour of musical instruments – from violin and double bass, to percussion, to trumpets and synths, and bagpipes. Filled with sparse flashes of percussion and franticly quivering strings in the backdrop, ‘Turn the Light On’ launched Holter’s vocals into another range and seemingly another dimension. From the set’s first couple of songs alone, I could easily understand the ethos behind Holter’s claim of making herself “a work of art” – the sheer magnitude and diversity of her voice swelling in such intricately deepening instrumentation was unique to say the very least.
With her setlist mainly consisted of her previous 2 LPs, Have You In My Wilderness and Aviary, the striking difference between her ‘safer’, art-poppier feel of the former LP acted as a slight detraction from the aforementioned feels of Aviary. If anything, older tracks such as ‘Silhouette’ and ‘Feel You’ offered pertinent respites within this vast out-of-body experience of a set – featuring much more rigid time signatures and regular percussive beats, adherent to a more muted tone of the overall instrumentation.
These more accessible tracks, however, soon gave way to the more astral and spacious tones of Aviary, reverting back to tracks such as ‘Colligere’ which reinforced this blanket of trance which swept over the crowd: there’s ambience, and then there’s ambience. Consisting of such beautiful synth and violin sections intertwining in a harmonious landscape, Holter’s voice fluttered throughout, often emanating some diminishing electronic bleeps peppered amongst it all. The heavily-laden synth chords and slower tempo offered a brooding, medieval-esque tone to the following track, ‘I Would Rather See’. The small intricacies of adding never-ending reverberation to the percussive element undoubtedly helped continue this state of ethereal trance for the audience swimming amongst this larger-than-life sonic realm conjured by Holter and co.
Leading into the latter half of the set, these talented set of musicians conducted a further array of ambient-tinged, neo-classical music with such tracks as ‘Words I Heard’ and ‘I Shall Love (1 and 2)’. Offering more of the same, the slow and gradual crescendo from the lighter tones of the former track, to the brass-heavy latter tracks, can only act as a testament to depth and breadth to Holter’s musical landscape. Not only is she and her 5 ensemble partners able to touch sweetly upon the lighter tones, incorporating a cacophony of strings and synths, but also the more immersive, baroque-esque tones which bask amongst the dense cries of “I shall love” from Holter.
Holter’s ‘quick’ and ‘love-related’ encore, extending to 15 minutes, began oxymoronically with the slow-burner final track from Aviary, ‘Why Sad Song’. The eventual sonic crescendo ultimately offered a multi-dimensional experience: floating strings, twinkling percussion, and droning trumpets swirling around Holter’s repeated refrain of “Why sad song? / Call why I’m begging for forgiveness”. Finally, after this odyssean set of an hour and three quarters, Holter arrived at the final track of the night taken from her penultimate LP, ‘Betsy On The Roof’. The ballad-esque feel to this particular track proved a slight tangent from the majority of the evening’s proceedings of Aviary, however, the delicate piano-driven nature to it all inevitably left the audience feeling a certain resonation with Holter’s final sentence, “I can’t remember the words to say”.
It can be said with a fair degree of confidence that Julia Holter’s show was unlike any other show I’d seen in a while. Given the exponential talent across the 6 musicians on stage, they all brought an improvisatory sense of energy and charisma to their music, conjuring one of my most favoured albums of this year, Aviary. Whilst my one personal drawback may stem from the jolting difference between her earlier discography and more current music, as well as some slight sound mixing issues, Holter has ultimately proved herself as force to reckon with inside of her unique neo-classical, baroque-pop genres. One can only hope that, unlike her lyrical symbolism of aviaries, she can continue to spread her musical wings and soar to the heights of notoriety as a significant and influential composer, conductor, and avant-garde musician.
8.5/10
Comments