In a sense, Julia Holter’s new album, Aviary, began with a question. The 33-year-old musician and composer stumbled across an intriguing query in a novel by the Lebanese-American writer and painter Etel Adnan, who was paraphrasing the German philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin: “What are poets for in these destitute times?” This resonated with Holter, who’d be struggling to figure out how to make meaningful work in an era of crisis.
But you could also say that Aviary began more simply, with Holter sitting down at her synths with a microphone and simply jamming until she lost track of time. Improvising and knowing she could work the kinks out later, she focused her efforts on just getting it all down on tape—asking questions with no answers, and finding answers for questions she hadn’t even begun to ask yet.
The album came together in the space between those two points, and it soon spiraled outward as she began shaping her improvisations into more fully realized compositions, assisted by longtime accomplices like Kenny Gilmore and Cole MGN. The results coalesced into her most audacious album yet: fifteen songs over the course of 90 minutes, a cottony cacophony of strings, synths, voice, horns, percussion, and even bagpipes. Medieval counterpoints shatter into icy, digitally treated vocals; sad synth melodies inspired by Vangelis’ Blade Runner score alternate with billowing choirs, ’60s pop refrains, and passages of dueling reeds, shrill as nails on a chalkboard.
Aviary’s lyrical inspirations are no less vast. On 2012’s Ekstasis, Holter quoted Virginia Woolf, Frank O’Hara, and Euripides, while the following year’s Loud City Song modeled itself after Colette’s 1944 novella Gigi as well as its 1958 film adaptation. But here she casts an even wider net, enlisting classic poets through the ages—Dante, Pushkin, Sappho—to help flesh out a flickering dreamworld full of cryptic imagery. Her writing has never been more vivid than in stanzas like this one, from “Words I Heard”:
“There’s so much intensity—I mean, it’s just a lot,” admits Holter, when I speak to her over Skype one day in late October. But the album’s brilliance, and Holter’s own genius, lies precisely in her willingness to tackle the chaos head-on, in terms both bracingly dissonant and breathtakingly beautiful.
Julia Holter: Actually, I didn’t know it was going to be very big. I kind of was letting it be what it was. It sounds a little precious, but it’s true. I came into this record taking a playful approach, and that meant following the song wherever it goes. If it goes down some meandering thing that takes a whole extra minute, I just have to let it do that.
The last couple of records were more made in the studio, and this record is basically like a studio sandwich: it started in my room, then we went to the studio, and then it ended in my room. I recorded all the vocals and synths myself at home, so it’s a very intimate record in that way. It feels very much like what I’ve done for a long time, but I feel like I pushed it in more directions than I’d ever gone.
Two years ago, I didn’t really know what I was doing in my life. I was creatively confused. We had been touring a lot. We’d had the presidential election while we were on tour. It was a very weird time, and I didn’t feel comfortable in my own writing. I didn’t know what to do so I just sat down and started improvising on synth—maybe 20 minutes, 40 minutes, a kind of cathartic experience. There would be moments I would get really into it, and I started pulling from recordings of those moments [for the album]. Then there are tracks like “Words I Heard,” which is all written out. That came from those improvisations, and then I improvised an arrangement over it and transcribed everything I’d done on synth for violins. I was really inspired by the way Alice Coltrane uses strings and synths on Universal Consciousness. To me, what’s special with this record was just going the extra step to think about what I really want.
I like to collect texts and participate in what I think of as the constant process of translation that is music or art. I think we’re always borrowing from each other. Everything’s passed down. One of the tracks is called “Colligere”—that means “collecting.”
Sound comes easily to me: I sit down and I just play stuff and get into it, and it’s not a very intellectual process. Text is really different. I struggle with language in music, because it’s kind of a contradiction. On the last record, Have You in My Wilderness, I was consciously trying not to do the collecting thing, but it’s really fun to work with other texts. I honestly don’t do it very consciously. I happened to be reading a book that resonated with what I was thinking about at the time. This is the Etel Adnan book, Master of the Eclipse, which poses the question, “What are poets for in these destitute times?” That was a question I was wondering.
I was interested in medieval stuff too, I was interested in Blade Runner—I was really into the Vangelis score when working on the record. I was reading Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory, about how memory functioned in the Middle Ages. Memory is something I’m deeply interested in. The Etel Adnan book talks about how memories stalk you, and that really resonated with me. Early on she mentions, “I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds.” What I’ve realized is that there are these connections in my mind between extremes: beautiful sounds of birds, shrieking sounds of birds, beautiful memories, terrible memories. And in the Mary Carruthers book, she talks about how birdcages were seen in the Middle Ages as a storehouse for memories. And that’s where_ Aviary_ all made sense to me: These birds that are like memories flying around, everything kind of happening at once.
Absolutely. I wanted to be as raw on this record as I could, because of that. I don’t know if that’s the right aesthetic or the right choice, form-wise. I just did what made sense, and I feel like it’s very much a response. One thing I’ve come to realize is that I think all work is political, inherently, just like all work is inherently personal. No one asks me this anymore, thank god, but people would always be like, “Why isn’t your work more personal?”
Right, like mantras or something? I think cathartic is what I was going for. Trance-like. I was trying to summon something inside. I think “Les Jeux to You” is kind of like that in the middle section. It’s almost a conceptually blank expression of sounds. That song feels very me to me. With that song, I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere with what I’m trying to do.
I know, I admit I like it too. I tell myself that a lot. A lot of this record is me talking to myself and asking myself questions, and that’s something I’m really focused on these days. I have to be a better listener. We all have to be better listeners.
California’s a big state, but what I know is Los Angeles. I’ve lived here for most of my life. L.A. is not very definable. That’s why I like it, because it’s confusing. It has problems. We have a horrible homeless problem. We have a lot of economic disparity, and it’s getting worse. But there’s something really beautiful about L.A. in that it’s sort of ugly. This duality is something I think relates to the record. There’s a track called “Everyday Is an Emergency”—I love the sound of those reedy instruments going [mimics reedy squawking]. To me that’s like heaven. It’s hard to listen to but it’s beautiful too, and that’s what I love so much. This duality of beauty and ugliness, this constant jumping back and forth, feels very L.A. There’s definitely that duality of, like, what is good, what is bad, what is consonant, what is dissonant? What is beautiful, what is ugly? Beautiful memories, ugly memories, beautiful birds, shrieking birds, beautiful bagpipe, shrieking bagpipe—it’s all connected.
