Julia Holter - Tragedy

You can probably count on one thumb the number of albums opening with a three minute sound collage of foghorns, strings, operatic samples and periods of silence which also have a press release with the word 'pop' in it. After dazzling critics with her second record Ekstasis, Julia Holter has re-released debut LP Tragedy, available on CD for the first time, allowing a larger audience to discover that the opaque experimentation of Ekstasis had actually been dialed down in comparison to her slightly under-the-radar debut. Based on a thousands-of-year-old Greek play by Euripedes (in a much less-definable, more-abstract way than something like Anais Mitchell's Hadestown) Tragedy proves to be a more demanding (and engrossing) work than her more widely lauded follow up, but entirely worthy of the wider exposure granted to it by this re-release.

With Ekstasis, Holter found ways of distilling her limitless visions and potentially alienating ambitions into digestible (or at least distinct) building blocks, but Tragedy's translation from vinyl to compact disc isn't quite so comfortable. Extended passages of ambience, drone, muttering and silences stretch between the recognisably 'pop' moments, interludes and digressions which meld Tragedy into an indivisible whole, well suited to the listen-in-one-go experience of vinyl, not so much to the shuffle of iPods or the arbitrary track divisions of CD. Take the period of the record de-marked as 'Celebration' – a twelve minute piece beginning with a collection of barely connected vignettes before finally blooming into a gorgeous flower of harmony and horn several minutes into its running time. Despite the promotional effort made to isolate a three-minutes version of 'Try To Make Yourself A Work Of Art', none of this is exactly ready for radio, nor easy to shoehorn onto a mix CD.

Having established that you're in this for the long haul or not at-all (and preferably with headphones, in the dark), you'll be rewarded to discover that Tragedy is a singularly incredible piece of work, entirely deserving of the hour of undivided attention it demands of you. Take 'The Falling Age' – a track which begins as a gorgeously direct vocal melody, before organically mutating into a seven minute drone piece, weaving string samples and piano into the depths of a deceptively featureless soundscape. It's a panoramic and engulfing force which hijacks your entire self if you let it, but making little sense at all as a background soundtrack in the kitchen or the office. It's all or nothing. With a cursory listen, you won't forgive the minutes-long stretch of ambience and bar-room chatter which ushers in 'So Lilies', but the concentrated listener will be exulted by the injection of melody which eventually burrows out of the greyscale.

One of the most exciting and engrossing things about Tragedy is the near-impossibility of isolating the nucleus of these tracks; the starting points from which Holter constructed these pieces. You can't listen to these songs and think to yourself "ah, she obviously built this passage on top of that rolling piano progression" or "ah, she obviously took that underlying rhythm as a starting point and expanded from there". The centres of these songs completely elude you, the entire record standing as a bafflingly indivisible whole, offering no clues as to how Holter began to approach such a wide reaching and ambitious work. And since there's no recognisable centre to these tracks, nor is there an identifiable centre to Holter herself, being impossible to say with conviction whether she's a drone artist gone pop, or a pop artist gone drone; a classical composer gone rhythmic, or a noise merchant gone classical.

It's this continual elusiveness to Holter and her album which makes it so engrossing, overpowering and downright impressive; having no earthly idea how she actually fucking made this. Of course, there's a couple of emperor’s new clothes moments during a full hour of something so lofty (although, the vocoder of 'Godess Eyes' being faintly distracting is the only one which immediately leaps to mind) but Tragedy stands pretty much unblemished as a fascinating and possessive hour of sound – an arrestingly assured debut whose execution frequently rises to meet its ambition, which is to say that Tragedy operates on a very high conceptual level indeed.