Julia Holter writes music out of joint, a mixture of times, genres and styles as unsettling as it is beautiful. St. John’s church in Hackney seems like a fairly fitting setting for a woman and a band intent on channelling choral music as much as operatic post-rock and trad-jazz. The five take the stage to perversely open with the closing song from last year’s full length, Bright City Song - ‘City Appearing’. “Bright blue flames under my fingers” sets the tone for the night, as Holter closes her eyes and stares into the lights, her keyboard strokes dancing around the nodding and bouncing of the various string players in her band.
Her set tonight is a combination of her two previous albums and her latest, recorded not in a studio but in her bedroom. As vocoders double and triple her voice, and she switches from quiet, Badalamenti free-jazz breakdown, and literal breakdown, horns, drums and strings batter against each other like the interlude in a David Lynch film. The screams of the saxophone in the crowded church at St. John’s make this more of an operatic experience than your standard gig. The horns of ‘Horns Surrounding Me’ mimic the experience of being aggressively surrounded, in Holter’s world, by photographers, in our world, LITERALLY BY HORNS.
It’s not difficult to tell that Julia Holter writes her lyrics before she writes her songs. The music is a brush stroke around a story, but at the same time the music seems to mimic the story. As Holter sings ‘In The Green Wild’, a song about escaping the city, the instruments cool and soften as Holter walks towards the sea. There are no choruses here, and operatic jazz parts mesh with delicate, choral verses. The majority of Holter’s work begins with a story that gradually morphs into discordant jazz, vocals and piano that ramp up into a Thelonius Monk-style freak out. The band plays ‘Marienbad’ (tentatively introduced by Holter with “There is a garden here [outside the venue]… and this song is about a garden”), which employs all the devices of so-called ‘post-rock’, vocal-less-ly folding in on itself and becoming (appropriately, as it refers to Alain Resnais’ film rather than the place), a kind of jazz-drone.
There are times during the gig when all the reverb and cello make you think Holter might be about to launch into the Titanic theme tune, but then the keys drop, the drums start and things become a fair bit darker. Julia Holter is all about time slippage. Just as her entire first album (like the nouveau roman, post-war) re-appropriates ancient Greek myth to become the story of a woman living in New York (“this one is a really new one and a really old one at the same time”, she quips), last year’s Loud City Song was a re-telling of Minnelli’s 1958 musical comedy, Gigi. Her first LP re-appropriated the classics - specifically Euripides’ Hippolytus - to make them say something new. Gigi does the same, but with a post-war musical rather than a Greek tragedy. Holter’s songs are also based around “trying to make yourself a work of art”, and watching her live, one is struck with the idea that Julia Holter is actually descending into her texts, speaking to her audience “whether it’s my voice or someone else’s” (as she told Quietus last year). Her second album was called Ekstasis, Greek for ‘ecstasy’, which although colloquially means ‘happiness’, literally (in Greek) means ‘outside of your own body’. Holter has apparently written an album around Gigi because she was fascinated with it as a child. This is nostalgia, which in Greek means ‘the pain of coming home’. That sums up the experience of watching Julia Holter pretty well.
