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Music

Julianna Barwick Chooses Darkness

A fire and some time alone fueled the Brooklyn-based composer's 'Will,' one of the year's best ambient albums.
Zia Anger

All photos by Zia Anger/Courtesy of Pitch Perfect PR

Julianna Barwick has run into a bit of bad luck lately. Walking around New York's Museum of Modern Art on a March afternoon, she doesn't say this, but wears it on her face—or, well, her foot. The composer and singer—who's sporting an otherwise inelaborate white blouse/black skirt ensemble—is hampered by some unwieldy footwear today: a walking boot she's saddled with for another six days following an ice skating incident several weeks ago. It was the Oklahoma-raised musician's first time out on a rink, and everything appeared to go fine. But the next day, she woke up feeling waves of pain that wouldn't subside. She soon discovered she'd broken her foot.

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So on the day of the announcement of her fourth full-length album, Will, she's forced, limping, to gingerly edge around a dancer wearing bejeweled grey jeans lying on the lobby staircase (part of a strange, dystopian performance piece by choreographer Maria Hassabi called PLASTIC). She chuckles—presumably at the inconvenience of having to step around such a roadblock while injured—but pauses for a moment to marvel at the endurance and core strength it'd take to move incrementally between contortions over the course of a whole day. Though she's made a name for herself on her effortlessly ephemeral music, Barwick's willing to laugh her way through a struggle as long as something positive comes out of it—which is perhaps why she lightheartedly relates another of the misfortunes she dealt while making the record: the fire.

It happened early on in a recording process that Barwick describes as "disjointed" by design. She worked in three different studios in three different locales, starting at a friend's place near Woodstock, New York in February 2015. With the exception of a past stint in Iceland working with Alex Somers (a Sigur Rós collaborator and the longtime partner of that band's Jónsi Birgisson) for her last album, Nepenthe, she'd always worked quietly and alone. She thought she'd find some peace again upstate, but the experience wasn't quite what she imagined.

"It ended up being a really bad idea, because the novelty and romance of that wears off really fast," she explains, sipping an overpriced and undersized can of Diet Coke in one of the museum's cafes. "After day two, I miss people. I want to have dinner with somebody. I was taking hour-long walks everyday, just trying to fast-forward the experience." She pauses, offers a sly smile. "And I almost burned the house down."

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The pipes in the kitchen had frozen and in an attempt to thaw them, Barwick trained a heat gun upon them, just like her friend had shown her. She left it alone for a moment, heard a strange noise; then, without warning, the whole underside of the kitchen sink was ablaze. Smoke filled the room; flames crawled up the wall. A hose burst, sending water spraying wildly around the room. Understandably, she panicked. "I was running up and down the stairs filling buckets with water," she says, still laughing out of disbelief. "I've never had a crisis like that in my life. It was so insane and intense and I was alone."

The house ended up being ok, but the minor catastrophe only compounded her downcast headspace. She'd thought she'd come away from the week's trip without much usable material, but when she played it back later on, the experience had lent an appealingly off-balance edge to the recordings, her signature diaphanous vocal loops weighted down for the first time with a sort of itchy anxiousness. She'd finish up the record at Moog's studios in Asheville, North Carolina—where she utilized a piano that belonged to Sufjan Stevens (whose label Asthmatic Kitty incidentally released her breakout album, The Magic Place)—and Lisbon, Portugal, a city where she'd played a handful of early shows, and which she considers sort of a home away from home. It's a more accomplished collection of tracks, with more compelling contrasts—inky synthesizer lines slightly clouding, for once, her dazed, wordless chorales. The heavenly sounds fully soar with a bit of hell for ballast.

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This new wrinkle is part of a creative evolution that began when Barwick was a kid back in Oklahoma. Her father was a youth pastor and her mother sang hymns around the house all the time, even participating in a contemporary Christian ensemble called the True Life Singers. "They wore matching outfits and did stuff you'd sing in church," Barwick explains. She was just "a teeny tiny kid," but she'd often join in with mom or make up her own tunes to sing to herself.

Early writeups of the singer's stolid compositions suggested that she was trained in church choirs, but that wasn't exactly the case. She was in choirs as kid, but for the most part, her interactions with music in a sacred context were less formal. Singing as part of the congregation on Sunday mornings, she grew to love the sound of men and women, young and old, coming together to make one sound in a reverberant space. "There's also a feeling of singing with people that's communal and powerful and moving," she says. Soon, she was walking around, and humming to the heavens at every free moment. "Even when church wasn't going on I'd wander into the auditorium and sing," She says. "I loved that echoing sound."

After finishing high school, Barwick moved to New York in May of 2001, when a friend who'd already decamped to the big city let her know she was looking for a roommate. After studying studio art at Hunter College—with a concentration in darkroom photography—she started making music of her own in earnest. She describes these early efforts humbly. She'd slop a lot of reverb on an electric guitar and her voice and "just jam out by myself with an amp at home." She played a few shows in this vein at the infamously grimy Lit Lounge and Glasshouse, an early iteration of the space that'd eventually become the now-shuttered Glasslands Gallery. But nothing really gelled until a few years later, when a friend gifted her a delay pedal with a looping function and she discovered that she could stack her improvised vocal melodies as high as the clouds.

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All photos by Zia Anger/Courtesy of Pitch Perfect PR

Julianna Barwick has run into a bit of bad luck lately. Walking around New York's Museum of Modern Art on a March afternoon, she doesn't say this, but wears it on her face—or, well, her foot. The composer and singer—who's sporting an otherwise inelaborate white blouse/black skirt ensemble—is hampered by some unwieldy footwear today: a walking boot she's saddled with for another six days following an ice skating incident several weeks ago. It was the Oklahoma-raised musician's first time out on a rink, and everything appeared to go fine. But the next day, she woke up feeling waves of pain that wouldn't subside. She soon discovered she'd broken her foot.

So on the day of the announcement of her fourth full-length album, Will, she's forced, limping, to gingerly edge around a dancer wearing bejeweled grey jeans lying on the lobby staircase (part of a strange, dystopian performance piece by choreographer Maria Hassabi called PLASTIC). She chuckles—presumably at the inconvenience of having to step around such a roadblock while injured—but pauses for a moment to marvel at the endurance and core strength it'd take to move incrementally between contortions over the course of a whole day. Though she's made a name for herself on her effortlessly ephemeral music, Barwick's willing to laugh her way through a struggle as long as something positive comes out of it—which is perhaps why she lightheartedly relates another of the misfortunes she dealt while making the record: the fire.

It happened early on in a recording process that Barwick describes as "disjointed" by design. She worked in three different studios in three different locales, starting at a friend's place near Woodstock, New York in February 2015. With the exception of a past stint in Iceland working with Alex Somers (a Sigur Rós collaborator and the longtime partner of that band's Jónsi Birgisson) for her last album, Nepenthe, she'd always worked quietly and alone. She thought she'd find some peace again upstate, but the experience wasn't quite what she imagined.

"It ended up being a really bad idea, because the novelty and romance of that wears off really fast," she explains, sipping an overpriced and undersized can of Diet Coke in one of the museum's cafes. "After day two, I miss people. I want to have dinner with somebody. I was taking hour-long walks everyday, just trying to fast-forward the experience." She pauses, offers a sly smile. "And I almost burned the house down."

The pipes in the kitchen had frozen and in an attempt to thaw them, Barwick trained a heat gun upon them, just like her friend had shown her. She left it alone for a moment, heard a strange noise; then, without warning, the whole underside of the kitchen sink was ablaze. Smoke filled the room; flames crawled up the wall. A hose burst, sending water spraying wildly around the room. Understandably, she panicked. "I was running up and down the stairs filling buckets with water," she says, still laughing out of disbelief. "I've never had a crisis like that in my life. It was so insane and intense and I was alone."

The house ended up being ok, but the minor catastrophe only compounded her downcast headspace. She'd thought she'd come away from the week's trip without much usable material, but when she played it back later on, the experience had lent an appealingly off-balance edge to the recordings, her signature diaphanous vocal loops weighted down for the first time with a sort of itchy anxiousness. She'd finish up the record at Moog's studios in Asheville, North Carolina—where she utilized a piano that belonged to Sufjan Stevens (whose label Asthmatic Kitty incidentally released her breakout album, The Magic Place)—and Lisbon, Portugal, a city where she'd played a handful of early shows, and which she considers sort of a home away from home. It's a more accomplished collection of tracks, with more compelling contrasts—inky synthesizer lines slightly clouding, for once, her dazed, wordless chorales. The heavenly sounds fully soar with a bit of hell for ballast.

This new wrinkle is part of a creative evolution that began when Barwick was a kid back in Oklahoma. Her father was a youth pastor and her mother sang hymns around the house all the time, even participating in a contemporary Christian ensemble called the True Life Singers. "They wore matching outfits and did stuff you'd sing in church," Barwick explains. She was just "a teeny tiny kid," but she'd often join in with mom or make up her own tunes to sing to herself.

Early writeups of the singer's stolid compositions suggested that she was trained in church choirs, but that wasn't exactly the case. She was in choirs as kid, but for the most part, her interactions with music in a sacred context were less formal. Singing as part of the congregation on Sunday mornings, she grew to love the sound of men and women, young and old, coming together to make one sound in a reverberant space. "There's also a feeling of singing with people that's communal and powerful and moving," she says. Soon, she was walking around, and humming to the heavens at every free moment. "Even when church wasn't going on I'd wander into the auditorium and sing," She says. "I loved that echoing sound."

After finishing high school, Barwick moved to New York in May of 2001, when a friend who'd already decamped to the big city let her know she was looking for a roommate. After studying studio art at Hunter College—with a concentration in darkroom photography—she started making music of her own in earnest. She describes these early efforts humbly. She'd slop a lot of reverb on an electric guitar and her voice and "just jam out by myself with an amp at home." She played a few shows in this vein at the infamously grimy Lit Lounge and Glasshouse, an early iteration of the space that'd eventually become the now-shuttered Glasslands Gallery. But nothing really gelled until a few years later, when a friend gifted her a delay pedal with a looping function and she discovered that she could stack her improvised vocal melodies as high as the clouds.

Through Myspace, songs from a self-recorded 2006 CD-r called Sanguine made its way into the hands of Sergio Hydalgo, a Lisbon-based blogger and scene-figure who asked her to come to Portugal and play a few shows in late 2007. There she played a handful of sets, including a performance for Hydalgo's blog Ma Fama that Pitchfork reported on, and a chance opportunity to open for Dirty Projectors' Lisbon tour stop. "All this crazy stuff happened," she says wistfully. "I had a really, really strong connection with Lisbon and its people. That's where I got my start."

After that, things took off. Her music caught the ear of Sufjan's label. He lent her his studio to craft the recordings that'd end up becoming 2010's The Magic Place. The success of that record spawned a friendship with Jonsi and Alex, the latter of whom would play a crucial role in engineering her 2013 album Nepenthe. Back in New York, though, she wasn't playing grimy bars anymore but returning to church, this time to play shows.

Barwick swears her music isn't explicitly religious, but footage from a special 2013 performance at the Upper East Side's sterling cathedral, the Judson Memorial Church, makes it even harder to avoid sacred interpretation of her music. Inside the cavernous space—with talented friends like Sharon Van Etten and Taraka and Nimai Larson of Prince Rama enlisted to handle a handful of the many vocal threads that weave through her songs—Barwick's compositions gleamed less like hymns and more like the heady shimmer of a pipe organ.

Barwick, like a certain higher power in the sky, never gives you more than you can handle.

Will doesn't exactly feel like those early works, likely because of the fractured nature of its recording process. The compositions are still largely wordless, or lyrics are deliberately glossed over—even a guest spot from Mas Ysa's Thomas Arsenault finds English turned into abstract shapes through studio trickery. But this time around she wrings a little more synthetic magic from her stated insistence on incorporating new instruments into her pieces. "Wist" layers her voice atop of a totemic synth bassline from her time in Asheville; the piano lines on "Big Hollow" are as wonderfully depressed as the title (and her time in Woodstock) might suggest. "See Know" closes the album with a celebratory synthesizer sequence and clattering drum work that feels like her sunnier times. It's gloomier than past records, but it's mostly self-assured, each track centered on emotional potential of the human voice when it's looped to infinity.

In the museum's sculpture garden, Barwick conjures the words of a British pop star to explain the unifying principle that guides her work. "I'm about to quote Adele," she says with a smirk. "She said recently, 'I know if one of my songs doesn't make me cry, it's no good.'" It's a feeling that Barwick is familiar with: "Ever since I was a kid, I'd walk around and start crying from my own pretty song. It still happens."

A little over a month after our first meeting, Barwick is back at MoMA, this time to perform material from Will for the first time in New York. The accompanying projection by the photographer Matthew Brandt describes her work better than most critics can: abstract images are bright, vibrant and largely static until they're disrupted by outside forces. Tar oozes into the frame, mold grows in a time lapse, or a series of photos burn to ash, repeatedly. Something compelling can come out of letting the darkness win, if only for a moment.

As she launches into the songs, layered vocal loops and hand-played synthesizer lines billow outward and upward. In the past, the right simile would've been cumulonimbus clouds, but this haze feels decidedly like smoke. Lines coalesce and collide in a familiarly hazy way, but the odd moment of dissonance or minor chord suggestion makes the whole thing feel a little more sinister, like you might start to cough and splutter if you spend too much time soaking in these sounds. But just when it feels like too much, there's a breath, a sigh, and respite. To bastardize an oft-misquoted verse from the apostle Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Barwick, like a certain higher power in the sky, never gives you more than you can handle.

Soaking in the abstractions, I'm reminded of something she told me a few weeks earlier, sitting in the museum's sculpture garden. Barwick was recounting her last trip to MoMA, a chance occasion to play piano with Yoko Ono in August of 2015 as part of the art-world icon's retrospective show. Casting a glance in the direction of her broken foot—just minutes after she recounted the dodgy headspace and near-catastrophic fire at the heart of her new album—she tells me that in spite of all the bad, she still thinks she's pretty fortunate. "I've already gotten extremely lucky with crazy awesome things, like the challenge of playing with Yoko." she says with a sigh. "Life is really long."

Julianna Barwick's 'Will' is out today on Dead Oceans. She'll be playing at Moogfest in Durham, North Carolina from May 19-22 as part of a longer tour in support of the record.

Colin Joyce is THUMP's Managing Editor. You can find him on Twitter.

Through Myspace, songs from a self-recorded 2006 CD-r called Sanguine made its way into the hands of Sergio Hydalgo, a Lisbon-based blogger and scene-figure who asked her to come to Portugal and play a few shows in late 2007. There she played a handful of sets, including a performance for Hydalgo's blog Ma Fama that Pitchfork reported on, and a chance opportunity to open for Dirty Projectors' Lisbon tour stop. "All this crazy stuff happened," she says wistfully. "I had a really, really strong connection with Lisbon and its people. That's where I got my start."

After that, things took off. Her music caught the ear of Sufjan's label. He lent her his studio to craft the recordings that'd end up becoming 2010's The Magic Place. The success of that record spawned a friendship with Jonsi and Alex, the latter of whom would play a crucial role in engineering her 2013 album Nepenthe. Back in New York, though, she wasn't playing grimy bars anymore but returning to church, this time to play shows.

Barwick swears her music isn't explicitly religious, but footage from a special 2013 performance at the Upper East Side's sterling cathedral, the Judson Memorial Church, makes it even harder to avoid sacred interpretation of her music. Inside the cavernous space—with talented friends like Sharon Van Etten and Taraka and Nimai Larson of Prince Rama enlisted to handle a handful of the many vocal threads that weave through her songs—Barwick's compositions gleamed less like hymns and more like the heady shimmer of a pipe organ.

Advertisement

Barwick, like a certain higher power in the sky, never gives you more than you can handle.

Will doesn't exactly feel like those early works, likely because of the fractured nature of its recording process. The compositions are still largely wordless, or lyrics are deliberately glossed over—even a guest spot from Mas Ysa's Thomas Arsenault finds English turned into abstract shapes through studio trickery. But this time around she wrings a little more synthetic magic from her stated insistence on incorporating new instruments into her pieces. "Wist" layers her voice atop of a totemic synth bassline from her time in Asheville; the piano lines on "Big Hollow" are as wonderfully depressed as the title (and her time in Woodstock) might suggest. "See Know" closes the album with a celebratory synthesizer sequence and clattering drum work that feels like her sunnier times. It's gloomier than past records, but it's mostly self-assured, each track centered on emotional potential of the human voice when it's looped to infinity.

In the museum's sculpture garden, Barwick conjures the words of a British pop star to explain the unifying principle that guides her work. "I'm about to quote Adele," she says with a smirk. "She said recently, 'I know if one of my songs doesn't make me cry, it's no good.'" It's a feeling that Barwick is familiar with: "Ever since I was a kid, I'd walk around and start crying from my own pretty song. It still happens."

Advertisement

A little over a month after our first meeting, Barwick is back at MoMA, this time to perform material from Will for the first time in New York. The accompanying projection by the photographer Matthew Brandt describes her work better than most critics can: abstract images are bright, vibrant and largely static until they're disrupted by outside forces. Tar oozes into the frame, mold grows in a time lapse, or a series of photos burn to ash, repeatedly. Something compelling can come out of letting the darkness win, if only for a moment.

As she launches into the songs, layered vocal loops and hand-played synthesizer lines billow outward and upward. In the past, the right simile would've been cumulonimbus clouds, but this haze feels decidedly like smoke. Lines coalesce and collide in a familiarly hazy way, but the odd moment of dissonance or minor chord suggestion makes the whole thing feel a little more sinister, like you might start to cough and splutter if you spend too much time soaking in these sounds. But just when it feels like too much, there's a breath, a sigh, and respite. To bastardize an oft-misquoted verse from the apostle Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Barwick, like a certain higher power in the sky, never gives you more than you can handle.

Soaking in the abstractions, I'm reminded of something she told me a few weeks earlier, sitting in the museum's sculpture garden. Barwick was recounting her last trip to MoMA, a chance occasion to play piano with Yoko Ono in August of 2015 as part of the art-world icon's retrospective show. Casting a glance in the direction of her broken foot—just minutes after she recounted the dodgy headspace and near-catastrophic fire at the heart of her new album—she tells me that in spite of all the bad, she still thinks she's pretty fortunate. "I've already gotten extremely lucky with crazy awesome things, like the challenge of playing with Yoko." she says with a sigh. "Life is really long."

Julianna Barwick's 'Will' is out today on Dead Oceans. She'll be playing at Moogfest in Durham, North Carolina from May 19-22 as part of a longer tour in support of the record.

Colin Joyce is THUMP's Managing Editor. You can find him on Twitter.