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Louisiana-based Julianna Barwick wove tapestries of
looped ethereal vocals on the mini-album
Sanguine (2006).
The nine untitled vignettes
sound like snippets of
Enya
wed to eerie instrumental and electronic sounds, but the whole is so warped
and dilated to evoke something halfway between
a female counterpart to
David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name and yodeling folk music.
Some of them create a symphony of
ghostly echoes and galactic lullabies
(notably the fourth untitled one,
Red Tit Warbler
and Sanguine), while others (notably
Dancing With Friends)
are inspired by
childplays and ethnic chants, like a hippie version of
Meredith Monk's lieder.
The arrangements were relatively harmless on the first mini-album.
The EP Florine (Florid, 2009), instead, added the instrumental
dimension; and each of the six songs is significantly longer than any of
the debut's songs.
Anjos
employs the technique of minimalist repetition of
simple melodic patterns (of keyboards) to create a deeply spiritual experience.
The vocal polyphony of Choose is equally intricate and dense, with
murky percussion setting the pace.
The lazy litany Sunlight Heaven returns to the ecstatic hippie
transcendence,
and The Highest builds up until it resembles an Indian hymn,
while the
haunting spectral multi-layered howl of Cloudbank is
almost an abstract remix of Cocteau Twins' vocalist Elizabeth Fraser.
The Magic Place (Asthmatic Kitty, 2011) is an a-cappella tour de force.
The angelic overdubbed chanting of Envelop is the overture for the
anthemic, iridescent crescendo of White Flag.
The Magic Place emits Enya-like waves of alien breathing, pulsing
towards nothingness, an art of reverbs and loops that
Cloak sculpts into limping piano figures and
Vow embeds in tinkling musical raindrops.
Far from being only an ethereal meditation, the album includes moments of
simple meandering in the minds of ordinary women, like
Keep Up The Good Work that comes through as
a remix of voices picked up in a square, or
Prizewinning, that marches along as if documenting a journey of sorts.
Flown closes the album with the most austere and convent-like
atmosphere.
This work represents the moment when psychedelic music loses its psychedelic
quality, and avantgarde vocal music becomes ordinary vocal music, and
female singer-songwriting becomes abstract soundpainting but still grounded in
highly personal experience.
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