Into the wilderness piano full#
Into the wilderness piano series#

Holter lingers over words just long enough to suggest secrets, and to render musical patterns anew.

‘Silhouette’ shuffles and slinks forth coyly, before climbing to a crescendo of keys and swirling, overlapping utterances. On ‘How Long?’, Holter deepens her voice and sings slowly amidst a developing chamber of sound, pulling away in the second part as the accompaniment halts and introduces the reverberating refrain, ‘All the people run from the horizon’. A distant bass is dolorously plucked. It is a tantalising and ardent evocation, and following this urban opening – in this sense a continuation of Loud City Song – Holter relocates for the wilderness of the album’s title, which is the coast. Warm and wet, Holter is both the demure woman in her raincoat, waiting patiently with fluttering chest for a glimpse of love, and the mysterious soul of the song’s myth. ‘Feel You’ opens out and surges with strings before immersing itself again, closing with a spoken-word passage and a final return to the hook, ‘I see a flashing light / I’m blinded by it (the possibility) / It’s impossible to see / Who I’m waiting for / In my raincoat’. ‘Feel You’ opens Have You In My Wilderness with its turning clavinet and cooing, before Holter’s voice carries over resolute percussion with a suggestive account of a trip to Mexico City. Holter is joined for Have You In My Wilderness by her regular collaborator Cole Marsden Greif-Neill, who produced the record, and by a group of Los Angeles musicians including Christopher Votek on cello, Andrew Tholl on violin, Chris Speed on saxophone, Danny Meyer on saxophone and clarinet, Devin Hoff on bass, and Corey Fogel and Kenny Gilmore on percussion, most of whom also appeared on Loud City Song. But each offers something of its own story and follows its own momentum, ebbing and flowing between phrases, the stimulation of a specific moment and setting. These share certain themes and locales, the repeated imagery of the beach, of waves, and of swimming, and they are populated by lone figures, half-seen, the sites of uncertain relationships and brief dalliances, summoned from the still-present near-past.

Into the wilderness piano series#

But it eschews the narrative thrust characteristic of Tragedy and Loud City Song to emerge as a looser series of interconnected pieces. Have You In My Wilderness bears traces of Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, of Colette’s novella Chance Acquaintances, and of Scott Walker’s ballad ‘Duchess’.

Into the wilderness piano full#

So Holter’s art is full of the cinema and literature as much as it draws from other musical sources, and she has consistently cited illuminated manuscripts as an influence on her work, and pulled into the worlds of her songs lines by Colette, by Virginia Woolf and Frank O’Hara. Her first three albums were explicitly conceptual: Tragedy, built around the extended track ‘Goddess Eyes’ with its line ‘I can see you, but my eyes are not allowed to cry’, was based on Euripides Hippolytus Ekstasis was compelled by the 1961 Alain Resnais/Alain Robbe-Grillet film Last Year at Marienbad and Loud City Song was inspired by the 1958 musical version of Gigi. It is that strange and captivating combination of elements: a classically-turned mind with a ready aptitude for the baroque or more delicately ornate, which at the same time tends towards music’s sharper edges, featuring drones and dissonances, and with oblique lyrics which serve as portals and frames. All of which does little more than to suggest that Holter is within a pantheon of women at the forefront of modern music.īut if there is one musician with whom Holter most closely shares, it is John Cale. She may be considered alongside Laurel Halo, Holly Herndon, and Julianna Barwick, all hardworking female musicians who sculpt complex, multi-layered sounds, with ambient textures set against moments of harsh discord and more loosely, Björk, Grimes, and Joanna Newsom, all of whose reaches extend far beyond music, ranging widely across the arts and still summoning with each new album a set sensations highly personal and discrete. In recent years, perhaps the best counterpart to Have You In My Wilderness is Grouper’s Ruins – which in its stripped-down way, focuses equally on the piano and the sea. Holter is without a contemporary: her compositions are uniquely exacting and esoteric. With her vocals vividly inhabiting the centre of her songs, she bounds briskly in the foreground and fearlessly comes in close, sometimes pulling sharply away from one side or with fingers that fail to clasp, but with a glance that fixes and stays.

Four albums into her career, Have You In My Wilderness is Julia Holter’s most impassioned work to date, brightly tender and intimately confrontational.