Aviary by Julia Holter [Domino]
Written for WSOE 89.3's "4 Albums to Transcend To"
“Julia Holter has lost her mind,” the Quietus review of Julia Holter’s new album Aviarybegins. I will say, Aviary isn’t an easy listen, it’s an otherworldly 90 minute album that takes the listener through every sound, mood, and feeling that could be bashing around someone’s head. In fact, the idea for the album title, Aviary, originated because, as Holter told DIY,
“Memory was a theme that kept coming up. Memories that emerge in the mind that get in the way of your own thoughts. I started noticing there was wings imagery, birds.”
The title was solidified with an Etel Adnan short story from her 2009 book, Master Of The Eclipse. A line in the story reads: “I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds.” In our case with Holter, we’re also in that aviary, those birds just happen to be Holter’s memories, anger, restlessness, joy and fear.
As a verb, transcend means to “be or go beyond the range or limits of (something abstract, typically a conceptual field or division).” To me, this makes Aviary a perfect album to transcend to, as it lets us go beyond our own consciousness and become increasingly aware of someone else’s thoughts, memories, emotions, and experience. Julia Holter’s reality seems just a little beyond ours, from the way her songs are structured to the way she creates the sound of Aviary. In the album opener, “Turn the Light On,” Holter wanted to be able to “swim in a sea of synthesizers,” which doesn’t feel like it should be possible to complete but she gives that experience to the listeners so successfully, so perfectly.
Aviary opens with the restless “Turn the Light On,” where Holter’s voice powers through a torrent of drums and violins and the listener is immediately drawn in. To start with one of the slower songs like “Voce Simul” or “Colligere” wouldn’t have had the same effect. Not that the songs aren’t gorgeous and intimate in themselves, they are, but that’s the point. Holter doesn’t give everything away right away on this album. We even see this in the idea that the song “I Shall Love 2” comes before “I Shall Love 1,” almost like Holter wants to give listeners the edited and rewritten version of the song before diving into the rawer, messier emotions portrayed on part one, emotions like longing and waiting for someone to come over that might never make it.
The album closer, “Why Sad Song,” isn’t a new song at all but actually a Julia Holter song that’s been floating around the internet for about seven years. The song is based on a phonetic transcription of “Kyema Mimin” by Nepalese Buddhist nun Ani Choying Drolma & jazz musician Steve Tibbetts. It seems perfect to me that she would end with something we already know, but now she’s given it to us on her terms. The song is made up of disjointed phrases about the passing of time, giving, taking and forgiveness. The song is fragmented like the way memory is stored in the brain, bringing us right back to the basing thoughts of the album title.
Aviary certainly feels like smashing around inside of Julia Holter’s head but throughout the album, she got into mine too. I found myself emotional over some tracks, smiling at others and just stopping dead in my tracks for quite a few of them. The powerful feelings of hope and anger and joy and sadness bleed together to create Aviary, and as Julia Holter belts, screams and soothes, whatever mess we’re in, we can take some comfort in this album. A phrase I like to use a lot (that I got from a professor) is “specificity breeds universality.” Usually, this means the more specific of an experience a writer writes about, the more an audience relates. Julia Holter actually doesn’t do this with experience, instead she structures the most specific words and sounds to tap into the most specific emotions for the audience. It feels completely otherworldly and yet grounded in something so authentic that it makes the album, yes, transcendent. Sometimes being too in your head is a kind of hell, but Julia Holter gives it to us like a gift. An unconventional gift, yes, but a beautiful one nonetheless.