| Julianna Barwick | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Louisiana, Brooklyn USA |
| Genres | New Age Ambient Ethereal Wave |
| Years active | 2009–present |
| Labels | Asthmatic Kitty |
| Website | Julianna Barwick's website |
Julianna Barwick is an American musician who was born in Louisiana and raised in Brooklyn. Her music is built around multiple loops and layers of her voice. Barwick, who credits a rural, church choir upbringing for her unique sound, begins most tracks with a single phrase or refrain, then uses a loop station and the occasional piano or percussive instrument to build the song into a swirling mass of lush, ambient folk. She released her first two collections of songs, the full-length Sanguine and the EP Florine, in 2009 and 2010, respectively, before issuing her Asthmatic Kitty debut, The Magic Place, in 2011.Her song anjos is used as the background score for the recent Levis "Go Forth" Ad Campaign.[1]
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According to the Allmusic she was influenced by artists like Cocteau Twins and Björk however music critics linked her to the most successful New Age musician Enya in their reviews like MusicOMH[2] and Pitchfork.[3] Allmusic linked her music to Artists like Harold Budd, Brian Eno's ambient works, Grouper and How to Dress Well.[4]
Julianna Barwick wove tapestries of looped ethereal vocals on the mini-album Sanguine. 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 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), 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.
Barwick started working on her album in mid 2010 and in early 2011 the album released by Asthmatic Kitty Records. The album was under New Age music and Ambient and it was well received by music critics[5] and also ranked as #35 of "The Best Music of 2011 So Far" in Metacritic.[6] In an interview she talked more about album:
"The Magic Place was a tree on our farm. It was in the back pasture. It was one tree that grew up, down and around. You had to crawl in and once you were inside, it was like there were different rooms, and you could actually lay in the branches. We named it 'The Magic Place' because it really was magical—especially for a kid... and that's how I feel about my life right now—without trying to sound too hippy dippy or cosmic, this year has definitely been a magical one."[7]
she was also one of the acts in Pitchfork Music Festival of 2011 on day 2.