Album released on Domino Records, March 22nd 2024

My name is David Jeffrey, I’m a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Boston, MA currently in my senior year of undergrad. I created the jazz fusion recording project Orbit Farm in 2018. One of my current career goals is to not only write and produce original music, but to also create and foster positive and forward-thinking conversation around contemporary music as well as its niches, genres, and artists.

Orbit Farm carries influences from many different kinds of music, and before getting on with the review I’d like to provide a little bit of background on where the idea for the project got it’s roots. The main genres and artists come from various combinations of singer-songwriters and a vast array of electronic music. Jazz is very much in my vocabulary as a musician, and I tend to write more contemporary fusion than any other genre, but Orbit Farm to me has always had electronic influence at the forefront. The big three records that were stuck in my head when I created the project include Crumbling by South Korean artist Mid-Air Thief, Velocity: Design: Comfort. by former San Francisco based duo Sweet Trip, and Aviary by Julia Holter. The latter of the three has haunted me with an artistic statement of perpetual dichotomy for the last five and a half years.

Julia Holter’s early catalog consists of what I’d think most of the fandom agrees is primarily experimental music. While she has always had a taste for sound collage and sampling, as well as a well-developed vocal style since early releases such as Live Recordings and Tragedy, she wouldn’t enter into a realm mainly occupied by songwriting until her second full-length record Ekstasis was released in 2012. It marked a substantial thrust forward in Julia’s crafting of her own brand of almost medieval indie songwriting. The attention to form in “Marienbad” is very interesting, as the first half is developed with multiple verses, then builds up to a cacophony, and resolves into what feels tough to describe other than one big chorus. The through-composed track “Our Sorrows” is so animated, as the sample of what sounds like chatter at a fancy restaurant during dinner time in a movie, flips the relationship of “program music” and “program” on its head. Julia creatively removes layers of vocal harmony very gradually as the song fades out. This is just one example of her effective use of minimalism as a compositional technique.

Carrying on past Ekstasis, Holter released Loud City Song the following year. The record pushed boundaries with explosive tracks such as “Horns Surrounding Me”, and “Maxim’s II”. The element of chamber pop was still present from Julia’s previous music, while the style shifted from drum machine, bedroom-esque production to a much more full, chamber-like acoustic sound. Her interesting approach to songwriting maintained consistent with tracks like “World”, which showcases a very legato sound featuring all of voice, piano, strings, and harpsichord occasionally, “In the Green Wild”, which displays her uncompromising nature to strive for arrangements that may seem strange and outlandish but work so well in the context of a good groove, and “This is a True Heart”, which almost does have a kind of program music, silent film type vibe to it. I love the ending vocal stacks on the line “I don’t understand” in that one.

Julia’s following release, Have You in My Wilderness in 2015, would be another stylistic change, but instead of feeling ‘shrouded in the nighttime’, a description of Loud City Song by music critic and Youtuber Rick the Lai with whom I very much agree, Holter’s Wilderness is beautifully bright and alive. With Julia taking an extremely singer-songwriter approach to every track on the record, it proves to be arguably the greatest starting point for listeners to get into her music. The opening track “Feel You” sucked me in for weeks when I first discovered it. The melancholy of when the chorus hits at “who am I waiting for in my raincoat” has always struck me. Similar to the binary form of “Marienbad”, the track “Silhouette” has two main sides to it. This time it feels like a very wanderlust, optimistic venture out into the world followed by a dramatic and reckoning ending. “Everytime Boots” is a revitalizing, fun indie pop tune that pretty much anyone can enjoy, while still showing off interesting and creative vocals. “Betsy on the Roof” has such an earworm of a hook while still being extremely emotional, and is one of the biggest heart wrenchers on the record. The closing/title track of the record is a very reflective one, where Julia laments at losing someone; “…tell me why can I feel you running away”. Her attention to the development of the hook, “you’ll see lightning cascading pronouncements of our love”, is so satisfying to hear compositionally.

Aviary is a record that I’ve been obsessed with for five and a half years. I’d like to plug Rick the Lai a second time here, as I discovered Julia Holter through his Youtube channel. His curation for periodical music review is remarkable; his choice of lesser known artists to shed a light on and promote is impeccable. I listened to his review of Aviary before I ever got into it myself, and I feel that I may have internalized a positive bias for it because of this. Nevertheless, I’m still going to sing its praises. It shows Julia at her most fearless up until this point (she keeps going afterwards). Aviary has some of the most daring and wild soundscapes of any Julia Holter record ever. Before I get into more raw sound collage discussion of this kind of variety, I’d like to talk about my favorite track from the record, “Words I Heard”; it is still absolutely a collage of sound, but it is so tasteful and cinematic, and is definitely one of Aviary’s more easily beloved songs. As someone who grew up with the grandiose, majestic transformations of the Dragon Ball franchise, I can’t help but create one in my head when I listen to this. It absolutely embodies an ascension and divination of sorts. On with the crazy shit, “Everyday is an Emergency”. Yup! This is the one alright. I admittedly love to partake in some marijuana before listening to music critically, and weed is one of the few things that will seriously make me break down the ultimate reed cacophony that is this piece of music. It gets a little more chilled out as the song develops, I see all the different reeds and noises almost as birds made out of plasma. The roosters are just screaming their bloody heads off for a while there. That’s simply where the song takes you; the psychedelic plasma-bird flowerbeds of organized and poetic dissonance. Eventually, the light from the plasma goes out, and the closing verses of the song begin, with just voice and piano. The particular emphasis and refrain on Julia’s pronunciation of the word “terror” shakes you. (The next record as a whole almost competes with this one song in my opinion.) Aviary has so many incredible moments that I would love to talk about, so I think I’ll make another post about the whole record soon.

Leading up to listening to the new release, I’ve felt a bunch of different things. Admittedly a little bit of fear that I wouldn’t love it, as well as a lot of excitement and indulging in telling my friends all about it. It has been almost six years since Aviary came out, so we’ve been waiting for a little while. Since 2018, Holter composed a soundtrack for the film “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”, directed by Eliza Hittman, as well as released various collaborations with artists such as Michael Pisasro-Liu, Alex Temple and the Spektral Quartet, and Call Super.

Writing down my thoughts while listening to the record for the first time was interesting. I like being able to capture my thoughts so as to not forget them, but there is also definitely something to just listening to music completely uninterrupted. Julia remains fearless in this record, pulling out all the stops in terms of interesting production tricks/decisions. Something in the Room She Moves, to me, has been a complete lift up from the world of Aviary, which is massive at an hour and a half worth of music. Aviary has so much material for listeners, including abstract sound collage pieces as well as more typical, easily digestible songwriting. Something in the Room She Moves feels a little short after swimming in a double album for almost six years’ time. Right when I thought Julia would have one more song up her sleeve, she ends the record with “Who Brings Me”. At this point I was contemplating just how terrifying of a musician she is after listening to a good 50 minutes of music, just to get slapped in the face with an even bolder, more uncompromising statement marking the album’s close. Just like with Aviary, I will make a follow-up post going in further detail on my thoughts with this record.

“Sun Girl” was the first single Julia released from Something in the Room. When I first listened to it a little while back, I was definitely captivated by numerous beautiful, charming moments. I never noticed what sounds like bagpipes in the mix until revisiting the single on the record. I also never noticed just how much ear candy comprised the very ending of the tune. “These Morning” is one of my favorites so far. Julia makes the jump from her usual use of Rhodes to Wurlitzer as her choice of electric piano, and this textural choice adds to the edginess of the album. This track gives the first hint of the fusion of styles between her last two full-lengths, Have You in My Wilderness and Aviary to create this record. Sarah Belle Reid’s tone on trumpet here harkens back to the track “Chaitius” almost identically, and the songwriting was a nod that elements of Wilderness would remain intact on this record as well. “These Morning” pulls a fair amount from jazz harmony which I absolutely love, although the purist nature of the 60’s post-bop fanatic inside me remains somewhat apprehensive about how “jazz” this kind of thing really is. This is a pretty common theme in musical discussion, and dominating mentality from jazz is a bias I hope to shed, as to stay open to as much music as possible. To reconcile this, it helps to identify some concepts from jazz harmony here, like Julia’s beautiful use of the Lydian mode in this track. The echo of the opening melody line in unison between voice and saxophone (2:22) really stood out to me, and Julia’s ornamentation of this melody is so masterful. I need to revisit the title track of the record, as I am writing this sentence a good 21 hours after listening to it. But, I can confirm that this track is a great example of the sense of motion and groove that Julia always employs in her music. Props to Elizabeth Goodfellow on drums here. This track almost reminds me of something by the jazz fusion supergroup Snarky Puppy, who have been an overwhelming influence on Orbit Farm and on my musical DNA in general. Similar to “Our Sorrows”, the title track uses texture subtraction as a very effective compositional technique. Some other elements from this track that I loved were Devin Hoff’s bass tone, and the delay-type effect in the ending. Onto “Materia”, this very well might be my current favorite song on the record. I didn’t write much in my notebook while listening because I was so stunned. Initially, I thought that the track would take us to a similar world as Holter’s record Maria from 2013, a collection of recordings made up of primarily keyboard and voice. What followed was what I feel is Julia Holter’s most beautiful use of harmony (and dissonance) to date. “Materia” not only skyrockets the role and importance of chord progressions on this album, but also features one of the most beautifully surprising arranging decisions that Julia makes (0:53), where she drops out of the established feel of the earlier vocal melody into a completely rubato unison line between voice and Wurlitzer. It’s so out of left field but it’s so beautiful at the same time. I really wish I could sing this song’s praises more now, but I will save it for the later review. We now arrive at “Meyou”, a vocal study that focuses largely pronunciation of the song’s title. Julia and company make the title truly feel like one word, and you can’t help but begin to imagine all the contexts that “me, you” could be implying. One of the most interesting instruments Julia adds to the arrangement is sitar, which sticks out as another new texture introduced on this album, among Wurli and the strident Yamaha CS-60. It was at this point that I began thinking about what Julia might be going for in terms of album narrative, and the boundary-pushing nature of Something in the Room really makes it a little bit more ambiguous as to what each song’s role is in terms of telling a story through the entirety of the album. “Meyou” is a perfect example of this kind of a much more free and open direction for a narrative to follow. With this being said, I did begin to see more of what Julia was going for as the record got closer to the end. “Spinning” was the second single released in promotion for the record, and is my favorite of the three by far. It really marked her return to the indie music scene, and felt new and familiar at the same time. It feels adjacent to the medieval tone of Aviary and works prior, but has pushed beyond into something that has transcended everything she has done before, into an era where her approach to sound collage is more fully realized and sharpened than it ever has been. I love the fact that “Spinning” was placed right after “Meyou”; that was a good choice, and a conscious one, I think. To land into the tune’s characteristic march after a very open, legato piece is such an empowering feeling. It was very nice to listen to this one on my Audio Technica ATH-M50x’s, as it tends to be more of a jam than something for very critical listening. This track sounds incredible transposed down a whole step; it’s much more rich and warm, especially when slowed down a little as well. Speaking of this, I’d like to give a nod to the music app Moises. You can change keys of songs, change tempo, and even isolate instrument tracks via the app’s AI functionality. It is a tremendous tool for building musicianship and I use it almost everyday. Definitely download it!! “Ocean” really got me thinking about the relationship between artist vision and fan/audience expectation. One of the incredible things about this track, and some other points of the record as well, is that it almost feels like Julia is breaking into ambient territory, while STILL having enough structure and anchor points to treat each piece like a fully fledged composition. The mix is very interesting as well in the sense that for as ambient as the track is, and as much as one might expect a big reverb wash to fit, it is very dry, and clear. Always a very stimulating artistic choice. “Evening Mood” was released as the third single from the record, and I will admit it is the one that I’ve spent the least amount of time with. The very faint, almost laser gun-esque sounds at 1:03 are a very classic “Orbit Farm” kind of sound, and appear again in various other spots, much more present in the mix. Another spot that really caught me was the displacement of the vocal phrase at 5:21; “am I listening…”, this is more evidence of Julia’s close attention to rhythm in her music. “Talking to the Whisper” is this record’s answer to Aviary‘s “Everyday is an Emergency”. It is cacophony personified and then translated back into sound. It is bigger, bolder, and more outlandish than anything Julia has made before, maybe except for “Everyday”. There is a moment at 2:13 that recalls the saxophone tone from “Boy in the Moon” on Ekstasis, which functions as an eye of the storm that is this song. It was at this point in the record that I was getting a really big sense of the era/school of songwriters Julia is trying to pay homage to here. Its tough to think of any artists in particular; almost like if there was an “alt folk” of the mid 70’s. Julia has cited Joni Mitchell as an influence, and I don’t think it’s very far off from what I’m thinking of. “Who Brings Me”, for me, was a maddening finale to listen to. For Julia to cast such a powerful track like “Whisper” upon you, then end the record with a track like this one felt just insurmountable. Aviary was so big, and when I was first listening to it, I was swept away on an incredible journey through an enchanted medieval universe that was a full 90 minutes in length. Something in the Room She Moves clocks in at just under 54 minutes. I was expecting another two or three songs, but for the record to just end as it did left me so shocked. For her to drop the craziest track she’s released since “Everyday is an Emergency”, then just dip after another three and a half minutes left me completely in awe. Although, the good thing is that I think I understood why pretty quickly. This is just one example of what feels like Julia consciously playing with your expectations just to take a complete left turn, and it may be the code to understanding her ethos around this record’s narrative after all.