Julia Holter makes deeply strange music that feels oddly familiar. This is because it mixes the ancient with the avant-garde, creating a temporal anomaly. Hence, it only makes sense that she would build an album around two versions of a song that she had already released. »Materia« was a—by her standards at least—catchy piano ballad that took cues from Hildegard von Bingen. It is the kind of song that goes down perfectly with a glass of whiskey at 3am. However, she heard more in it.
The first of the two new renditions on Materia leans into the jazzy atmosphere of the original, adding sprawless fretless bass lines, delicate clarinet melodies, and the subtle-yet-intricate drum rhythms that underpin much of Holter’s best music. Her voice, multiplied and harmonised, soars over the song like a murmuration of exotic birds. The second interpretation slows down the original and transposes her vocals into a different register—the closest thing you will get to a chopped’n’screwed Holter.
They are embedded in a record that feels less like an album and more like a spontaneous compilation of one-off experiments. Besides the—by her standards at least—rather conventional opener, Materia sees Holter indulge in whispery jazz-post-rock, washed-out new waviness, an uncanny piece for solo choir and synth as well as the ten-minute-long »My Twin,« a Visible Cloaks-like ambient lullaby suite. Materia is not exactly coherent, nor does it rank among Holter’s best work. But it is one of her most interesting records.
Materia
