To listen to a Julia Holter album is to embrace the mystery. Their sonic adventures challenge you in unexpected ways and captivate you thanks to their suggestive atmospheric quality. The same can be said about his live performances, like the one he gave last night in Madrid presenting his excellent latest album ‘Something in the Room She Moves’. The Shôko room, with its flashing red lights on the walls and its modern aesthetic, served as the ideal setting for the Californian artist’s concert.
Accompanied by three other musicians (drums, bass, synthesizer), including her husband Tashi Wada, each with their own score, Holter stood in the middle with a synthesizer in front of her and opened the night with the playful and luminous ‘Sun Girl’. Behind the musicians, a screen projected a cascade of moving images of abstract drawings, hands waving in the air, and lush forests. On stage, several smoke machines were responsible for giving the space mysticism.
It didn’t take long for the artist and her band to establish a dreamlike and bewitching atmosphere. The multiple sounds traveled from one part of the room to another, sometimes making it impossible to know where they came from; Holter’s voice, delicate and powerful, traveled directly to the hearts of those present. Their long songs, full of layers and enigmas, sounded immense, transforming their arid nature into the purest epic. So much so that one gets the crazy idea that, if Julia Holter wanted to adapt to conventional structures and abandon her experimental vocation, she could perfectly fill stadiums. His mastery and musical knowledge is total, and this is demonstrated by his variety of registers and tonalities.
His most conventional songs, those from ‘Have You In My Wilderness’, like ‘Sea Calls Me Home’ or ‘Feel You’, sparked some timid attempts in the audience to sing them, but Holter’s presence is so special that it was collectively taken the decision to remain silent. From his most recent work he rescued 5 songs, all of them withstanding the live test with flying colors: the aforementioned ‘Sun Girl’, ‘Spinning’, ‘Evening Mood’ and ‘Talking to the Whisper’. The latter gave us one of the most memorable moments of the concert thanks to its wonderful progression, in which after pronouncing the phrase “love can be shattering”, the song is lost in a mysterious instrumental section. Among the most spectacular moments of this part are when the drummer dragged one of the drumsticks across the instrument’s cymbal, achieving a screeching and disturbing sound, or when Wada left his position on the synthesizer to play the bagpipes.
These overwhelming climaxes were also very present in older songs, such as ‘Marienbad’, from their first album ‘Ekstasis’, which at its peak turns towards practically silence. Of course, two of Holter’s most beloved songs also shined, both from his demanding and beautiful ‘Aviary’: the exciting ballad ‘Words I Heard’ and that art pop gem that is ‘I Shall Love 2’, which served as the closing definitive of an evening to remember.
