From her found-sound DJ mixes to her experimental albums based on French novels and Greek tragedies,Julia Holter seems very much the serious artist. But she has always done beautiful melodies, and never more so than here Related: Julia Holter: ‘People just want to conquer somebody’ It feels slightly odd to use the words “commercial breakthrough” in conjunction with LA’s Julia Holter. Holter has long set out a defiantly avant-garde stall, and making music that gave the kind of critic who likes to talk about things like mesotics and detournement the opportunity to talk about mesotics and detournement until they passed out from exhaustion. On one early solo release she used John Cage’s Circus On – a score consisting of an instruction on how to turn a book into a performance – to originate music out of a Los Angeles church-club cookbook from the 1920s. Since then,she has assign out a pink vinyl 7in single of phonetic translations of songs in foreign languages; a limited-edition release on a label that specialises in “experimental acoustic ecology and improvised sound-art; a collaboration with Michael Pisaro of experimental composer collective the Wandelweiser Group; and albums based on Euripides’ Hippolytus, the work of Virgina Woolf and Frank O’Hara, or Gigi,the Colette novel that begat the musical in which creepy customary Maurice Chevalier sanked ’eaven for leedle gulls”. There was also a DJ mix consisting entirely of found sounds and the work of experimental composers. Potential listeners to the latter were counselled “don’t be frightened” by the website that hosted it: a website, it’s perhaps worth noting, or that wasn’t frightened of voting Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats as the best album of the 1970s.
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Source: theguardian.com