The interface between the voice and technology is central to Juliana Barwick's art. A Louisiana-born, Brooklyn-based singer who previously released the album Sanguine and the EP Florine, Barwick makes music whose raw material is almost exclusively her voice. But it's hard to know what she might sound like alone in a room. When she records, Barwick layers and processes and twists her utterances into figures that can alternately be described as familiar, soothing, alien, and tense. She might bring to mind the bright harmonies of Panda Bear or the mystical invocations of Elizabeth Fraser, but her approach is her own.
That's partly because her music feels homemade. We know that she spent a lot of time in church as a kid, so it's tempting to think of her work as a digital update on sacred hymns. The heavy reverb and layering brings to mind cathedrals, light refracted through stained glass, some kind of surrender to or celebration of the eternal. But while Barwick can seem to be reaching for these grand themes and overwhelming statements, there's something in her music that brings it back down to earth. It feels human, imperfect, and intimate, and the line of communication is one-to-one. Despite her music's often epic sweep, it can feel like she is whispering in our ears. So the sense of the sublime, which permeates every note of her material, ultimately works on a humble scale.
We've grown used to following along with artists from their first demo to their first self-released EP to their debut album and then their breakthrough moment courtesy of a company that specializes in caffeinated sugar water. But Barwick works slowly and carefully. She had a little bump with the issue of her debut in 2007, returned with a small-scale EP two years later that received a handful of positive reviews, and has presumably been spending the interim figuring out how to make something even better. The Magic Place, her first album for Asthmatic Kitty, stands above her earlier work in virtually every way. She sings better, the structures are more patient and enveloping, the layering is more precise, and she makes much more effective use of instrumentation. It has the feel of a modest classic of post-millennial ambient music, the kind of record that sounds gorgeous and immersive on first listen and never loses its sparkle, whether playing in the background or filling a room with its swells.
One of the secrets to The Magic Place's enduring appeal, the way it holds up to repeated listens, has to do with that aforementioned imperfection. Though Barwick's essential tool is the loop, she has a way of structuring them so they never seem too locked into the grid. They tumble and unspool and break into the silence like waves, but they are not easily reduced to units of sound dragged from a window onto a timeline. The imperfection gives a feeling of instability to these tracks. So "Keep Up the Good Work" mixes piercing high-pitched voices that a friend compared to the malevolent siren calling distant ships into the rocks and then folds in indecipherable low-pitched murmurs, hints of bass, and a piano line that sounds like a bag of pebbles falling onto the keys. It rolls forward but with an unstable gait, so the shimmering prettiness of the layers never feels too ordered and predictable.
She takes a similar approach on "Cloak", but the effect is less creepy and leans more in the direction of awe, a mini celebration of the idea of ethereality. "Prizewinning" combines her high/low voices in loops that spread like fractals with a marching guitar/drum figure that bores through the center of the track and makes it feel a little like two complementary songs playing at once. It's in these moments, where loops dangle and collide but don't quite line up, that Barwick seems most indebted to the process music of Eno. The way the units of sound in Thursday Afternoon and the reconstituted Pachelbel of Discreet Music develop bears a marked similarity to the easy unpredictability these tracks present.
Is something beautiful and ethereal that feels timeless and transcendent enough? What keeps Barwick from being the "indie rock Enya," which is the phrase that popped into my head when I first heard her music in 2007? It's not an easy question to answer. I want to say that the encroaching creepiness and human blemishes elevate Barwick's music above the soothing Calgon bath of new age, but I'm not quite convinced that's true. I'm also not sure that it matters. Part of it has to do with where we are living now, and how music functions in our lives. Complaints about the one-dimensionality of new age feel less relevant when we have so much music easily at our disposal. The Magic Place is music for a specific constellation of feelings. They are real, many people share them, and this album owns them completely. So while there are few identifiable words here and the titles don't really register, there's a hell of a lot being expressed. We may not need Barwick to go deep into darkness or to write words that mean something, because she has tapped a vein of expression that is rich and powerful and affecting and even useful. And for the time being, the vein seems to be hers alone, though we can visit any time we like.
