Julianna Barwick recently told Pitchfork * *that she didn't "think" there was any guitar on her new EP. We can sympathize with her hazy recollection of the specifics-- Florine leaves a lingering impression of unreality in its wake. A breadcrumb trail of piano and synthesizer guide us through the misty forest of Barwick's voice, and we come out on the other side wondering if it really happened. The mood is blissful and bewitching; lost, but somehow secure. Using a loop station and pedals to produce cyclical patterns on the fly, Barwick's work can't help but recall Brian Eno's Music for Airports. Even so, Florine feels bracingly intimate and original, in its hieroglyphic way.
The most cunning thing is how the music seems wordless at first, then divulges gentle commands, both real and imagined-- stay, higher, come back, choose. Because of the album's spare substance, these little imperatives take on a divine weight. And divinity is the spark that gets Florine going. Barwick begins with a halogen hymn, "Sunlight, Heaven", and then builds a cathedral in the sky, "Cloudbank". But when "The Highest" dips into tones of serene lament, her sacred equanimity begins to slide. "Choose" chirrups like Enya doing Kate Bush; "Anjos" spills Glassian waterfalls of piano; "Bode" epitomizes the cherubically neurotic flutter of Florine's second half.
Nothing you can say about Florine directly accounts for its elegiac, magnificent aura. Except maybe this: Barwick has remarked that the album was inspired by her memories of playing music without instruments in church, and the course it charts, out of the choir loft and into the more fluctuant realms of leftfield pop and post-minimalism, could represent... gosh, all kinds of narratives: the loss of received values, the fading of religious conviction, the basic human learning curve from clean myth to murky reality. How fitting that the first song after the opening trio of tearjerkers, at the moment when the spiritual seems to lose ground to the postmodern, is called "Choose". This blend of uplifting sounds and postlapsarian concept might account for the music's sorrowing, joyful, dreamlike impression-- it moves in two directions at once, floating upwards to describe a fall.
