In early 2020, while Julia Holter worked on a relatively swift follow-up to her 2018 opus, Aviary, two complications arose. The first, a pandemic, you know all about; the second, a lockdown pregnancy—well, just imagine. The shift flung this once prolific singer-songwriter into a period of stops and starts. She stopped performing, of course, and mostly stopped writing songs; perhaps most gravely of all, she stopped reading medieval texts. She started preparing for motherhood, then stopped preparing—motherhood was here! When she finally started recording, exhausted, things often went awry: She would stop singing and start yawning, occasionally dozing at the controls. This was no reflection of the music, though it is true that Something in the Room She Moves dispenses with her usual song and dance, distilling its vexed creation into one long, languorous thought. Stop talking, it suggests, and start listening.
In the 13 years since Tragedy, her audacious, Euripidean debut, Holter has made contrasting demands of listeners. On one hand, her oeuvre has swung toward pop and back again. At the same time, she and her ensemble have charted a broader arc from intention to intuition. After the high-concept early entries—drawn from Hippolytus, from Gigi, the process she calls “remixing texts”—improvisation meandered to the core of Holter’s practice, shepherded by collaborators like bassist Devin Hoff and multi-instrumentalist Tashi Wada.
The Holter of Something in the Room She Moves sounds more determined than ever to renounce conscious authorship. The music—bubbly, nebulous, free—seems to have a mind of its own. The concept, if there is one, borrows the key principle of meditative minimalism: Reduce, reduce, and reduce to lift your spirit higher. Opener “Sun Girl” is the model in miniature, a sprightly little odyssey that could beguile a conservatory crowd but just as easily reduce—or indeed lift—a child to awestruck giggles.
As well as her own daughter, Holter dedicates the album to her late nephew, “a beautiful young human who loved to make art, to debate ideas, and was passionate about socialist politics.” On “Talking to the Whisper,” a moment of devastating brilliance, she draws out distraught pleas—“Heaven can’t take my love”; “Love can be shattering”—but the true climax is a cosmic, wordless breakdown summoning the ecstatic grief of Alice Coltrane’s Universal Consciousness. In her recent live score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc, Holter sought a language of unintelligible chants, including “syllables decapitated from their word context,” to reflect lead actor Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s fidelity to the inexplicable. “Talking to the Whisper,” and Something in the Room She Moves at large, employ a similar lyricism that, like Falconetti’s Joan, evades literal explanation in favor of communion with the sublime.
More readily apparent than any possible themes—motherhood, grief, love, early cognition—is Holter’s wish to evoke the “body’s internal sound world.” The music is fluid, sonorous, and unpredictable; in the middle of several songs, it briefly shuts down altogether. Pitch-bending synths, sparing percussion, and vaporous reverb suspend the songs in a sort of amniotic sac. Yet they pulse with such serene familiarity that, from inside, it feels odd to find them odd. We think of visceral music as gutsy and brash, but Holter has less interest in jolting your system than listening to it with a stethoscope: Hear the cellular rush; the mysterious currents; in “Evening Mood,” a genuine ultrasound heartbeat. Only on “Spinning,” the blissfully adrenalized nerve center, does she reach out to the world and absorb its electric energy.
This record’s closest relative in Holter’s catalog is the 2017 live album In the Same Room, which smelted brassy numbers like “Horns Surrounding Me” into a loungey, jazzy ooze. Casting off theatrical fineries, Holter set her melodies to music that offered questions rather than answers. Though crafted and produced with her usual perfectionism, Something in the Room She Moves feels similarly open-ended, as if preserved in its own potential. A song, in this setting, is not a final document but something to be dredged and excavated like an ancient ruin. The broodier style of composition, or decomposition, conspires with her tone of sing-songy dissociation to emphasize the disconnect between sound, meaning, observation, and whatever bewildering reality might lie underneath.
The longing that runs through all of Holter’s music is, in some sense, a desire to be liberated from the rational. Something in the Room She Moves luxuriates in that spirit of uncertainty; the title track, a magisterial highlight, uses the melisma of a Hindu devotional to evoke a sensation of hovering on the cusp of ecstasy. She has a knack for pinpointing pop melodies in the ether, then playing the vowels like slide whistles, rummaging deep in a word like “around” as if for a missing set of keys.
Having zigzagged between order and disorder, from operatic refinement to clamor and hubbub, Holter sounds happier now to present heady musings with childlike mystification. It’s a contented ambiguity reflected in her attempt to channel oxytocin, the love chemical, through continuous-pitch instruments: The Vangelis-style synths, portamento vocals, and fretless bass, from an agile Hoff, conjure the stuff of the in-between. Rather than choose the black or white keys, Something in the Room She Moves lets us flutter between the notes.
