The voice may be the original instrument, as the groundbreaking experimental singer Joan La Barbara put it, but in Julianna Barwick's music, the voice itself isn't necessarily a point of origin. Layering and looping her often-wordless singing into hypnotic and otherworldly configurations, she enters her songs as though slipping into a stream. The music, she seems to say, precedes us, and it will outlast us; we don't so much carry songs as allow ourselves to be carried along by them, swept up in their current for a little while.
From the beginning, the Louisiana-raised, Brooklyn-based singer has used her voice as a means of stressing a sense of union with forces greater than oneself. It's something she learned growing up singing in church, but also singing alone, "so lost in it that I would cry," as she told Pitchfork. Her music joins the massing voices of the congregation with the wordless reverie of aloneness, and that union of togetherness and solitude is a big part of the unique emotional register she achieves. Collapsing oppositions like interior and exterior, self and other, her songs convey the sublimity of being immersed in an unfathomable vastness, of being part of an indivisible whole. Her music is deeply, powerfully emotive, but it doesn't so much express emotions as conjure them; it feels not so much like soaring through clouds as being made one with them.
Her last album, 2013's Nepenthe, marked a shift from working largely in solitude to collaborating with others: She traveled to Iceland and recorded with the Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers, along with members of Múm and the string quartet Amiina. But Will moves in the opposite direction. Recorded in a variety of different places—upstate New York, North Carolina, Lisbon—it highlights Barwick's own voice in simpler configurations. It is a looser, less polished album than Nepenthe, and that rough-around-the-edges intimacy turns out to be a great part of its charm.
If her last album was a journey to the furthest edges of alien realms of sound, the opening song on the new album, "St. Apolonia," grounds us firmly in the here and now, with the distant hum of traffic wreathing her quavering vocal loops. The sumptuous reverb, a regular feature of her work, comes in this instance from architecture, rather than any trick of circuitry or silicon. That's no effects pedal, our ears tell us; that's an overpass. Where once she sang in the hollow of a tree trunk (the magic place referenced on 2011's The Magic Place), here she's wringing music from the hollows of the city, and throughout the album, the reverb around her voice suggests physical space rather than infinity; it's just one of the ways that Will scans as humble and homespun in comparison to Nepenthe's effortless opulence.
Beyond voice and natural reverb, the most frequently used instruments are reedy, inexpensive-sounding synthesizers and watery piano, the kind you might encounter at a distant relative's beach house—its strings gone faintly out of tune over the long, boarded-up winter. Melodies often feel like they're folding back in upon themselves: Her piano playing ruminates on repeated sequences, lingering on the same few notes and small, simple chords. On "Wist," heavy reverb pulls at her descending lines, blurring her words and tugging them back into the folds of the earth. You can tell that there are words in many of these songs, but the difficulty of teasing out their contours reinforces the impression that this is private music. She doesn't entirely turn her back on those grand, windswept vistas: "Same," with its wailing vocal harmonies and vibrating strings, has a real arms-thrown-wide-open, standing-before-the-void quality to it that contrasts nicely with the muted vibe of the rest of the album. And the closing "See, Know" is built around a delightfully incongruous synth lead, easily the most hi-def sound ever to grace one of Barwick's recordings.
Between the piano and the omnipresent hush, the record that Will most resembles is probably Grouper's Ruins (which, coincidentally, was also recorded in Portugal; the effects of saudade upon visiting musicians are apparently very real). But where Grouper's album was isolationist to the extreme, Barwick's never stops letting in the wider world. The swirling synthesizer loop of "Nebula," almost indistinguishable from a humming voice, recalls the gracefully spinning arpeggios of Meredith Monk's Book of Days; the simplicity of "Big Hollow" suggests Low at their most demure; the weightless ecstasy of "Same" fires up the same pain-and-pleasure centers as This Mortal Coil's version of "Song to the Siren." And something about the melody and atmosphere of "Wist" even brings to mind Swans' ethereal "Blackmail," as though heard resonating through a cistern. It's not that Barwick is imitating these songs, but it's impossible to shake the sense that she is picking up on fragments of a greater melody, a harmonic continuum, a song that belongs to all of us. Will may at first seem small, private, and modestly appointed—just a room with a piano, a synthesizer, and a looping pedal—but once you settle in, it feels as vast as the universe in there.
