Although Julia Holter’s name often sits alongside other great contemporary songwriters, Courtney Barnett, Angel Olsen and Sharon van Etten, Holter has carved out her own unique place with her music being described as “art pop’, “Baroque pop” and attracting more direct comparisons to Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, Joanna Newsom and Stereolab.
Holter’s new album, Aviary, is released today as she announces her first visit to New Zealand for January 24th, 2019 at Auckland’s Tuning Fork. Her fifth album is an epic journey through what Julia Holter describes as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world.” Out on Domino / Universal in NZ, it’s the Los Angeles composer’s most breathtakingly expansive album yet, full of startling turns and dazzling instrumental arrangements. The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 record, Have You in My Wilderness, it takes as its starting point a line from a 2009 short story by writer Etel Adnan: I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds.
“Amidst all the internal and external babble we experience daily, it's hard to find one's foundation,” says Holter. “I think this album is reflecting that feeling of cacophony and how one responds to it as a person - how one behaves, how one looks for love, for solace. Maybe it’s a matter of listening to and gathering the seeming madness, of forming something out of it and envisioning a future.
