THE FALLING AGE: I love Julia Holter’s mind. How it must see sound. Filter it. Mold it. And allow it to find its own spaces. I was listening to her nine-minute apocalyptic track, “The Falling Age”, late at night, turned up loudly — the sound big in my giant old 1970s headphones, stolen from my father (the same pair I use to listen to all music I write about). At one point, I took them off, thinking I heard a jet flying over my apartment. I live near an airfield, where National Guard pilots are frequently practicing at all hours. But when I took the headphones off, there was nothing but the stone-cold silence of 5 a.m. Why do I tell you this? Well, Holter’s music makes you re-think exactly what music is, and how it interacts with the listener. Does music require recognizable structures and parameters? Are all of Holter’s works really songs, or are they compositions in the classical sense? Or does it even matter? Is the sound of a jet-engine, music? “The Falling Age” begins with one note wavering, Holter’s reverb-laden vocals echoing over with consonant-heavy, treble-dipped phrases like, “Was here I had a friend, / Washing ‘cross the purple and trickling stream / And she was laying them out to dry / On the face of a warm and sunny rock.” What she’s doing is far more interesting than a traditional verse, chorus, bridge, musical-climax routine. She’s painting doomed frescoes with words, textured by walls of sound, cool waves of droning organ synth, and a searing noise like a building subsonic thrust. Without the nudge of the song title, it would be difficult in the first few seconds of the song to determine if this mood was heading toward an ascension or fall. But eventually, it’s clear that everything about this song is paradoxically building to disintegration. The orchestral arrangement begins to truly deconstruct halfway into the song, with off-key strings falling away into an abyss, tremolo organ-synth shuddering with enough rapidity to be almost imperceptible, like a hummingbird flapping its wings. It’s quite masterful. This L.A.-based composer has 10 tracks you can hear at her MySpace page. Listen to the stunning “try to make yourselves a work of art” (at her official website), which begins with what sounds like an angelic air-leak, rising with the clank of metal on metal and the percussive thump of a gallows march. Like much of her work, it’s both scary and sublimely beautiful. — David D. Robbins Jr.
Julia Holter “The Falling Age”
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