Julia Holter Pays Homage to Life Itself

Hélène Cixous is a 20th-century French writer and philosopher best known for her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in which she coined the term “écriture féminine.” Within the text, Cixous urges women toward liberation via writing. “Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges the anti-linear, cyclical writing so often frowned upon by patriarchal society,” states literary critic Elaine Showalter. Cixous’s work heralded the importance of communication as a means to discuss struggle, identity and connection. In her 1996 essay “Writing Blind,” Cixous mediates the relationship between her writing, creativity and the night. She details how the emblematic darkness of night allows her a distinct and visceral clarity that enables her to boundlessly create. “To go off writing, I must escape from the broad daylight which takes me by the eyes, which takes my eyes and fills them with broad raw visions. I do not want to see what is shown. I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to see the skin of the light,” she writes.

On her highly anticipated new album Something in the Room She Moves, Julia Holter takes inspiration from Cixous’s “Writing Blind” to craft songs steeped in a tangible, thrilling urgency that accompanies the ritual of creation. “I was, at this time of my life, struggling with inspiration a lot. There’s this text by Hélène Cixous called ‘Writing Blind’ and there’s a lot in there about the night and how the night blinds us, like we can’t see but therefore the imagination can run wild and we create in the night when we’re free from seeing and that the daylight kind of prevents us from seeing […] I was really playing off that in my mind I think both with ‘Sun Girl’ and ‘Spinning’ where the harshness of the day can be very sobering and intense. But also, with ‘Sun Girl,’ it’s sort of enriching in certain ways,” Holter says. “She’s [Cixous’s] writing about this moment of creation and that sort of intensity and urgency of it. It’s very intense and I was trying to capture that.”

Something in the Room She Moves celebrates the physical and emotional experiences of life and the impact that creation has on the human spirit. Its swirling odyssey of sweeping sound and emotion leaves you breathless, and Julia Holter’s distinct blend of experimental pop reaches new expansive heights with open, ethereal arrangements of noise that swell and condense at will over a pressing and abstract sense of rhythm. A shimmering symphony of scattered synths, reeds and percussion uplifts the opening track “Sun Girl,” as Holter repeatedly sings, “My dreams as I dream in golden yellow.” A heartening warmth wafts through the track as we navigate through the many layers of instruments and samples.

“I wanted to have a playful feeling. I was obsessed with capturing this playfulness with a little anxiety,” Holter says of “Sun Girl.” “It’s almost like I had a painting in mind or something. I made the chorus first originally. So I had the chorus, but I knew I wanted the rest of the song to have this lightness and this playfulness but then an undercurrent of anxiety. I worked on it for a long time trying to capture it. I made a lot of different versions. It was very collaged together post-recording whereas most of the other songs were quite true to performance.”

“There’s a sample of this xylophone at this playground by my house, there’s a sample of me and my daughter hitting a table to make a drum beat [but] it was mostly me, there’s a recording of us hitting the piano, there’s a drum sample from Aviary—oh, my God, there’s so much,” she continues.

Within the layers of the opening track, we acquaint ourselves with a side of Julia Holter we have never seen before. There’s a central focus on bodies and physicality that hasn’t been examined in her previous work, as well as a lush, overgrown feeling of immediate love. Holter emphasized that she primarily leaned outward for her past projects and working on Something in the Room She Moves led her to a restorative space of seeking inspiration from a new inward perspective and the all-consuming emotion behind that space.

“I just was experiencing a lot of physical change and that went into the music. So I think, for me, it wasn’t just my own body, but just also in pregnancy [and] also just COVID—which was a pandemic very much [with] the atmosphere of like everything was about people staying away from each other, and their bodies and everyone’s lungs and their breath, and the masks covering their breath. The body was just inescapable. So, in that way, it wasn’t something I ever was interested in exploring, really, to be honest, and I feel like, in fact, that’s part of what it is—that I’m so disconnected from my body in certain ways. So, this whole process was therefore pretty jarring for me,” Holter says.

She continues, “Also, just mortality. I had a child but also I lost my nephew, and I lost other family members, my grandparents. This is true for a lot of people during this time period, whether it was COVID or whatever. There’s a lot of death and a lot of birth. It’s kind of like, ‘Like it or not, you’ve got the body to contend with.’ But, it’s also the nice aspects like the physical. The touch of someone’s hand in your hand, your hand holding someone’s hand. The oxytocin, the love hormone. Like the elements of love that are visceral and all of that stuff. So just all of these things. I just feel like most of my music has not ever really [had a] connection with that. A lot of times in the past it was love from afar, like troubadour love, medieval love, love from the past, love in the future, memory and all that stuff makes up a lot of my music. This felt different. If my record Ekstasis from 2012 was like being outside of oneself, this record is like being inside oneself.”

Something in the Room She Moves is inspired by a plethora of sensations and experiences. With “Evening Mood,” Holter wanted to “capture the feeling of oxytocin, love hormone” in sound. The sparse and transcendent “Materia” features just Holter’s vocals and her Wurlitzer to fill the hollow space with a “Hildegard von Bingen-inspired” medieval melody. The track “Spinning” emotionally centers around the aforementioned writer Hélène Cixous’s musings on the intense art of creation. “I wanted to make something that evoked feelings,” Holter says. “I had an interest in a certain sound world and capturing certain feelings around what emerged to be the realms of love and what it entails, the emotions in very deep forms of love and labors of love and all these kinds of things became themes that emerged, but a lot of what I was interested in sonically capturing that was certain specific elements like the fretless bass, which is used throughout with Devin Hoff on fretless and the production in general.”

Within the writing and recording process, Holter ventured into new territory and discovered what works for her within the spaces she creates in. Due to a mild case of COVID, Holter was required to record her vocals in a formal studio setting as they mixed the album because of time constraints caused by the illness. In the past, Holter preferred to write and record vocals in the comfort of her home. Having a formal space to work in the studio gave Holter newfound inspiration to write and fill gaps in the album.

“I had a weird experience, because I thought it would be really hard to do that,” she says, “but, actually recording in a nice studio on really nice mics, turns out it’s great. And, because I was in my own space, I felt a little more free—because no one was around me in that studio versus being at home in your domestic sphere and family. I think I felt more free for the first time in a studio than [at] home because it’s just nice to have this new space. I ended up writing a lot more of the lyrics in the end while I was recording vocals,” she says.

Something in the Room She Moves showcases the musician’s distinguished ascent into new heights of experimental pop music. Her mastery of space and composition is evident throughout the album. Holter’s immersion in new influences creates a vital and unflinching album of raw feeling that is both energized and hypnotic. The emotional clarity of the album connects to listeners on a primal level as we see ourselves reflected in the glassy synths and billowing reeds. When discussing creation, Cisoux tells us she wants to “see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible.” Something in the Room She Moves pulls back the curtain and unveils to us what is there amongst the visible for Julia Holter: an intoxicating collage of color and emotion that pays homage to life itself.

Listen to Julia Holter’s Daytrotter session from 2012 here.