Altered Zones

By Samantha Cornwell

After a slew of tape releases and notable collaborations with the likes of Linda Perhacs and Nite Jewel, Los Angeles composer Julia Holter has at long last released her debut LP, Tragedy. Holter is an alumnus of Cal Arts, alongside Ariel Pink and John Maus. While her music is far removed from the aforementioned Failure Popists, her approach to composition reflects a background in conceptual art. One of her more notable endeavors is her phonetic translations project, in which she covers a song in a foreign tongue and translates it into English based on phonetic sounds and the psychic impact of certain vocal inflections. In another ongoing project, Lady JJ, Holter and Berlin-based video artist Jana Papenbroock send each other independently conceived videos and music on a monthly basis, then mash the pieces together, creating a finished product that oscillates between the awkward and the sublime. Although Tragedy is a more cohesive and long-gestating project, it drives home her aggregate approach to aesthetics.

Leaning equally on her classical training and the kind of archival appreciation of the history of pop and world music that can only come from growing up in the Internet age, the album is as full of careful detail as it is grand in scope-- and it establishes Holter as one of the most distinctive composers working today. Its main inspiration is Euripides Hippolytus, a Greek tragedy that was first performed in 428 BC. In the play, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, smites the protagonist Hippolytus for worshipping Artemis, the noble goddess of the hunt, instead of her. At the story's outset, Aphrodite dooms everyone around her; most of the play's action is watching the disastrous events that she predicts come to life. While Tragedy is in many respects a concept album, it does not appear to unfold in narrative order. Holter culls much of the lyrical content from Euripedes' text, but her main focus seems to be using sound and excerpts of the source material to capture the story's overarching sense of doom.

Holter's vocals play an interesting role in this mix. While it is often tempting to interpret a vocal, particularly a female vocal, as a pop or singer/songwriter element, Holter's does not seem to correspond to any single category (or character). With the exception of "Try To Make Yourself a Work of Art," in which she seems to be singing in the voice of the goddess Aphrodite, she does not seem to be channeling the emotions of the actors in the story. In fact, the majority of the time, she sounds more like a machine age, vocoded observer à la Bruce Haack or Laurie Anderson. The cyborg persona is most pronounced in "So Lillies," where the Kraftwerkian main melody pushes through a wall of incessant chatter like a space age radio transmission. Here, we could easily align Holter’s character here to the narrating chorus so often associated with Ancient Greek Theater. However, as Holter the vocalist weaves in and out earshot, another figure might be a more intriguing fit. It is said that in the original production of Hippolytus, the two goddesses, Aphrodite and Artemis, were represented on stage throughout the play's action by statues. Perhaps Julia's character is a mechanical age version of this sort of figure-- part Greek goddess, part Maschinenmensch.

Julia Holter: Tragedy

Tragedy LP is out now on Leaving Records; vinyl copies are sold out, but you can grab the digital via Boomkat