Off the 405: Julia Holter

Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and composer Julia Holter is known for her experimental and avant-garde approach to music, which showcases her unique songwriting style and ethereal vocals. Just released this March, her sixth studio album, Something in the Room She Moves, was celebrated by Pitchfork as "fluid, sonorous, and free." Holter's past work has often explored memory and a dreamlike future, but her latest album resides more in presence: "There's a corporeal focus, inspired by the complexity and transformability of our bodies," she says. Her production choices and arrangements form a continuum of fretless electric bass pitches in counterpoint with gliding vocal melodies, while glissing Yamaha CS-60 lines entwine warm winds and reeds. "I was trying to create a world that's fluid-sounding, waterlike, evoking the body's internal sound world," Holter says of her flowing harmonic universe. After a string of dream-pop albums that established her searching voice in independent music—from the 2012 breakthrough Ekstasis to Loud City Song and Have You in My Wilderness—her new album marks a remarkable progression in Holter's oeuvre, synthesizing a free, improvisatory energy with her signature eloquence.