andrew stout

The Church of Julianna Barwick

For Interview magazine online, I spoke with Julianna Barwick. Tomorrow night, Julianna is home in Brooklyn, where she will play the Glasslands Gallery in celebration of Canta Luchuza, the extraordinary new album by Roberto Carlos Lange (otherwise know as Helado Negro):

Shortly after our early-morning talk with Julianna Barwick, she sent an album of photos our way. The pictures tell of a trip she took to France this past March. Included among the shots of kindly friends, fathers, and bistros are several striking snaps of the Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix, a neo-Gothic cathedral built in the last half of the 19th century. Against all technological odds, the structure’s mannered beauty has overwhelmed the sharpness of the digital image. The church’s literal glow appears to reach beyond the jpeg’s border. 

The effect is not unlike that of Barwick’s own stately edifice, The Magic Place, the debut album she issued earlier this year on Asthmatic Kitty. Proved by the album’s nine songs, Barwick has refined the highly intuitive process she stumbled upon five years ago, when she started looping her voice through an effects pedal originally designed for guitar. Her songs are composed primarily through vocal improvisations she records to a laptop. Though the input is often as simple as a four-bar melody hummed into a loop station, the output can resemble a Gregorian chant. Barwick’s moxie is the essence of her art, with the profane forever willing itself toward the sacred.

Read the entire article here.

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