Julia Holter – Materia
Experimental composer Julia Holter returns to 2024's Something in the Room She Moves to tend to some unfinished business
We tend to treat album tracks as finished products. Fixed the moment they're mastered. Julia Holter argues otherwise. Returning to Materia, the centrepiece of her 2024 record Something in the Room She Moves, Holter treats this hushed ballad the way a folk singer might approach a song passed down through generations, or a jazz musician a standard; not to preserve it, but to continue tending to it.
Holter reworks Materia into two new versions: Materia 2 is a hallucinatory duet with experimental vocalist Jessika Kenney, built from voices and Devra Hoff's fretless bass, whilst Materia 3 arrives like a hidden track on a CD, surfacing after almost a minute of silence at the tail-end of My Twin. Holter's voice sounds strangely aged here. Not like that of an old person, but distant, like how starlight travels years to reach us.
Five more tracks, conceived alongside Materia, round out a set of seven, but they're not offcuts. Fantasy and My Lost One rank among the most fully-realised songs Holter has ever written, but there are no final versions here, only a question she keeps answering differently: why settle for one take, when a song can hold several at once?
Listen to: Fantasy, Materia 2, My Lost One