Support: Silver Pyre
The bedroom musicians of today have the unique position contrary to most arena-centric bands and artists out there to forge their own world within the comfort of their aesthetically moulded environments and harbour some measure of success and merit for their work. American one-woman operation Julianna Barwick has garnered some high praise from critics and spellbound fans alike for her ethereal incantations.
The title of her last full-length, 2011’s The Magic Place, conjures a dream-like state that could so easily allude to her own space of music-making. The same concept is analogous to Cafe Oto, a relaxed, stylish coffeehouse-cum-music venue with an authentic atmosphere of a vintage jazz club. Instead of solely focusing on jazz music like its neighbour, the Vortex Jazz Club, its eclectic nightly programme makes this a popular venue.
Tonight’s sold out event begins with Silver Pyre, pseudonym of Gary Fawle, who challenges the crowd to some minimal folktronica. His sound inhabits a similar aesthetic to Thom Yorke’s solo glitch-rock – with laptop, pre-programmed sequencer, guitar and an aura of abandonment, he paints intimately-bound layers of rough, stuttering beats and tones. Lyrical vocals too, but these lack the rounding punch. The climax of the set arrives with a distorted Lou Reed-style vocal performance grinding together with processed chimes, scattershot buzz tones and a sludgy bass pulse to deliver a swaggering post-industrial heaviness.
Julianna Barwick is the cheerleader for DIY ambient folk. Where her cousin contemporaries (Julia Holter, Rachel Evans (Motion Sickness of Time Travel) and Grouper’s Liz Harris) are caught in the claustrophobic rut of abandoned loneliness, Barwick’s sonic pedigree is a rich and cleansing experience elevating our emotions to heavenly heights.
With her head gracefully poised upward, as if delivering a sermon to the Gods, Barwick opens her set immersed in dreamy projections of tree-flecked skies. Within the enveloping washes of harmonies and gushing reverb, rewards begin to greet the patient audience members. I feel transfixed, and pretend to hallucinate enchanted spirits that dwell within the trees whispering through the crepuscular glades. She turns an East London coffee shop – that most intimate space – into an Arcadian idyll, a majestic cathedral.
In spite of her arrestingly original approach to composition, the same method is used time and time again in each piece: a build up of mainly wordless vocal loops, interlaced with thickly blanketed instrumentation which all reach some kind of euphoric plateau where Barwick can then inject some more of her own unearthly vocal decorations before fading back into stillness and silence. These multi-tracked mantras evoke a spiritual feeling that chimes the all too familiar resonances of Enya’s atmospheric fairylike folk, or the cosmic touchstones of Brian Eno’s ‘An Ending’.
I could not fault the sound, which I assume plays a critical role in her own enjoyment of performing live. Tonight she is as sweet and modest as her music would suggest. Barwick’s dependency on her loopstation and pre-programmed effects occasionally dispels the magic, but her talent is in that crystalline voice. One gets caught in a resonant web, created by the vast layer of vocal phrases and these build up with interwoven delicacy. The weighty presence of reverb is the glistening touch for the IMAX of musical experience. The elevated intensity reaches a climax in ‘Bob In Your Gait’ where the soaring resonances shaped by Barwick’s controlled vocal decorations around leisurely refined pulse of guitar and piano juxtaposition lets the song drift off into the ether with poise.
I think we should be beaming Julianna Barwick’s music out into space if heaven was a place on Earth. As we all float away from the sacred space of dreams, one would hope Barwick can cast her net wider on her next stride towards creative ambition. On her forthcoming album (out in 2013) which features guest vocalists and musicians, it will be intriguing to know whether her unique aesthetic combines effectively with collaborative minds to coexist with this meteoric ascent of her talent.
