Sundaze 2010

Hello, as it is International Woman's day it made sense to honor that day here with a female artist.


Today's artist is an American musician who composes using electronic loops. She has said that her music is influenced by her participation in church choir while growing up in Louisiana. She composes with a machine to create electronic loops built around her vocalizing.......N-Joy

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Louisiana-bred, Brooklyn-based recording artist Julianna Barwick crafts ethereal, largely wordless soundscapes, all of which are built around multiple loops and layers of her angelic voice. Barwick, who credits a rural church choir upbringing for her unique sound, begins most tracks with a single phrase or refrain, then uses a loop station and the occasional piano or percussive instrument to build the song into a swirling mass of lush ambient folk. She released her first two collections of songs, the full-length Sanguine and the EP Florine, in 2009 and 2010, respectively, before issuing her Asthmatic Kitty debut, Magic Place, in 2011. Barwick kept busy in the time between her proper albums with various collaborations and smaller releases. In addition to remixing a Radiohead track, she collaborated with Ikue Mori on an entirely improvised album, did guest appearances on various friends' albums, and formed the duo Ombre with Helado Negro, releasing the collaborative album Believe You Me in 2012. A 7" single, Pacing, preceded her third proper solo album, 2013's Nepenthe, which she recorded with producer Alex Somers at Sigur Rós' studio Sundlaugin in Reykjavík. She followed it with a spate of unique projects, including 2014's Rosabi EP, a collaboration with Dogfish Head Brewery that incorporated recordings of the brewery into its pieces, and live collaborations with Yoko Ono, Philip Glass, and the Flaming Lips in 2015. Meanwhile, she recorded her fourth album in such distinct locations as Asheville, North Carolina; upstate New York; and Lisbon, Portugal. The results were 2016's Will, which also featured Mas Ysa's Thomas Arsenault, Dutch cellist Maarten Vos, and Chairlift drummer Jamie Ingalls. On December 20, 2019 she released her fourth album Circumstance Synthesis

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Originally released by the artist herself in 2006, Sanguine is Brooklyn-based experimental vocalist/composer Julianna Barwick's first collection of studio recordings, made primarily with loops of her own vocalizations. These dream-like compositions are presented here in snippet form, giving the listener the impression that they've been building up for a long time before the moments we're listening in on. Barwick's later albums were characterized by dense, ethereal layers of mostly wordless singing, but the short (mostly untitled) pieces here get into more playful vocal sounds and devices. Strange lispy pops, beat-box-like rhythmic techniques, and a grating screech on the appropriately titled "Scary Cat" all point to an artist figuring out her sound and having fun trying different approaches.

Julianna Barwick - Sanguine EP (flac 91mb)

01 Unt. 1 1:16
02 Unt. 2 2:01
03 Unt. 3 1:17
04 Unt. 4 2:32
05 Unt. 5 1:57
06 Unt. 6 2:02
07 Unt. 7 2:23
08 Unt. 8 1:45
09 Unt. 9 1:30
10 Scary Cat 0:35
11 Dancing With Friends 3:00
12 Sanguine 1:49
13 Red Tit Warbler 2:03

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The fact that Julianna Barwick's second full-length LP, The Magic Place, was released within a few months of Grouper's double-sized A I A collection illustrates an exciting growing interest by female artists in ambient, minimal, drone-like approaches to recording, a terrain usually dominated by male performers. The Magic Place represents a vast leap forward over her debut, Sanguine, in that she has expanded her songs, allowing them to breathe more. Her vocal arrangements are haunting, ethereal, resulting in an aesthetic not too dissimilar from the music found on Slowdive's final album, Pygmalion. In fact, they rather sound like a slightly stoned version of The Beach Boys ... as overly romantic wallflowers ... at Goth Dance Party Night. Barwick's music relies on carefully manicured and developed loops. However, she adds flourishes here and there, such as pianos, bass, and drums, to her predominantly choral backdrop. As a result, the tracks build quite nicely. Barwick effectively draws from older influences like Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports while maintaining a distinctly fresh approach to her music. The Magic Place is clearly a cinematic set-piece as seen through a soft-focus lens in slow motion.

Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place (flac 199mb)

01 Envelop 5:39
02 Keep Up the Good Work 4:48
03 The Magic Place 3:51
04 Cloak 4:05
05 White Flag 4:53
06 Vow 4:39
07 Bob in Your Gait 4:03
08 Prizewinning 6:42
09 Flown 5:04

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Julianna's collaboration with avant-garde music titan Ikue Mori, should come as no surprise. The resulting album, FRKWYS Vol. 6, is part of a series of collaborative, often improvised live sets released by RVNG Intl. in vinyl-only limited editions. Mori, known to many as the drummer of No Wave legends DNA (which also featured the guitarist Arto Lindsay), has long been a force in experimental music, known for her manipulation of drum machines and other sonic glitchery, as well as her collaborations with Fred Frith, Kim Gordon, Robert Quine, and Christian Marclay, among others. She shows restraint with Barwick on FRKWYS Vol. 6, giving the relative newcomer the needed musical space for her vocal loop manipulations.

For those expecting The Magic Place Part Two or the tinnitus-inducing noise of Merzbow: you will be sorely disappointed. The improvisations on FRKWYS Vol. 6 are rather placid, the digital equivalent of a light summer rain. Mori's laptop sonics are constant but never insistent. As a result, Barwick's vocal interjections arrive as a welcome guest. Her wordless utterances, combined with the percussive, mutilated beats supplied by Mori, are reminiscent of Yoko Ono's Fluxus experiments on the second disc of her 1970 double-album Fly. In other words, this is not very accessible music to a broader listening public, even to those who own the latest albums by Panda Bear or John Maus. The big difference between the two is that Ono was preoccupied with Janovian catharsis at the time and Barwick appears far more interested in the sublime. By teaming up with Mori, this impulse on the part of Barwick is somewhat tempered, and often for the good, generating a fascinating musical tension between her careful premeditation and the unexpected bleeps and bloops supplied by her collaborator. In the end, FRKWYS Vol. 6 is a fine, but hardly essential, record for fans of Barwick, Mori, or experimental music in general.

Julianna Barwick & Ikue Mori - FRKWYS Vol. 6 ( flac   215mb)

01 Dream Sequence 12:55
02 Stalactite Castle 13;22
03 Rain and Shine at the Lotus Pond 10:12
04 Rejoinder 9:19

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Julianna Barwick's Nepenthe, the follow-up to her marvelous second album The Magic Place (2011), inhabits many of the same ethereal realms as its predecessor. On that record, one of my favorites of the last few years, Barwick combines her densely layered vocal harmonies with spare loops and brief piano motifs. Surprisingly, this restrictive musical approach yields a verdant kind of daydream music, akin to the spacey after-effects of a mild concussion. It reminds me of those abundant, epiphany-depicting snippets found in the two most recent Terrence Malick films (The Tree of Life and To the Wonder) where his characters kinetically frolic inside teeming shrouds of white muslin curtains. Musically, it shares some of the same spaces as Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) and Slowdive's Pygmalion (1995) yet always flirts dangerously with the New Age cliches of Enya. Fortunately, it avoided these snares.

Nepenthe is an appropriate title for Barwick's third album. The ancient term refers to an elixir or intoxicant that creates a lacuna in ones memory to help them forget painful memories. There are a couple of immediately striking things about the new album. Barwick has refused to alter her aesthetic. By that, I mean there is still an abundance of eerie but lovely vocal harmonies, the utilization of loops, and minimal percussion. But she has made slight modifications. The production possesses more clarity here than it did on The Magic Place. While this generally benefits the music found on Nepenthe, there are a few times where the clarity—the kind of unfortunate clarity that allows one to see the transparent wires holding up the Cowardly Lion's tale on Blu-Ray copies of The Wizard of Oz when viewed on HDTV screens—sends Barwick's music hurtling down to Middle Earth. You know, the one where Enya sings to Hobbits? This is especially apparent on "The Harbinger" and "Forever." Fortunately, these New Ageisms take up less than a fifth of the album's running time.

For the most part, the tracks on Nepenthe take few chances as it relates to the distinct approach she perfected on The Magic Place. One track that distinguishes itself from the pack is "Crystal Lake." While it offers few variations structurally, there is a repeated piano figure whose pitch is manipulated to resemble the effect of someone intermittently putting their finger lightly on a record as it spins on a phonograph. This yields what might be her most disorienting song to date. Because Nepenthe offers such few challenges or variations to the music found on The Magic Place, I can't say it’s her best effort to date. On the other hand, its overall-improved sonics and further exploration of her already-established aesthetic generate some awfully lovely music. Fans of her previous work will find little to be disappointed about here.

Julianna Barwick - Nepenthe +Rosabi EP (flac   266mb)

01 Offing 3:16
02 The Harbinger 5:51
03 One Half 3:41
04 Look Into Your Own Mind 4:37
05 Pyrrhic 4:21
06 Labyrinthine 4:33
07 Forever 5:30
08 Adventurer of the Family 2:58
09 Crystal Lake 4:23
10 Waving to You 2:37
Rosabi EP
11 Pure 3:18
12 Meet You At Midnight 4:04
13 Two Moons 5:00
14 Blood Brothers 3:54


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Prior to Will, Julianna Barwick's albums each had a singular sense of place reflecting where they were made, whether it was her own bedroom or a converted swimming pool in Iceland. However, Barwick recorded her fourth album in several distinct locales: Upstate New York, Asheville, North Carolina's Moog Factory, and Lisbon, Portugal, where the piano she played on songs like "Beached" was the same one she used on The Magic Place, and originally belonged to her early champion Sufjan Stevens. This globe-trotting genesis makes Will more varied than any of her previous work. Instead of flowing into each other seamlessly, its songs are self-contained atmospheres, and within each track, Barwick explores different kinds of motion. Elongated drones suggest an endless horizon on "Wist," synths and vocals ring around each other on "Nebula," and piano and bass trace wide arcs on "Big Hollow." Will's discrete songs also let Barwick explore different emotions. Where her previous music felt like it went on forever -- or like it always existed -- the defined edges of these tracks emphasize that the listener can only spend a short amount of time with them. Barwick's willingness to avoid a sustained mood is risky, but it gives Will a restless poignancy. It feels a little like a loss when "St. Apollonia"'s idyllic echoes fade instead of building into the next song; "Same," one of two duets with Mas Ysa's Thomas Arsenault, evokes the aching, full-throated beauty of This Mortal Coil as he and Barwick express a passion so intense it can't last. While Barwick returned to recording on her own with this album, a handful of well-chosen contributors keep some of Nepenthe's wide-open feel. "Someway," the other Arsenault collaboration, is another standout, with the earthier sensuality of his vocals balancing her soaring bliss. Elsewhere, Dutch cellist Maarten Vos lends a soothing depth to songs like "Heading Home," while percussionist Jamie Ingalls' powerful work helps make the fiery finale "See, Know" a true climax compared to her earlier albums' subtler culminations. An intentionally fragmented portrait of change, Will's cracks show the growth in Barwick's music, and its pieces are facets that allow different aspects of her talent to shine.

Julianna Barwick - Will (flac 181mb)

01 St. Apolonia 2:13
02 Nebula 5:34
03 Beached 4:08
04 Same 4:55
05 Wist 2:40
06 Big Hollow 5:30
07 Heading Home 3:57
08 Someway 4:30
09 See, Know 5:04

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