Labyrinthine – Julianna Barwick
Many people make ambient music – where glacially slow movements are designed to hypnotize us, to give us a sense the deep structures of the world around us. And many other people make inspirational music – which uplifts, heartens and invigorates us. But I am not sure anyone in the world combines these two things with more care and astonishing skill than Julianna Barwick. She works with incredibly simple tools: short hymnal movements looped together with ethereal choirs, and the most delicate of instrumental interjections. But the result is simply entrancing. Imagine Sigur Ros performing a collection of Gregorian chants – produced by Stars of the Lid. Her music doesn’t just soothe, or provide a sense of peace; it reveals hidden gaps in our sense of the world, perturbations, anomalous movements. But it does this with such grace that we can resist the urge to elide their genuine difference and read them back into the world of the customary.
When Horatio says “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” to the dying Hamlet, I imagine that he means Nepenthe.