ethereal, ecstatic

Over the course of the last six months or so, I’ve fallen back in love with going to see bands live. I think it started in Iceland, where I was hearing new (and often unusual) bands every night, and it’s continued unabated since then. These days, I try to primarily check out bands whose albums we’ll be getting on eMusic; it helps to recontextualize the records for me, and to shed a little bit more light about the personalities of the bands. Plus, I inevitably end up hearing an opener or two that piques my interest. This past Friday I went down to Cake Shop to hear White Hinterland (their forthcoming full-length is like a pocketful of magic), but ended up being more intrigued by one of their openers, a woman named Julianna Barwick.

We have Julianna’s album on eMusic, but it doesn’t adequately capture how grand and mysterious her songs sound live. Brawick’s primary — and, at times, only — instrument is the human voice. She sits down behind a keyboard, sings a musical phrase into a microphone, records it, pitch-shifts it and loops it. She does this over and over and over to create a kind of “ghost choir” effect — a heavenly tangle of voices loop-de-looping endlessly. It was both hypnotic and unnerving, like someone stripped all the music from a Cocteau Twins song and just left Elizabeth Fraser’s voice whipping in the wind.

You can get a slightly better idea of Barwick’s marvelous, mysterious sound from this (very dark) clip shot at a performance at Brooklyn’s Glasslands Gallery last month: