The Magic Place

VINYL FORMAT. The Magic Place is the third record from Julianna Barwick, and the first to be released by Asthmatic Kitty. This nine piece, forty-three minute album is a cinematic journey through glacial pacing and drifting drones. The occasional icy down-plink of piano, Julianna's gorgeous churchhouse sigh of a voice, a swell of a dozen voices rising in harmony - this is music from the inside of the fortress of solitude, the work of a solitary creator, a message from a crystal palace of reverb and avant-choral bliss. "The Magic Place was a tree on our farm," says Louisiana-raised Brooklynite Julianna Barwick. "It was in the back pasture. It was one tree that grew up, down and around. You had to crawl in and once you were inside, it was like there were different rooms, and you could actually lay in the branches. We named it 'The Magic Place' because it really was magical - especially for a kid. . . and that's how I feel about my life right now - without trying to sound too hippy dippy or cosmic, this year has definitely been a magical one." And so goes Julianna's Asthmatic Kitty Records debut, The Magic Place, a nine-piece full-length album of magic and solace, bursting joy and healing tones. Julianna's mostly-a-capella music is built from her voice multi-tracked through a loop station. There's more backing instrumentation on this one than on previous albums but it's the vocals - soaring high in reverb-drenched, wordless harmonies - that matter most here. It's the layered fragments and pieces that become an intricate pattern through technology; it's the sound of a rising thing, a big group harmony as a splash of sunlight through a car window, a sound that feels like hope and ascendance and patience and intimacy. The Magic Place begins with "Envelop" (which, incidentally, is a perfect one-word description of Julianna's aesthetic). "Envelop" is Julianna's voice and a warm drone of synth and it builds into a great crystalline tower of fragile sound as more Juliannas join the first Julianna in a triumphant super-choir. Her inspiration here is the a capella church hymns she grew up singing; the way a roomful of diverse voices can join together to fill up a space. Says Julianna about her church singin' days: "You could really hear all the layers, harmonies, rounds, the men and the women, the claps. . . everything. Some of those hymns are so beautiful." And "hymn" is an operative word here - these are like ecstatic church hymns building in power as more voices join the congregation, rising to the rafters, progressing with extreme patience, based on a slow, almost glacial pace that leads to something bigger than itself. These are patient songs, and in the patience comes the record's most sublime and captivating moments.