Julia Holter Aviary CD

Aviary is an epic journey through what Julia Holter describes as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world.” Out via Domino, it’s the Los Angeles composer’s most breathtakingly expansive album yet, full of startling turns and dazzling instrumental arrangements.

The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 record, Have You in My Wilderness, it takes as its starting point a line from a 2009 short story by writer Etel Adnan: "I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds." It’s a scenario that sounds straight out of a horror movie, but it’s also a pretty good metaphor for life in 2018, with its endless onslaught of political scandals, freakish natural disasters, and voices shouting their desires and resentments into the void. “Amidst all the internal and external babble we experience daily, it's hard to find one's foundation,” says Holter. “I think this album is reflecting that feeling of cacophony and how one responds to it as a person—how one behaves, how one looks for love, for solace.

Maybe it’s a matter of listening to and gathering the seeming madness, of forming something out of it and envisioning a future.” Fittingly for an album about the chatter of the mind, most of the songs on Aviary grew out of “cathartic solo improvisations” with voice and synth, recorded by Holter at home throughout 2017. Where Wilderness showcased her knack for writing immaculately constructed pop ballads, she describes Aviary as an exercise in letting her subconscious show her the way.

“I was really trying to have fun and make a daring record. I found myself drawn to certain things that would happen when improvising—surprise utterances and slips.”