Florine

We Say...

Review by Jayson Greene

Just as you can never dip your foot twice into the same spot in a river, you can never hear a Julianna Barwick composition a second time. The uncannily poised Brooklyn performer builds her reverberant cathedrals of vocal harmony alone, piling her voice slowly and purposefully up in layers, and every time she sits down to record, it is a new experience. From a few wispy strands of melody, she erects massive, dreaming towers of sound; listening to her music is like witnessing an entire city rise from the ground and crumble back into dust. But when Barwick's foot comes up off the looping pedal and the last echo fades into the air, so does the piece you have just heard. You may still be sitting there spellbound, but Barwick has already moved on, to the next improvisation, the next show, the next moment. The methods might be constant, but the song never remains the same.

Which only makes this ineffably gorgeous six-song EP that much more precious. As a document of Barwick's trancelike approach to music-making, it is fascinating, a window into an intensely personal and spontaneous creative process that sometimes resembles a Zen spiritual practice. But taken at face value, as an album that rewards and demands repeated listens, it is just as stunning. The circling, high-pitched cries that wing the edges of "Cloudbank"; the small, heartbeat-like sound Barwick makes with her mouth on "Choose" that serves as the song's pulse before morphing gradually into a buzzing synth; and maybe most of all, the glittering ice palace that Barwick conjures on "Anjos" with just two rolling pianos, phased apart a la Steve Reich, and some wordless "ooohs": — such moments only increase in wonder when you realize they're essentially byproducts of a fruitful improv session; it's a reminder of just how much beauty you can spill out armed with nothing more than faith in serendipity and a little courage.

As an album, Florine is an immersion in the pure pleasures of sound: Anyone who has ever held down a foot pedal on a piano, banged out a chord, and sat there savoring the resonances will find deep satisfaction in the simple beauty of Barwick's voice as it layers endlessly atop itself. But Florine is much more than a warm bath in a New Agey reflective pool; her on-the-spot compositions are labyrinthine, and you can spend a lifetime getting lost in just one of them. Maybe Julianna has already moved on, but we're going to stick around for awhile with Florine; there's just too much here to discover.