Avant-pop composer Julia Holter: ‘When I hear sirens, I find myself wanting to sing with them’

Outside the station where I meet Julia Holter, a busker is playing the bagpipes: a fantastic drone of sound that cuts through the noise of oncoming traffic. It’s serendipitous, I suggest, that the city is greeting Holter with one of her all-time favourite instruments. Bagpipes featured heavily on the LA composer’s last album, 2018’s critically adored Aviary, weaving its skirls into her gorgeous, neoclassical chamber pop.

They find their way again onto Holter’s new album Something in the Room She Moves, a collection of songs that shed her previous albums like a skin, sloughing off the brassy melodrama of Aviary for something new. Across five albums and 13 years, Holter has combined her kinetic dreamlike visions with pretty much everything – jazz-infused post-rock, classical, psych-folk, electro-pop – to spawn a broad, sometimes inscrutable sound, as rewarding as it is mysterious.

Holter’s music is often described as intellectual: brainy beats for brainiacs. It probably has something to do with the references to Euripides’ Hippolytus, the French novelist Colette, Dante’s Inferno, and the poets Sappho and Frank O’Hara, all of which she deploys as casually as other musicians might an “oooh” or an “aaah”. Holter shrugs off the cerebral label. “The way I use that stuff always feels to me a little bit lighter than how it’s been portrayed,” she says. They’re less references than they are flotsam washing up on the shores of her brain. It’s not that deep, is her point.

Take her new album Something In the Room She Moves. The title has been framed as a feminist subversion of that Beatles lyric about admiring a woman’s gait. In truth, it’s just what came to Holter when naming the project file on her computer. She’d just watched Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back and was singing a lot of Beatles songs to her newborn baby. “I had to name it something and for some reason, I wrote that,” she says, uninterested in probing further. Holter concedes that she did write “something in the room he moves” initially – “But I don’t know why, and then I changed it. I don’t really have a logical explanation; I think it is to do with capturing the subconscious at a moment in time, preserving it or something.”

That said, she welcomes the interpretations. “A lot of people asked if it was a reference to A Room of One’s Own [by Virginia Woolf], about a woman needing space to work,” says Holter. “Which it wasn’t – but it’s interesting because when I had my baby, I was having a lot of trouble writing lyrics and recording vocals at home. I used to have more space.” She pauses; maybe Woolf’s words did seep into the subconscious. “It’s always in retrospect that I notice themes,” she says.

Holter is a slow talker and deep thinker. Presented with a lunch menu, she jokes it’ll take 20 minutes for her to choose. In the end, she can’t decide and orders two meals. Her thoughts come in a slow-drip process, as if wrung through a cheesecloth – it’s very unlike her music, which tends to arrive in rushes. New single “Spinning” is a drunken lurch into love’s unsteady ground as Holter’s nonsensical speaksong haphazardly dodges the spurts of jazz woodwind that erupt like little geysers. Meanwhile, “Evening Mood” marvels in the vast possibility of night-time: the clinking of wine glasses and the heartbeat-like soft mallet drums, all cloaked in a shimmery synth that offers something akin to the cover of nightfall. The music is instinctive, sounds coaxed from her environment and her subconscious.

There are less literary references on Something in the Room She Moves; pregnant at the time, Holter found she was unable to focus long enough to read anything. True to form, there are plenty of other avant-garde elements, bits of tape manipulation and field notes. “Sun Girl” is full of these little sonic experiments: a recording of a playground near her house in LA, a piccolo, the percussive heartbeat of a phone thudding against a table. “It’s all about being playful,” she says. “And sometimes very silly – very jammy. We jammed to this basic structure I put together just to tear apart.”

Field recordings have always been part of Holter’s toolbox. “It’s about creating this cinematic feeling where sounds that are familiar can lead you in a certain direction,” she says. “Creating an atmosphere for your brain to associate with. Playground equals playful.” I ask if her ears are particularly tuned to this sort of thing, pricking up at every noise in her vicinity? Right on time, an ambulance blares by. “I’ve realised that I’m a bit ADHD. Either I really focus on something, or I don’t notice it at all,” she says. “But when I hear sirens, I do find myself wanting to sing with them or hit a pitch that’s in harmony.”

Holter’s interest in field recordings began when she was a student at the University of Michigan, majoring in composition. “I hated everything I was writing,” she says bluntly. “I think it was attractive to me because I was trying to ‘find my voice’, as they say.” College was hard but formative, Holter continues, careful not to sound at all woe-is-me about it. “There were these really incredible musicians that are so talented and virtuosic, they practise five hours a day at least and I was very intimidated by that sort of rigour,” she says. “I was probably seen as a little spacey in comparison, so I have these foundational insecurities probably stemming from that.”

She holds no ill will for the professor who scolded her for recording music as opposed to notating for instrumentalists. That, he said, was not composition. “His was just a very old school way of thinking,” she says. “It’s not a big deal really, but back then I was really sensitive, so every little comment was such a big deal.” Despite his protests, Holter felt it in her gut that this was her way in: “I knew it was something I liked and that was a new feeling.”

Holter is equally unconcerned about being a woman in a male-dominated field. “I honestly don’t know what to say because I personally feel like I haven’t experienced a lot of sexism,” she says. “I mean yes, I’ve experienced sexism, but maybe the discomfort I have with talking about it is that I never genuinely experienced a lot of adversity, so it feels fake for me to go off about my struggle as a woman. I’ve been sheltered from it to some degree.”

The production on Something in the Room She Moves, watery and shifting, was inspired by the 2008 Studio Ghibli film Ponyo, which she watched for the first time with her two-year-old daughter. “It was her first ever movie,” Holter says. “She’d never seen a screen before, so it was a big deal. And for me, I think there was a weird childhood thing going on because The Little Mermaid was so important to me, and Ponyo is that story but better because it’s this cool fish rather than this hot sexy mermaid, who was my role model for some reason.”

The movie’s themes of fluidity and transformation – it’s about a goldfish princess who encounters a human boy – struck a chord with Holter who, being pregnant, had body transformation on her mind. “And mortality,” she adds. “I was suddenly having these crazy horror feelings I’d never experienced. It was crazy how intense it was. I’ve never felt hormonal changes like that.”

Her feelings were amplified by the fact her pregnancy dovetailed with a pandemic. “Everyone was dying,” she says. “It’s hard to remember now, but people were just dying all the time.” Her grandparents died around then, and so did her 18-year-old nephew – though not from Covid. Something in the Room... is dedicated to him. The idea of gender transition was also on her mind, her friend, the composer Alex Temple, having transitioned herself. As ever, the inspiration behind the song is loose – a marble rolling about in a bowl.

“Not everyone has the same transforming experience, but everyone is born and everyone dies,” says Holter. Her nephew’s death came as a shock. “I wish I’d had more time with him; it was one of those things where he was a teenager, so I didn’t see him as much in his last years,” she says, eyes downcast. “We recorded music together and even set up a bandcamp page called…” Holter pauses, groping around her mind for the name. Moments pass before she turns to her phone for help. “Hollow Wind. It was called Hollow Wind”.

Holter had grieved people before, but this was different. “Obviously my sister was…” she drifts off. “It happened a little after I gave birth, and you know what’s crazy about having a child? You give birth and the first feeling is the immediate thought of having something so precious that you could lose.” Holter begins to cry but when I apologise for making her upset, she only smiles. “It’s part of it. I don’t mind being emotional.”

‘Something in the Room She Moves’ is out on 22 March via Domino