Julia Holter on the accidental fantasia of Materia

She’s tip-toed through post-language adventure travelogues on Loud City Song’s “In the Green Wild”, sent out a painterly, maximalist S.O.S. from a space above our heads on Aviary’s “Words I Heard”, insisted that “elsewhere” is her name now and sent herself off to sea on Have You In My Wilderness, and demanded a story to explain the “circular magic” of creation on Something in the Room She Moves. On that last record, her most recent, Holter seemed to let one crucial facet of her creative world slip: her feet, now those of a parent, must occasionally touch the ground. Even while oscillating between the real world and a place beyond our physical senses in her world, however, there is an overwhelming feeling of love bearing down on our necks in the space she leaves in the arrangements – threatening to flatten us if expressed too clearly. These emotions don’t quite need to be spelled out in Holter’s fantasia, but there are glimpses that make the weight difficult to bear. Maybe this is where the make believe comes in handy. Over the phone, Julia Holter is not suspended in a fairytale, but in her kitchen baking banana bread, occasionally getting distracted talking through the ephemerality...