Julianna Barwick

New one's pretty great. After having my hopes raised by the return of the Magic Place font.

God, this is gorgeous stuff. "Oh, Memory" with Mary Lattimore's harp and the strings on "Safe" are particularly sublime. The title track, too, is one to get lost in.

Today I learned that Ninja Tune still exists.

I've been deeply enjoying this new one

some parts of this are as lovely as ever but it has a widescreen cinematic quality that does a lot less for me. Listening to The Magic Place felt like stumbling into something intimate and private despite its gargantuan sound, whereas a lot of this just sounds like big soundtrack music

The first three songs on Healing Is a Miracle have stayed with me all year. They will pop up on random playlists and everything around me just shuts down. I particularly love the mix of light and heavy textures on this one. The bass can be enveloping.

Enya??

and what's wrong with that

the album is nice and I really needed it last year

and probably this year

yeah, this was a major record for me last year -- definitely a top favorite

I always enjoy a new album, but to be honest it gets hard to tell them apart.

Turns out that what I really needed was JB + ~~~~flute vibes~~~~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APlC8ldtD2s

The three collaborations on this one (especially Oh Memory w/ Mary Lattimore) + the fulsome lower register made this one stand out from the rest of her catalog for me. Probably still reach for Nepenthe most of the time, though.

Healing is a Miracle has crept up as probably my favorite record from 2020, as Indexed notes when a track from it comes on the whole world seems to red shift into prehistory. The adjacency to Grouper, so close but also so different, makes me think of the future as a catalog with no gaps.

Somehow I never got around to Healing is a Miracle, or maybe I wasn't paying enough attention for it to resonate with me, but listening to it today it is bowling me over. Magic Place is the one that I hold close to my heart, and the usual Julianna Barwick stuff on Healing is totally on par with that, while the guests and additions add a whole other emotional dimension. Indexed otm re: "the fulsome lower register." I surprised myself with the comparison but when the deep rumbling synth comes in on "Inspirit" it reminds me of when the synths come in on "O Superman" and add a whole array of richer, more foreboding colors to the palette. Great album. I will probably still listen to Magic Place more because it is such mood music to me, and the moods on this one are more diverse. But without giving it too much thought this one is feeling like her best artistic achievement thus far.