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Music in mind

Julia Holter continues working on her tower of song

In her music Julia Holter creates sonic journeys with a consummate craftsmanship that draws from a wide range of sources.

A classically-trained pianist working in avant-pop realms, she incorporates influences such as medieval composer Guillame de Machaut, 1960s girl groups and the stream of consciousness operas of Robert Ashley into her work.

Holter's debut album, Tragedy, released in 2011, is conceptually rooted in Euripides' Hippolytus, while 2013's Loud City Song, loosely based on Colette's novel Gigi, features a cover of Barbara

Lewis' top 40 soul hit "Hello Stranger" set in amongst other original tunes. The indie singer/songwriter likes to throw some curves into her music.

Tragedy and 2012's Ekstasis, she recorded on her own in layers, while Loud City Song and Holter's latest, Have You in My Wilderness, bring in a producer and a full band to accompany her. Perhaps because she's writing with other musicians in mind Holter has begun to move towards more conventional song structures but the transition does not seem to have affected her intense esthetic at all. The song remains the same mainly because the young Holter is an old hand when it comes to thinking about compositional technique.

"When I was like nine I remember having music in my mind," Holter says on the phone from Los Angeles. "I wanted to write but I was like, 'No, I can't do that.' I didn't know about contemporary composers. A lot of Americans don't understand that there are people who are still composers. It's kind of like poets - people don't know there are people who are actually poets."

Holter got her first taste of music as an art form as a teenager at L.A.'s Alexander Hamilton High School Academy of Music. "I had some great teachers in high school," she says. "I went to a regular school that had a music program that was pretty strong and teachers there taught us theory and that was pretty important for me.

"Bob Bruning, the electronic music class teacher at Hamilton, took us to the NAMM show, the big music technology convention in L.A., and we got to meet Bob Moog - Robert Moog, the guy who invented the moog. It was so crazy - he came to our class. It was extremely cool. When I started at Hamilton, I was like 14, I guess and I said, 'I want to make electronic music.' Basically what that meant is I went to Guitar Center and bought a big Casio."

Holter started seriously composing while she was studying at the University of Michigan. "My first teacher at Michigan was a composer named Susan Botti and I think she was pretty important for me as an inspiration. She was a singer and she was the first teacher that I worked with there. I started college at 17 and that would have been pretty formative as a female inspiration. It was good for me to meet her and begin to learn about other women."

Finding her own footing as a musician Holter further studied composition at CalArts before joining Linda Perhacs' band in 2010 and collaborating with Night Jewel (Ramona Gonzalez) among others.

In Holter's own work anything goes. "The writing is always singular for me. I write it alone. It's not really one way. I hear melodies sometimes and sometimes I hear words with them and sometimes I make up words first. Sometimes I'm at the piano notating some kind of figuration that my fingers are doing, other times I'm just playing chords and I write down the chords and words just kind of come out while I'm playing and then I elaborate them. On the last record I would just play chords because it was more of a traditional pop form."

Long an admirer of Joni Mitchell, and particularly the album Court and Spark, in her latest material Holter reaches a new level of emotional immediacy and directness while losing none of her poetic edge. Mitchell always tried to keep a dialogue going between pop and poetics throughout her songs and that can also be heard on much of With You in My Wilderness in tracks such as "Lucette Stranded on the Island" and "Sea Calls Me Home."

Ramona Gonzalez's husband Cole Marsden Grief-Neill (a member of Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti before becoming Beck's engineer) mixed Holter's album Ekstasis and co-produced Loud City Song and With You in My Wilderness.

While writing music is a meticulous, all-consuming process for Holter the results are brought on demos into a studio environment where they receive further treatment.

"Cole does things very quickly but we still have to mix which usually means arranging over and over again," she says. "All the vocals are recorded at home. It's not fast in the end, it's part of the composition process in the way you're working with new material and you can't predict a lot of things. He's good at making decisions and I'm not good at making decisions, so that's very helpful." Holter completes a West Coast tour in Vancouver at the Cobalt on Feb. 4 before heading off for Europe to start a new round of shows in Paris on Feb. 8.