Julia Holter’s Sonic Aviary: A Journey Through Noise and Light

The L.A. singer-songwriter helped me deal with some heavy grief.

In the summer of 2018, I was working as an editor in the Brooklyn office of Bandcamp Daily when my colleague J. Edward Keyes told me about the album Aviary, from the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Julia Holter. I’d been a fan of Holter’s music since Have You In My Wilderness, her 2015 release, so of course I was going to listen. By then, I’d become a full-on jazz head, digging through the back channels of the site, excavating obscure albums by the French pianist Jef Gilson and new ones by the British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. If your band had the word “ensemble” in its name, or if the record was some lost relic from 1970s Brazil, chances were I would listen and commission a feature on it.

Back then, Aviary’s opening song “Turn the Light On” hit me like a wave, a jazz-meets-classical composition of billowing strings, rolling drums, and Holter’s voice: filtered but not really, frantic and soaring, sitting atop the dissonant arrangement yet situated within it. “Thank,” she declared flatly, as if revving up, “-ful you’ll come baaaaack.” She ended this line with a full-throated wail, punctuating the words and their place amongst the orchestra. The song erupts immediately, with no buildup or prelude, as if dropped mid-thought into Holter’s internal monologue.

At the time, “Turn the Light On” registered as an excellent track and that was it, something I’d play occasionally and slip into the blends I’d compile for Dublab and WorldwideFM. But after seeing my mother die and coping with the subsequent grief, “Turn the Light On” became something else entirely. I’d play it on long drives and weep uncontrollably, the volume on blast to get the full breadth of sound. It felt like Holter opened the gates for the people I’ve lost since 2023: my mother, my aunts, my dear friend. As if she stood at the pulpit summoning their spirits to enter:

Come in, Delores
Come in, Claudia and Claudette
Come in, Leon

No matter how I felt whenever the song started playing, I’d hear that arrangement, imagine my ancestors walking into paradise, and lose my composure. Though Holter’s opening line referenced a loved one coming back, I knew mine weren’t, at least not physically, and the pain of no longer seeing them alive hurt me the most.

Anyone who’s lost someone close knows how paralyzing sorrow can be. Some days I think I’m getting better: I’ll play “Turn the Light On” or Archie Shepp’s “Rest Enough (Song to Mother)” and not flinch. Other days, I’ll catch a quick thought and can’t move: my mom sitting on the right corner of the chaise, my aunts cursing and laughing their way through the crab feast, Leon and I — in early 2016 — talking about this new kid named Anderson .Paak and his album Malibu. While these are the memories I don’t want to shake, I never know when or where they’ll arise.

In an email, Holter said she wrote “Turn the Light On” to convey a feeling of deep love. “It’s one of the few songs I have from that era of my music where the love feels warm and undeterred in that way,” she told me. Inspired by Alice Coltrane’s arranging approach (the strings on “Words I Heard” and “Colligere” were influenced by Coltrane’s 1971 album Universal Consciousness), the rest of Aviary is best described as chamber pop, orchestral songs with a light bounce to them, bathing in sun but with palpable weight. “I think that kind of deep, inner vibration way of thinking was what I was trying to channel,” Holter continued. “Like when I first turn on a record like Turiya Sings [Coltrane’s 1982 album], I immediately am sucked into some other level of existence, maybe a vacuum of all-embracing deep love that doesn’t falter.”

Where songs like “Whether” and “Chaitius” were constructed meticulously, “Turn the Light On” was recorded start to finish with everyone in the studio together. “Everyone just jamming really crazy and loud the whole time,” she wrote. “The only instruction I had for the players was just continuous loud tremolos on the string instruments.” And though Holter was initially uncomfortable with having her voice on the track, the album’s executive producer Cole Marsden Greif-Neill convinced her to keep it. “I think the unhinged quality (for me) was intense, but that is also good probably and makes it more interesting,” she continued.

Indeed, Holter’s voice, along with the arrangement, make the song special. That the vocals echo and border on punk give it an edge beyond the concert hall. It’s what I play when I need to blow the dust out of my head — or, more pointedly, when I need to cry alone while traveling along I-95. This past March, I stood behind Holter in a line to see the band [Ahmed] at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the effects of the song then. It was a festival after all, and my musings on bereavement didn’t jibe with the free jazz wafting through the glass. We spoke for a little bit, about writing and avant-garde music, then proceeded with our respective evenings. It wasn’t until later that I had the heart to bear such personal emotions about the track.

Having followed her work, “Turn the Light On” felt like a departure from the serenity she’d been cultivating. It had this chaotic ferocity I admired, almost like Sun Ra if he’d played Carnegie, the sax of Marshall Allen shaking the pillars. In a world that’s become too fast and, well, too much, “Turn the Light On” is a reset after all the scrolling and Zoom calls, when you’ve chased dreams to exhaustion and can’t fully convey the fatigue.

“It sounds so full of energy and intense,” she said, reflecting on the track and the album seven years later, “and I always am so enamored of the musicians I’ve worked with, and their work shines through on this recording for sure.”

Ultimately, Holter concluded, “this whole album Aviary will always probably be something that resonates with me because of the indulgence in timbre and layers. It all is bringing together frequencies I want to hear and embracing that, and I am so so glad that any of this can mean something to others as well. Because it always is an experiment.”

Edit: Here’s a full list of the players — sans Holter — on Aviary. They deserve shine, too.

Corey Fogel (drums)
Devra Hoff (double bass)
Dina Maccabee (viola)
Sarah Belle Reid (trumpet, electronics)
Tashi Wada (Prophet synth)
Kenny Gilmore (production, recording, mixing)
Cole MGN (executive producer)