Inspired by the 1988 Bill Murray movie of the same name, we bring you the eighth in a series of interviews called Scrooged.
Past
One Thirty BPM: So, just to give you a rundown, the title of this interview series is Scrooged, like the Bill Murray movie from the late 80’s, with the ghost of Christmas past and present and future. I don’t know if you are familiar.
Julianna Barwick: Of course, I’m a huge Bill Murray fanatic.
Yeah, it’s a great movie. So starting out, you’ve talked a lot about your time in church when you were young, what kind of church did you attend?
It was Church of Christ.
Tell me about it, I don’t know much about it.
It’s a Christian denomination… It’s not Baptist, and not Episcapalian, it’s the Church of Christ. It’s so prevalant in the South. I grew up in Louisiana and you can’t drive two miles without seeing a Church of Christ. They are alllllll over the place.
And, my dad was the youth minister for, like, twenty-something years. I was there three times a week for worship services and then extra, because my dad worked there, so I’d go there and hang out with him. And, he did all the summer camps, so it was pretty much all the time.
What was the music like?
Well, the way that we sang in church… it wasn’t like I’ve read a few times, that I was in a church choir, which isn’t neccesarily true, it was just the way our congregation sang — a cappella. No instruments, no nothing. Just voices and clapping.
Is that something you are still involved in?
-pause- No. -laughter-
Is that hard to reconcile with your family or is that all understood now?
Uh… I try not to talk about it too much, because, well, you know…
I can relate, though. I used to go to church with my mother and sister when I was younger. And, it’s not anything about religion, neccesarily, I just didn’t like the actual church aspect… the hypocrisy. But, I can still really respect the beauty of it and all these people getting together and doing the same thing.
Totally. I gained a ton from it, I really did.
I think there is a lot of beauty in ritual, I guess… At what point did you get into making your own music?
Well, I was always one of these day-dreamy kids, singing all the time, and we had a piano and was always super musical. And I was in choir in school and had voice lessons in high school and was in an opera chorus right after high school, and I would tinker around with making my own melodies all through the years. I remember teaching friends in third grade a song that I made up. But, I think I was like 18 or 19 and my friend let me borrow his four-track and I started messing around with that and an acoustic guitar and vocal parts, just playing around.
Then I moved to New York and after a couple years started playing with friends, playing electric guitar with a ton of reverb and singing with reverb and just making it up as I went. It was early 2005 when a friend let me borrow a looping pedal and that’s when I started all this stuff.
And that sort of changed your game?
Yeah, that changed everything.
Was there a point when you got the looping pedal and got really into it that, like a point of no return where you decided this is something I want to pursue and try to make a career out of?
Well, pretty instantly, I was like “I love this, I love this, I love this.” Before, as I was saying, I was singing and playing guitar with tons of effects, and I didn’t want to commit to that and necessarily sing about any one thing. I wanted to make sounds. As soon as I started playing with that pedal, everything sort of came together and it was… it was satisfying. I sort of surprised myself at the end every time, I would never know where the thing was headed. And then I would stop and be like “that just happened, that’s just crazy.” There was no planning ahead of it.
I don’t have the work ethic where you just tour it all and compose for days and agonize over things, it works so well for me to sort of make things up on the spot and then piece things together later. So, that’s how the looping thing has developed because I just really enjoy making them. It’s really fun for me and I love the way it sounds.
Yeah, a lot of people do. -laughter- Well, apparently, as you have been getting a lot of positive attention. So, this is your second full-length album, and you have an EP, right?
Well, the thing about my first record was it was 24 minutes long. It was sort of 2 minute… I don’t know what you would call them. It was loops over and over with very little added on top. And Flourine was a 6-song EP, and that was about 24 minutes long, so the two records were the same length in time, but totally different.
So, maybe I was just unaware of your music before, but it seems like the attention level for The Magic Place is a lot higher than it was for your earlier releases. Were you encouraged or discouraged at the time of the release of your early work?
In the beginning, I had no agenda. I mean, I still don’t. I just wanted to make stuff. And I put out Sanguine and I hadn’t even played many shows, but I booked Lisbon and London in 2007 and went and played those shows, and then Pitchfork picked up something I did over there, so it all happened pretty fast. But, I just felt lucky, after that trip especially, because I had played no more than 10 shows ever before I went over there with my loop station and that setup, so by the time I got there it was still so new to me… it was just a magical trip. I did three shows in London and did a bunch of stuff in Portugal and magically got hooked up opening for the Dirty Projectors. And, this was my first trip ever doing anything and I had such a wonderful time, especially in Lisbon, which I also just got back from… it’s my favorite place.
Is it the magic place?
What?
Nothing, it was a bad joke. I’m sorry.
Oh, HA!
After that trip, I was like “I like this, I want to do this. If I can do this for real, like for real for real, I would be so happy.” Since then, I’ve just been working, not going to crazy, but just making my stuff, and it is finally at the point where I am doing it pretty full-time now. It feels great, becuase I love it.
Present
Are you overwhelmed by the reception that The Magic Place has received.
Um, yeah. But to be honest and as I said, I had no expectations at all. My brain, when I was recording it last year, I was totally inside it. And the thing was finished, I sent it out, and it came out three months later. I totally was not expecting the response that it has gotten. It’s been incredible. It’s really something else.
How did you get hooked-up with Asthmatic Kitty?
Through my homie Roberto. Roberto Carlos Lange, he has a couple other projects on Asthmatic Kitty, Helado Negro and Epstein, but he does a lot of other things, but those are just a couple things that he does. And, we played a show together and he talked to Asthmatic Kitty about me and that was how we were introduced.
Did you get to meet Sufjan?
Yes, I got to meet Sufjan! I’ve always been a huge fan of his stuff and actually got to a point in 2005 or something where I had to make myself stop listening to Seven Swans or I would never be able to listen to it ever again. So that part of it was really exciting, too.
Yeah, he is pretty damn incredible.
Yeah, he is prodigeous.
I was able to photograph him last October when he played L.A. and it was among the high points of my music journalism career.
For sure. He is just incredibly talented, it’s mind blowing. I saw his show in November for The Age Of Adz and it’s hard to believe that one brain can make that.
Totally, just the scope of everything on that tour, with the backing dancers and the projections and just the beauty of it all, opening with “Seven Swans,” and I don’t know if you had the same netting thing with the projections over it.
We had balloons shower down on us.
I didn’t get balloons! What’s up with that? -laughter-
Yeah, it was amazing. That show was the whole scope of Sufjan’s genius. You got the slow, pretty, sad stuff, which he is the best at making those kinds of songs, let’s face it, and then you had the crazy, fun, funky stuff. It was incredible. And I’m extremily happy to be in his company.
Tell me about South By Southwest. How was it for you?
I didn’t really love… I’m going to sound like an asshole, but… South By Southwest is so loud and busy and bustling, it’s just not my scene. But, I was really excited to do the Pitchfork thing because it was in this marvelously beautiful church with lots of lineup-mates that I really wanted to see. That show was awesome. It was a really great experience. The sound in that place was phenomenal.
I really wanted to go to that… but I didn’t.
It was a short trip. I was only there for 48 hours total.
I was scheduled to interview you there, actually. But, I was down there for one day and the reality set in. I was like “I can’t have an interview of any substance in these circumstances.” There would be people yelling in our ear.
Yeah, trying to talk on the phone anywhere there is impossible. If you try talking on the phone walking down any street in Austin during South By Southwest, you are never going to hear the person on the other end.
For instance, I got home from my Europe trip with my dad, had one day in between, and went to SXSW the very next day. I played the Pitchfork thing, got up in the morning and did the NPR thing and then I had the day off, so I was wandering around, I saw Sharon Van Etten play, she’s a friend of mine. So, I was wandering around, it was 100 degrees, and I was like, “I’m just going to go in this lobby of this hotel and have a beer and chillout and have some semi-quiet.” And I hadn’t even gotten two sips into my beer and a band started playing in the lobby. -laughter-
After a while, you are just like, “I don’t want to hear music, I don’t want to hear any sound.” It was a little overwhelming for me.
It was overwhelming for everybody. So, okay, so Diplo has that quote about you, describing your music as “Carebears making love.” So yeah, it’s a funny quote and I get where he is coming from, but my reaction was that “how nuts is it that Diplo is listening to your music?”
It wasn’t (nuts) because we were semi-intoduced before that. I think that quote is awesome and hilarious, I think it is super-creative. I think it is one of the best things I have ever heard.
Diplo and I were two of seven or so people who were commissioned to do the “Reckoner” remix for Radiohead in late 2008, so he did one, I did one, some other people did one, and that is how he heard my stuff. And, we kind of emailed a little bit over the years, dropping an email every now and then to see what is new.
That’s cool!
Yeah, it’s an unlikely pairing, but it’s awesome. It’s totally awesome. He is obviously mega-famous and huge, so it’s a little surreal, but yeah, that’s how we knew about each other.
Future
As far as the music you have made so far, it has contained all these vocal loops. Is that something you are committed to or is it just what you are doing right now and are looking to possibly change in time?
I’m not committed to anything. I have no idea where things will lead. I mean, I really, really love making music the way I make it. It works, it’s natural and flows so well and is really fun and satisfying. But, every record, like with The Magic Place, there is a little more going on and it is a little more dynamic.
I am actually (and this is the total beginning planning stages of this) thinking about working with someone on my next record, which of course I haven’t done with the three records I’ve done. That in and of itself could change things.
That can be scary. I was actually in Texas last week, and you were too, but I saw Owen Pallett and he does, not the same thing, but a lot of looping and you know, this one guy on stage creating these vivid soundscapes, and he was talking about that he was starting to work with someone else and it was probably the last shows he was going to play by himself. He was excited, but it’s also probably a trippy and scary thing to start trusting other people, I guess.
Totally, and I feel exactly the same way. I’m not scared about it, but it is just comfortable for me to do everything by myself and to rely on myself. I really enjoy that aspect of it. I like touring alone, I like recording alone. It’s such a personal thing and I’m not looking for extra input, I just want to make my stuff. But I – and this is totally not a for sure thing that I am talking about – but there is a chance that I might be working with someone, maybe later in the year, and I’ve done everything by myself so far, with no engineer or recording expert, I’ve always been following my nose and doing the best I can. But, I am interested in exploring other recording techniques and using nice microphones, just things like that, to see if I can make it sound… not neccesarily different, but just to explore.
So, that may be on the horizon, but generally speaking, I like to do things myself. -laughter-
There is nothing wrong with that.
