The aural equivalent of a Mark Rothko painting, the work of Louisiana-born, Brooklyn-based Julianna Barwick loops her voice in layers of soft, radiant texture to build an effect of sacred-feeling simplicity. Her fourth album is inspired by a return to instinct. If it feels less ambitious than its predecessor, 2016’s Will – which explored acoustic settings from a Moog factory to a motorway underpass – it’s also more ravishingly beatific.
Inspirit ripples a reverbed melody over a bass synth that thrums like an interplanetary pipe organ, while the wordless keening of Wishing Well waxes and wanes like a lighthouse beam in fog. Hints of shadow keep Barwick’s bliss from becoming one-dimensional: pulses of vocal fire out like radar blips into a darker, emptier space in Flowers, while the album’s title track has the feel of a gothic afterworld, This Mortal Coil finally shuffled off.
A guest appearance from harpist Mary Lattimore on Oh, Memory gilds the celestial glory beautifully, but other collaborations, with Sigur Rós’s Jónsi on In Light, and producer Nosaj Thing on Nod, come closer to the conventional. It’s the most purely Barwickian tracks such as Safe – the sound of sunlit uplands, where tantalising cadences resolve into perfect peace – that will stay with you and be a balm to your soul.
