That album was a byproduct of an incredibly fertile time both for Barwick and for a broader rock-adjacent underground in New York. The indie boom of the early '00s was giving way to a sprawling mixture of more experimental approaches, from strange hypnagogic sounds to DIY warehouse raves to a new generation of pop stars. Barwick fit right into the mix, conjuring devastatingly ethereal wordless hymns for an uneasy new age with only her voice and a Boss RC50 loop pedal. “I would just start singing, and, by the end, wonder, ‘Where did that come from?’ That element of surprise went such a long way.”
Her first releases struck an undeniable chord with an audience outside her immediate scene peers. The clarity of her tone and her exquisite melodic sensibility bridged the gap between basement noise shows and the spirituality of Arvo Pärt. From her earliest EPs - Sanguine and Florine, through the release of her debut LP The Magic Place, anyone who was in the loop knew she was onto something special. Barwick quickly found further avenues of expression as a film composer and multi-hyphenate collaborator. One such example: in Knockdown Center’s earliest days, she was one of the primary musical contributors to The Wilder Papers, Debut and Fable, a trilogy of dance films by Derrick Belcham that were shot in the venue.
Barwick’s career to date has been marked by both expansiveness and rootedness. Her music is always identifiably hers, even as she takes on new projects and explores wider vistas. And it’s always, always sublime. Here are five of our favorite Julianna Barwick songs.
“Cloudbank”
This is the second track from Bariwick’s second EP, the self-released Florine. The whole record is a stunner, opening with the gentle fade-in of “Sunlight, Heaven” and moving through a sequence of thematic variations that tweak small differences to create striking contrasts. Comparisons can credibly be made to Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks LP (made with Daniel Lanois and his brother Roger Eno), particularly the fan favorite “An Ending (Ascent),” as well as to the Popul Vuh soundtrack to Aguirre, The Wrath of God. But Barwick channels the cosmic awe that defined those works into something more personal.
Across Florine, Barwick brings you into her world with generosity and focus. Each track bathes the listener in transportive, ethereal harmonies that breathe like the tides. There are no concessions made to crossover appeal, but none are needed. If there’s a single keeper, and that’s a big if, it would be “Cloudbank,” which is so tender and pure that it feels like music to die to.
It’s an inevitability that spiritual terms keep cropping up when describing Barwick’s music; describing her influences, she cites “church. No doubt about it.” She continues: “My dad was the youth minister at the Church of Christ. We sang as a congregation from song books. It wasn’t a church choir situation. It was the whole congregation. Totally acapella. I was hearing that three times a week and more from birth. I would tear up because it was just so beautiful. As a little kid, I felt the auditorium was the most gigantic thing in the world. There was a ring to it, a little bit of reverb. I was moved even as a tiny kid by these beautiful, slow, gorgeous hymns with stacked harmonies. Hearing my mom sing it right next to me was heaven.”
“Envelop”
By the time Barwick began work on her debut LP The Magic Place, she had landed on an approach all her own that was yielding work of undeniable power. The challenge of an artist in this position is to not screw up a good thing. Having grown into a position of strength and integrity, how do you keep evolving without overburdening yourself? Where do you go next?
“Envelop” opens the album right where she left off at the end of Florine, but just a touch more confident. The track was her longest to date, swaying with a dreamlike grace and perfectly stacked harmonies. Listening to the undulations of Barwick’s who-knows-how-many layers, it’s amazing to explore the depth of field and shifting perspectives that she gets from her modest rig. First, one line leads the charge (the “ooohhh-ahhh” at the opening stands out as an initial “hook”), but then you notice countermelodies, and distant refrains drifting into the foreground. Lines dovetail into one another, and it’s impossible to tell if one melody is endlessly ascending or if another comes in at just the right moment to keep extending the gesture. This all sounds perhaps a bit technical. Instead, imagine laying in a dewy field as the sun rises over mountains and, in a moment of sublime clarity, you feel the inherent power of the earth and the unity of all living things. That’s what this sounds like. Barwick’s music is NSFW in that it invokes the sacred, the timeless and deeply human in a way that might leave you suddenly crying at your desk.
OMBRE - “Dawning”
The OMBRE collaboration between Barwick and Helado Negro takes the singer just a few steps out of her comfort zone and places her voice in a more crowded field of instruments. You would be forgiven for wanting to have Barwick all to yourself. But give it a moment and there’s a refreshing quality to be found, as clarinets, percussion, textural noise and small melodic flourishes weave around her incantations. It’s a rare moment where her music feels in the world rather than simply otherworldly.
“In Light ft. Jónsi”
If there’s one artist who might be a brother-from-a-different-mother to Barwick, it’s Jónsi, singer for Icelandic art-prog-rock band Sigur Rós. His soaring and tender vocals (sometimes in a made up language called Hopelandic) gave an androgynously celestial centerpoint for their gently cascading suites (their breakout LP had one writer compare it to “God weeping tears of gold in heaven.”) On 2020’s Healing is a Miracle, Barwick invited him for a duet, and he pushed her to make one of her most outstanding songs to date. He insisted she write lyrics - a rarity - and “In Light” is a sweeping ode to heartbreak and resilience. “I saw the sun, gleaming / How to take the dreaming? / I lost the sands of our plot / Now a new foundation / And now, it's severed / And now, in light again.”
Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore - “Canyon Lights”
Barwick loves light - sunlight, being “In Light,” etc. So be it. There’s plenty of dark music in our world, but how many artists can you name who are singularly focused on joy and beauty? Earlier this year, Barwick and harpist Mary Lattimore released “Canyon Lights,” a short piece they recorded in 2021. The gentle plucks of the harp work so well with Barwick’s voice that it’s hard to believe it took a decade for them to work together. “For years, Julianna was this one-woman choir,” Lattimore told the NY Times. “But she let people in. That’s growth — opening up and being vulnerable to other people’s choices.” That vulnerability shows in the tenderness of the music, which, true to its title, twinkles like a sea of small lights across a darkened canyon just after sunset.