Julianna Barwick
A Brooklyn-based ambient composer and vocalist who builds wordless choral pieces with a loop station, and whose Will (2016) opens with the single "Nebula".
Voice and loops
Julianna Barwick is an American ambient and experimental vocalist and composer, active since 2006. Her family is from Louisiana, where she lived until about age five, and she grew up mostly in Missouri. As a child she attended church about three times a week, singing a cappella with the congregation in reverberant rooms, and loved finding spots where her voice echoed; she told Tiny Mix Tapes she was never in a church choir. Her method is improvisation, layering her voice with a Boss RC-50 loop station: I like not knowing how something's going to sound until I get into it. I like the mystery.
By 2017 she was performing without a laptop, with a Moog Mother-32 synthesizer: every loop is brand new, and every sequence on the Mother-32 is new, she told The AU Review. The self-released EP Sanguine appeared in 2006 and Florine on April 27, 2009. In 2010 she was commissioned to remix Radiohead's "Reckoner". The Magic Place, her debut album on Asthmatic Kitty, followed on February 21, 2011, named after a tree on her family's farm big enough to crawl into.
Records
FRKWYS Vol. 6, with Ikue Mori on RVNG Intl., came out on June 14, 2011, and Believe You Me, as the duo Ombre with Helado Negro, on August 21, 2012. Nepenthe (August 20, 2013, Dead Oceans) was recorded in Iceland with the producer Alex Somers, with the string ensemble Amiina and a choir of teenage girls. Will (May 6, 2016, Dead Oceans) was her third album, followed by the EP Circumstance Synthesis (December 20, 2019) and Healing Is a Miracle on Ninja Tune (July 11, 2020). In January 2026 she and Mary Lattimore released Tragic Magic on InFine.
Setlist.fm has 186 setlists, among them KEXP sessions in December 2013 and February 2026 and a concert at WFMU's Monty Hall on October 7, 2016 that aired on Surface Noise on November 14, 2016. She also performed "Offing" at the Philip Johnson Glass House in Connecticut.
Albums
- Will 2016 · Dead Oceans
Her third album: nine tracks, with more electronics and, for the first time, lyrics.
Songs
- Nebula Will · 2016
The lead single from Will, a solo piece built on a Moog Mother-32.
Sources
- Julianna Barwick, Wikipedia
- Will (Julianna Barwick album), Wikipedia
- Julianna Barwick, Tiny Mix Tapes
- Julianna Barwick wills magic for Melbourne Music Week, The AU Review (2017-11-15)