> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Julia Holter :: Materia - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/julia-holter-materia/ - Published: 2026-09-11T05:11:17.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-11T19:08:20.000Z - Description: Experimental chamber pop, fretless bass, improvisation and slowed time - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Electronica, Post-Classical ### In “Materia” Julia Holter takes a recording that has already been released and slows it down. No new performance, no restoration. --- The old take is forced to live more slowly. It may be the cheapest gesture on the record, and the one that explains everything else best. *Materia* was made alongside 2024’s *Something in the Room She Moves*, but these seven pieces have enough indiscipline to escape the role of appendix almost immediately. Holter herself has described the record as something that grew out of continuing to work with the musicians from those sessions; Devra Hoff on fretless bass and Elizabeth Goodfellow on percussion form its mobile skeleton, often recorded playing together with her. “The Laugh Is in the Eyes” establishes this straight away. The bass does not accompany: it snakes underneath the song, continually shifting the ground beneath it. The percussion knows where the time is without feeling obliged to announce it; above, Chris Speed’s horns appear for a few seconds, the flute rises, and Holter’s voice moves through the instruments rather than sitting in front of the mix. It is oxidised chamber pop fed through an apparatus called jazz. “My Lost One” is even better. At first, keyboards and bass seem to move over and inside a calm sea, almost overexposed by sunlight; then the construction gathers speed and Maia, singing into the flute as well as playing it, produces one of the album’s strangest sounds: human breath and instrument become difficult to separate. Holter has singled out that moment as central to the recording. Hoff’s fretless, meanwhile, carries something that is hard to manufacture at the mixing stage: experience embedded in the gesture. This is not virtuosity placed behind glass. The bass keeps modelling the direction of the piece, anticipating, withholding, slipping away from the expected note. [Materia by Julia Holter](https://juliaholter.bandcamp.com/album/materia?ref=hwaelmag.com) “Fantasy” brings this vocabulary close to pop, with a skipping keyboard and an apparently light rhythm. Almost. Holter spent more than a year finishing it; the riff comes from “My Twin”, an improvisation that does not appear on the album until three tracks later. The surface is danceable, but with a slight self-conscious stiffness, like a figure who has learned every step perfectly and still keeps looking down at her feet. “Materia 2” is the physical centre of the record. Dry drum machine, fretless bass pushed high in the mix, clarinet, Jessika Kenney entering and intertwining with Holter. The original melody, inspired by Hildegard von Bingen’s intervallic leaps, is stretched until air appears between its joints. Hoff’s bass is magnificent because it refuses the reassuring function of the root: it slides, detours, arrives at notes as though it had found them while walking. Above it, the singing takes on an almost dreamlike, soft-focus quality, illuminated without ever becoming bright. There is something hard to name in that light: sunlight stored in small glass ampoules, then slowly opened, a luminosity that seems to enter through the eyes more than the ears. Then “Clepsydra” reduces everything to little more than two minutes of manipulated voice. Each syllable is stretched, layered, made to proliferate electronically. After the instrumental precision that precedes it, the voice resembles biological material under glass: it retains traces of the body, but is examined closely enough to stop behaving like language for a while. “My Twin” occupies ten minutes and sixteen seconds. It began as an improvisation; tactile keyboards, blurred harmonies and shifts of weight succeed one another without building a conventional progression. At times it resembles generative music, with one crucial difference: its human origin remains audible throughout. The hesitations stay in. An occasional chord arrives slightly late; an apparently misplaced note suddenly opens another section of the piece. Sometimes it appears ready to become a jazz ballad, then loses the shape again. This is also where *Materia* risks overreaching: a few minutes could disappear without seriously damaging the piece. But that length allows something a more disciplined edit would have removed. > **You can hear Holter finding the music, not merely hear it once she has found it.** Mallets, keyboards and voice occasionally build a small ecosystem that recalls a more botanical Björk, less concerned with the theatre of the body than with what might germinate around a voice. The resemblance lasts only a few seconds, then “My Twin” becomes difficult to place again. Finally, “Materia 3”: the 2024 take slowed down and conceived by Holter like an old CD bonus track. The voice drops, the pauses put on weight, and the chords expose intervals that were almost invisible before. A thoroughly ordinary piece of technology produces something strangely archaeological. Slowing it down adds no material; it changes the apparent age of what was already there. LISTENING NOTES / 01 02 03 “My Lost One” Maia’s sung flute and Hoff’s fretless make breath, reed and movement difficult to separate. “Materia 2” Drum machine, clarinet, bass and divided voices stretch the melody until space opens inside it. “Materia 3” A previously released recording slowed until pauses gain weight and almost-hidden intervals become audible. That is how *Materia* works. The material is never protected from its supposedly definitive version. It is touched again, slowed down, divided between two voices, extracted from an improvisation, put back into circulation. Seven pieces, thirty-four minutes, and the sense that Julia Holter has left the workbench switched on. ---