Julianna Barwick
I was expecting Julianna Barwick’s show at Sixth & I Historical Synagogue on Monday night to be a psychospiritual, transcendental sort of experience. And it was. I wasn’t expecting a show defined by her dreamy, calming music to be a distinctly physical experience. But it was.
I arrived at the synagogue about five minutes into opener Vasillus’s set. I hadn’t listened to his music before taking my seat in a pew to the center-left of the “stage”, but I could almost immediately understand his choice as an opener.
If Barwick’s wordless warbles and intonations resemble an angelic choir, then Vasillus’s music lies somewhere on the other side of the spiritual spectrum, his vocal inflections ranging from deep, echoed, Gregorian chants to tribal, rapidly octave-shifting bellows, almost Björk-like in their force. When combined with the bass rumbles and slowed-down trap beats provided by an on-stage auxiliary synth player, the resultant trance was comparable to Devon Welsh’s music as Majical Cloudz. These comparisons to other artists will have to do, but truthfully, they’re ineffective at conveying the experience of the set. Vasillus’s music is the kind you feel more than you hear.
In the five minutes before Barwick’s set, I focused on her minimal setup — apparently a Boss RC-50 looper and Roland SP-404 sampler — and on the visual design of the space. In between the phrases “Remember Ye the Law of Moses” and “Faith in God is Happiness” engraved on the wall, images were projected on to a mostly black screen with a circle in the middle, giving the audience an incomplete, circle-shaped representation of whatever impressionistic designs were panning leftward during her set.
Wondering how the crowd of about 100 would compose themselves before the set, I took in the sounds and noticed the effect of Sixth & I’s curves and dimensions on the mass of sounds I was hearing. Murmured conversations, the clicking of DSLR cameras and the rustling of bags echoed around the space, fading in and out.
When Barwick finally began, the live manifestation of the multilayered vocal tapestries I had come to love on the record surprised me. Instead of building up a barrage of equally audible voices, the wordless notes would fade into the background as they looped, leaving the singer’s current phrase front and center. This created a cavernous effect that complemented the interaction of different vocal phrases interweaving and expressing different yet compatible emotions. The audience was transported into the echoing recesses of her mind, where feelings, thoughts and emotions don’t go away but reverberate in the background, constantly — if implicitly — present.
During the second song of the set, a moon was projected behind Barwick, framing and illuminating her black gown and impassioned expression. I felt myself unable to move no matter how hard I tried. I was physically sedated, my body captivated, but I wasn’t put to sleep. Fully engaged, my thoughts and physical energy were moving upward, filling my head to dizzying effect.
When she reached Nepenthe highlights “The Harbinger” and the aptly titled “Labyrinthine”, the vocals began swirling around and into one another, each indistinguishable from the next. That is really when I began to lose myself.
I didn’t know where this would take me, so I looked to the synagogue’s architecture for something to grasp onto, something to ground me. The vertical arcs supporting the building, reaching towards the dome, and the inverted arcs of the menorahs all seemed to point upwards, divine worship implicit in their design. Above the menorahs I again noticed inscriptions emphasizing worship and Jewish law. Meanwhile, I felt the vocals were extending in all directions, expressing all things at once, embracing the flow of our emotions.
The recursive guitar line and splashes of piano from The Magic Place’s “Bob In Your Gait”, applause from the audience around me and glazed-over glances exchanged with my companion also helped ground me throughout the show, but I wish they hadn’t. I wish I had let myself go completely but, before I knew it, I was thrust back into the cold, the warmth of sound freezing up instantly the moment I stepped outside the concert hall.
But this is Julianna Barwick’s version of a secular, spiritual experience: as physical as it is transcendental, as fleeting as it is transformative. Go forth and listen to Nepenthe, all you saints and sinners.
