Julianna Barwick has been crafting her ambient soundscapes for some time now. Inspired by the soaring, sacramental nature of her high school church choir, rooted in freeform vocal experimentation, her choral, exuberant Ambient music draws from her deep affinity to reverb and harmony, the echoing space of a cathedral or an abandoned rail tunnel. Produced with Sigur Ros veteran Alex Somers, Nepenthe, her third full length solo album, carries with it the same kind of blissful exuberance that permeates the Icelandic band at its most joyous, but by curbing experimentation and ambition in favor of facile prettiness and palatability, it falls slightly short of the classic status of Agaetis Byrjun or Takk.
In turns stark and lush, minimalist and baroque, the music of Nepenthe isn’t theoretically complex by any means. The actual sounds of the album are drawn mostly from Julianna’s voice, layered and re-layered to create an ethereal, choral effect, for the most part lovely and affecting, impaired by an occasional tendency to slide into New-Age corniness that reminisces of Enya’s more unfortunate moments. It’s Ambient with Pop sensibilities, simple chord progressions, angelic choral loops and warm, intimate sensibilities, all wrapped in easily digestible 3 to 6 minute pieces, reaching for transcendence through layer upon layer of timbre and aesthetic rather than complexity or depth. Julianna works with what sounds right to her, rather than from theory, building her songs from a single vocal sample into an ornate, multilayered expression of elegantly simple melody.
Brian Eno, perhaps the originator and main advocate of Ambient music, intended it to be “as ignorable as it is interesting”. By writing her music within the framework of Pop convention; the songs are more structured and focused than typical Ambient, as such Nepenthe seems to demand the listener’s attention more than the archetypal Ambient album, certainly more than Barwick’s earlier release The Magic Place, which was a rather more spacious, freewheeling affair. This greater sense of structure works both for and against Nepenthe at times. The music is undoubtedly pretty, Julianna has a gorgeous voice and the sparse piano, synth and horn arrangements are well placed and more than effective at accenting the vocal soundscape that Julianna is creating, but in imbuing that Pop framework into the music the songs have a way of insisting upon themselves during their relatively brief runtime in a way that ultimately makes them light and inconsequential. Nowhere is this more evident than on the one track with actual lyrics, “One Half” in which Julianna repeats a simplistic three line refrain in a repetitive ascending scale surrounded by a children’s choir, delicate strings and minimalist percussion. It’s pretty, hauntingly so, but like the rest of the album the question remains: is it really saying anything？
