Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place (2024 Remaster) (LP)

"In 2010 I was falling in love and making a record for Asthmatic Kitty in Sufjan Steven’s studio, recording it all by myself, and i’ll admit- singing into the laptop at times- ha! the feeling was akin to the magical feeling I felt when i would crawl under the big limbs of the osage orange tree we had when i was a child that we named- appropriately- ‘The Magic Place’, and that’s why I decided that that’s what the record had to be called. It came out in 2011 and that’s when i started doing little tours, making connections, and reaching a lot of you with it. To this day I would say that it’s the fan fave and the record i’ve gotten the most heartfelt messages about. It changed my life, and so did the years surrounding it. I really wanted this to be a ten year anniversary remastered reissue but things were delayed a bit around covid. i’m actually really happy it’s a thirteen year anniversary reissue. the number thirteen has a lot of significance around this record- believe it or not. I am so incredibly thrilled to announce the thirteen year anniversary of ‘The Magic Place’, remastered by the one and only Heba Kadry. Heba brought every single track to new heights, just like she did with ‘Healing Is a Miracle’, which funnily enough is a sort of… follow up/ flip side of the ‘The Magic Place’, to me. i can’t wait for you to hear it, and celebrate its 13 years with me.”

The Magic Place is a nine-piece full-length album of magic and solace, bursting joy and healing tones. Julianna's mostly a capella music is built from her voice multi-tracked through a loop station. There's more backing instrumentation on this one than on previous albums but it's the vocals—soaring high in reverb-drenched, wordless harmonies—that matter most here. It's the layered fragments and pieces that become an intricate pattern through technology; it's the sound of a rising thing, a big group harmony as a splash of sunlight through a car window, a sound that feels like hope and ascendance and patience and intimacy.

Her inspiration here is the a capella church hymns she grew up singing; the way a roomful of diverse voices can join together to fill up a space. Says Julianna about her church singin' days, “You could really hear all the layers, harmonies, rounds, the men and the women, the claps... everything. Some of those hymns are so beautiful.”

There's a very particular joy in listening to Julianna's music. Free of the constraints of narrative and traceable language, it's the same joy in giving yourself over to opera in a foreign language, of letting go of your pesky rational mind and allowing the feeling to come through in the voices and performance. The title track is next, a reverb-y beauty queen that soars to Promethean heights and builds its own kind of safe haven in the clouds. Even the gaps between songs are essential to the album's listening experience—a sigh between stories or silence-as-drone, each second important. The New York Times called the pauses between Julianna's songs, “the small pleasure of a chance to breathe between the greater pleasures of not wanting to have to.” Meet The Magic Place. It's a great place to be…