Coming in from the cold with Julianna Barwick's new album

JULIANNA Barwick is contradictory. Her music is esoteric, often eerie. In person, however, Barwick is chatty, upbeat. and sociable, so the isolation of Iceland, where she recorded her new album, Nepenthe, drove her to distraction. She would sit in cafes, watching the world pass. The loneliness worsened as the weeks passed. She worried for her sanity.

“I’m not really big on being on my own,” she says, in the living room of her parents’ home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, struggling to be heard over the barking of the family dog.

“I don’t mind touring without anyone. That’s fine. I’ve done it over and over. To be in the same place, day after day, without company, is different. It doesn’t agree with me.”

Barwick was in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, at the invitation of Sigur Ros, the stadium-filling post-rock band. Sigur Ros had offered their studio to Barwick to record Nepenthe.

Among independent musicians, the studio has semi-mythic status. Barwick had never visited Iceland previously. “Where Sigur Ros work is an amazing place, so atmospheric,” she says. “It is incredibly beautiful. The mixing desk is one of the largest I have ever seen. They had to drop it in by helicopter. That’s how gigantic it is.”

The studio is in a converted swimming pool on the outskirts of the city. The recording area is in the ‘bottom’ of the pool; the mixing desk on the precipice above. This creates a unique atmosphere. You can hear it in Nepenthe, a project at once creepy and lushly gorgeous.

“I’ve been a Sigur Ros fan since forever,” says Barwick. “To be doing an album in that studio was incredible. The first thing we did was bring five girls in to do backing vocals. It went better than I ever imagined. You want to pinch yourself.”

Loneliness aside, all was proceeding according to plan. Then, she received a call from home. “My grandmother passed away,” she says. “I had arranged for my mom to come over and sing on the record. And, suddenly, I get this news. I had to fly from Reykjavik to Tulsa. It was like ‘really? This is happening now’?”

Days after the funeral, Barwick returned to Iceland, saddened but determined to channel her emotions into her art. “I definitely felt the weight as I was writing the songs and recording the LP,” she says. “It was in there, for sure.”

Barwick had previously written and recorded alone. This time, she had a producer, Sigur Ros engineer, Alex Somers. In a strange country, with unfamiliar people, Barwick was beyond her comfort zone. She is grateful. It brought out something new in her.

“On my previous two records, I played all the instruments. I produced. Here, there was a producer and other musicians. We used to talk about what we wanted to achieve. A lot of ideas would be exchanged. Alex and I had fun bouncing suggestions off one another. We clicked very early in the process,” she says.

Barwick credits Iceland’s haunting landscape with shaping the tone of the LP. “It is breathtaking. You go for a walk and encounter all these stunning sights. Coming from the city, that sort of beauty is incredibly moving. It is such an amazing country. I’m so glad I went.”

Barwick was born in Louisiana, and grew up in Missouri and Oklahoma (where she attended high school). Her first album, Sanguine, was self-released in 2006. It set the template for her career. A sort of loop-based sonic architecture, the LP was built around disembodied samples of the voice. This prompted Bjork comparisons, though you could also tell Barwick had absorbed the early music of Sigur Ros.

Barwick moved to New York in 2009. The city is hugely inspirational, even if surviving can be challenging. “To be in New York, you’ve got to want to be in New York,” she says. “It tests you in a lot of ways. Of course, it has a unique energy, too, and has definitely pushed me on.”

Barwick has put out three other albums. She came to wider attention after Radiohead invited her to remix the single, ‘Reckoner’, from their 2007 release, In Rainbows. She was honoured, but reshaping the music of one of her favourite bands was surreal. Radiohead’s XL label got in touch and she said yes. Then, she wondered how to do it.

“I was a fan since OK Computer,” she says. “I remember calling a phone line to buy a ticket to one of their shows, back in the day. Do you remember when you had to buy tickets to a show that way? You’d call the hotline number and then press redial over and over, until you got through. I bought six tickets and went with a bunch of my friends. I remember Thom Yorke not being into it. The crowd was quite lifeless. At one point, I think he said, ‘this is really dull’. Then, a few years later, I’m remixing them. It was strange,” Barwick says.

* Nepenthe is out now.