The Deliberate Incompletion of"One Half" by Julianna Barwick
Drumming Upstream 11
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about them. Because my snare drum is out of commission, this week I wrote about one of the songs from the list that has no drum part to speak of. That means this letter will have only one half of the usual two part format. Appropriately enough, the subject of today’s letter is “One Half” by ambient artist Julianna Barwick.
Side A
“One Half”
By Julianna Barwick
Nepenthe
Released on August 20th, 2013
Liked on November 21st, 2015
Two weekends ago I strolled over to Nitehawk Cinema on the corner of Prospect Park to see Men, the new movie by director and screenwriter Alex Garland. I can’t in good conscience recommend that you do the same, unless you, like me, harbor an idiosyncratic fondness for Garland’s filmmaking1. Men is not that great. But if you go in expecting a schlocky horror movie instead of a serious film with something novel to say about the state of gender relations in 2022, you might enjoy yourself the way that I did. Men follows (and men follow) Harper (Jessie Buckley), a woman renting an idyllic house in the British countryside following the (possibly suicidal) death of her husband. Early on, Harper takes a long walk through the woods to clear her mind of the grief that hovers at the corner of her conscience, not to mention the suggestion of guilt that lurks even further on her mental periphery. Eventually she comes across a tunnel with an exceptional echo. First cautiously and then with increasing confidence, Harper sings into the tunnel, layering fragments of melodies over each other until something like a song returns to her. Hearing her music bounce off the tunnel walls Harper smiles with a childlike delight that suggests she hasn’t smiled at all in a long, long time.
After this brief glimpse of happiness things go pear-shaped for Harper with gravitational quickness. It is a horror movie after all. But as far as requisite calms before storms go, Harper’s improvised a capella is an inspired choice. The scene taps into something that’s probably been true for all of human history: it feels good to sing, and it feels even better to sing in harmony. Singing merges the pleasures of expression and motion. It takes your whole body to sing, from the placement of your feet to the insides of your skull. Singing with another person is about as close to turning conversation into exercise as humanity has yet to muster. It’s no wonder that singing in a group is a key feature of so many religions. Get enough people cycling through enough oxygen in sync and someone’s bound to experience something profound. The scene also resonates with a more contemporary truth: the simple joy of playing with a loop pedal. Maybe you don’t have another person harmonize with. Well, with only a mic and a loop pedal you can build a chorus out of your voice one layer at a time. No congregation required.
This is how I was introduced to Julianna Barwick when I reviewed her third album Nepenthe for a friend’s blog in 2013, as a one-woman choir crafting ambient dreamworlds with little more than her voice. Barwick, the daughter of a youth minister, started singing as a child in church. As an adult she began experimenting with a loop pedal to harmonize with herself, occasionally accompanied by guitar or piano, but more often than not letting her multiplied voices do the talking. Her early recordings aren’t songs so much as gestures, webs of interlocking harmonies that never coalesce into a central melody. Barwick at her best achieves a neat musical paradox: her songs are constantly in motion and completely at ease. After releasing two EPs and a full length of self recorded material, Barwick accepted an invitation from producer Alex Somers to fly out to his studio in Reykjavik for her next album. It isn’t hard to imagine why Somers, one half of the Sigur Rós side project Jonsí & Alex, would see potential for creative chemistry with Barwick. Like Iceland’s premier post-rockstars, Barwick makes music unapologetic about sounding beautiful. Both Barwick and Jonsí are so committed to the expressive power of their voices that they abandon language entirely, letting their upper registers soar heavenward unburdened by the need to be legible as anything but sound.
Barwick and Somers recorded Nepenthe in two sessions over four months. Barwick would start by improvising in Somers’ repurposed swimming pool studio, casting her voice off the walls to cultivate its echo. Then the two would organize these improvisations into songs by adding strings, piano, guitar and a choir of teenage girls to fortify Barwick’s melodies. All but one track on Nepenthe originated from this improvisatory process. The one exception is “One Half”.
“One Half” is exceptional in another way. It is a rare song where Barwick’s sings recognizable words organized into almost complete sentences. “One Half’s” lyrics are just as formless and open-ended as her melodies. “I guess I was asleep at night, was waiting for…” the line trails only to be answered by the equally inconclusive “come around me, I was waiting for…”. According to Barwick, the music she makes, lyrics presumably included, isn’t intended to mean anything. “It wasn’t about any message, just about the sound of it,” Barwick told The Skinny’s Sam Lewis in 2013 “and it still is.”
Still, it is hard to resist the temptation to make “One Half” add up to something more than just pretty sounds, in no small part because it is so breathtakingly pretty. The first 90 seconds lay out the song’s three vocal loops under a fog of reverb and softly crackling static, the words barely audible, as if heard at a distance. After a brief pause Barwick re-enters unobscured and backed by piano and strings. The sentence fragment at the center of “One Half” rises slowly and reaches for even greater heights at end of each phrase before tailing off. More voices join Barwick in this melodic yearning until they’re answered by the embrace of two counter melodies. The three parts of the choir swirl around each other until they vanish just as gracefully as they arrived, leaving a shimmering film of strings in their wake. This arc from ephemerality to catharsis and back feels too satisfying to just be a matter of aesthetics.
There are a few different ways to try and complete “One Half” by giving it meaning. You could start with the lyrics. Perhaps the first third of the song is a dream that Barwick is trying to piece together. That would explain the references to sleep and the “slipping through your fingers” quality of music as the details of the dream recede in the light of day. But this interpretation brings us back to where we started. It justifies the fragmentation but doesn’t solve it. Maybe the song is meant to capture the natural beauty of Iceland in musical form. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to hear the sustained notes from the string section at the start and end of the tune as vapor rising off of volcanic hot springs or mist rolling over the shores at dawn. Haven’t Sigur Rós operated as the sonic wing of the Icelandic tourism board for years? Why not extend that Barwick and Somers’ collaboration on this record?
But this interpretation requires us to ignore chronology. “One Half” was written before Barwick shipped off to Reykjavik. Without access to an early demo of the song it is impossible for us to say for certain which parts of “One Half” existed prior to the Iceland sessions with Somer. Instead we have to rely on our meditated preconceptions about what music made in Iceland is “supposed” to sound like. That isn’t fair to either Barwick or the people of Iceland.
Most of the contemporary reviews I’ve read about Nepenthe looked for meaning in the album’s title. In an interview with Spin, Barwick defined Nepenthe as “a potion used by ancients to induce forgetfulness of something sorrowful or painful.” Barwick didn’t choose this title arbitrarily. After the album’s first recording session in February of 2012, Barwick had to return home due to a death in the family, returning to finish the album in April and May of the same year. The easy conclusion then is that Nepenthe is an album about working through grief if it is about anything at all. Barwick’s music certainly attracts descriptions only a crystal’s throw away from new age lingo; soothing, healing, calming, etc. And while I take Barwick’s word for it that none of the tracks on Nepenthe were written to be about anything in particular, and again chronology prevents us from saying that “One Half” was written in response to her loss, I do think this reading of the album has some merit.
I don’t know Barwick, so I won’t make any assumptions about her inner life. But I have some experience with taking a break from recording an album to deal with death, so I’ll just speak for myself. The end result of the work doesn’t have to mean the same thing as the working itself. When Harper sang into the tunnel in Men she wasn’t singing about her husband, she sang because singing felt good and she needed to feel good. The sound that echoed back to her was less important than making the sound in the first place. So while none of the songs I’m working on are about my grief, making them has helped me deal with it. Same goes for this silly newsletter about songs that I liked on a streaming app. Process is an active verb.
When I first reviewed Nepenthe I was an intern at the Music Garage in Chicago. Every so often over the last six months some fragment of a memory from this era of my life will waft up to my conscious mind. Usually something small, like an inside joke. Nearly a decade on it can be hard for me to recall every detail of what it was like to work there, so when one of these memory shards floats up to the surface I always want to reach out to a friend of mine who interned there with me to verify my memory. Except now I can’t, because she’s dead. So the memories hover incomplete, one half of a conversation whose answer will never return, until they fade back into the ether.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
First, a matter of practicality. If and when this project concludes, the leaderboard will be the size of a full newsletter by itself. So in order to avoid ballooning these letters completely out of proportion with the least content-rich section of the format, I decided to give the leaderboard its own separate page. Going forward each entry will feature a ten song chunk of leaderboard. The full list is only a click away, just follow the link in the header for this section!
With that out of the way, where does “One Half” stand? I find the song beautiful, so it succeeds on its own terms. But even if being ephemeral and temporary is part of the point, when I reach the end of the song I never feel fully satisfied. I remember when I first heard the song I immediately sent it to a producer friend of mine almost begging him to sample it for a beat. I guess as much as I’d like to think that I love drumless and drumfull music equally, I still thought “One Half” could use some thump to sound complete. For now, “One Half” will occupy the lower half of the leaderboard, but that doesn’t diminish my appreciation for it, or for the haunting beauty of Barwick’s work. She’ll be back in this project soon enough.
“One Half” by Julianna Barwick
Thanks for reading, I’ll be back next week with another drumless track from the Liked list. See you then!
I will eventually have occasion to talk at length about why I love Annihilation in this series, but for now I urge you to not get me started.
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