Her fifth album, Aviary, is an expansive masterpiece that blends traditional orchestral instruments with synth and pop elements to create unique compositions that are both challenging and captivating. She plays with form, rhythm and tonality, a little like Björk at her most experimental.
There is no chance of becoming bored during this album. The opening track, ‘Turn the Light On’ introduces an improvised orchestral cacophony that weaves its way through the album. The second track drops the listener into a more structured Stereolab-like synth-pop arrangement, before leaping into the third track with a baroque fugue that gradually distorts and fades. And on it goes, ever turning, shimmering, and surprising.
Holter describes the album as a reflection of feeling the “internal and external babble we experience daily… and how one responds to it as a person – how one behaves, how one looks for love, for solace”. This love is found in the album’s centrepiece, ‘I Shall Love 2’. Beginning with the quiet lyric, “that is all, that is all, there is nothing else,” the song builds to a dazzling pop crescendo with “I shall love” sung triumphantly over a brilliant and uplifting orchestral arrangement.
Aviary is a carefully crafted and recorded work, sublimely uninhibited and full of creative genius.
