Holter’s fifth album is a mighty proposition. Most tracks are more accurately described as compositions or movements rather than songs – few of the 15 tracks fall below six-minutes and they tend to evade conventional structure or clearly marked choruses.
Aviary follows 2015’s Have You In My Wilderness, whichwas Holter’s most concise and sophisticated release and the only album in her catalogue that suits the indie tag often attached to her work. That album’s mellifluous consistency stands in sharp contrast to the magnitude of Aviary.
“I think of each record as a different project and I don’t think of it as a progression, even though I know it is,” Holter says. “A lot of the stuff on [Aviary], the imagery and a lot of that stuff, was coming from stuff I’ve been thinking about for ten years. So in ways it reminds me of stuff I was working on ten years ago, but the work is different.”
In the period since Have You In My Wilderness, Holter provided the score for the boxing film Bleed for This, worked on an operatic adaptation of her first album Tragedy and performed with the experimental ensemble, Dog Star Orchestra. The experience gained from these various endeavours informed the sound of Aviary.
“People wonder is there politics in someone’s music or is there personal life in someone’s music? It’s all there,” Holter says. “Everything that I’ve learned from playing other people’s music or working with other people comes through.
“There’s a track called ‘Colligere’ [on Aviary] and that means to collect. My approach to art-making is collecting things; borrowed things, things by other people. It’s like translation of art leads to new art. I think that’s the way art works in a lot of ways, whether it’s a translation of energy or a translation of physical material.”
This preference for collecting and borrowing ideas has been a mainstay of Holter’s working practice throughout her career. Her earlier albums gathered inspiration from a curious mixture of art forms, including film, literature, poetry and Ancient Greek tragedy, and Aviary is no different.
The new albumfinds Holter incorporating multi-lingual vocals, creating poetry out of an Anne Carson translation of the Greek poet Sappho and utilising the medieval practice of hocketing, where vocal melodies are distributed to a range of overdubbed voices.
“To me what’s fun about that, it’s not just an empty reference to something,” Holter says. “When you’re working with mystery in that way with something, you don’t really know where it’s coming from and then there’s a meaning that emerges.”
Aviary’s final track, ‘Why Sad Song’, features an English-language phonetic translation of a song by Nepalese Buddhist nun and musician, Choying Drolma. It’s a leading example of the translation of art stimulating new ideas and meanings.
“Ten years ago I did this phonetic translation of the song ‘Kyema Mimin’. I just did it based on the sound of the words, turned them into English and I called it ‘Why Sad Song’. Then I found out that kyema means sadness, but I didn’t know that. That stuff is so beautiful.
“I used this device to come up with this poem and then I worked with the poem to make it my own. But there are all these unexpected elements and I suddenly find that these words have this beautiful meaning that I didn’t feel like I put there. On this record, the moments when things would just happen would be the most meaningful.”
