The Magic Place

“The Magic Place is music for a specific constellation of feelings. They are real, many people share them, and this album owns them completely. “

– Pitchfork Best New Music 2011

Originally released in 2011, Julianna Barwick’s debut full length 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 multi-tracked and looped voice, with backing instrumentation, but it’s the vocals—soaring high in reverb-drenched, wordless harmonies—that matter most here. Layered fragments and pieces become an intricate pattern through electronics; 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. Out of print for years, this 2024 version has been fully remastered by Heba Kadry, and is available through Julianna’s Florid Recordings, the imprint she started in 2006 to self release her earliest recordings.

There’s a very particular joy in listening to Barwick’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…