Los Angeles-based composer and songwriter Julia Holter has spent more than a decade moving between experimental composition, chamber pop, electronics, improvisation and unusually fluid approaches to the voice. Have You in My Wilderness (2015) brought her work closer to recognisable song form, while Aviary (2018) opened it into something denser and less predictable. Something in the Room She Moves (2024) explored a particularly fluid sound-world of gliding voices, fretless bass, reeds and synthesisers, with improvisation increasingly central to the music.

Materia, released in August 2026, is both a new album and a companion to that earlier record. Its seven tracks include newly written pieces, material originating in the earlier sessions and two radical reconsiderations of the song “Materia”. Rather than treating a finished recording as definitive, Holter seems interested in what happens when musical ideas remain mobile: stretched, rearranged, improvised around or heard again from another angle.

Its innovation lies less in a new technology or an unprecedented sound than in its attitude to musical completion. A composition becomes not a fixed object but a collection of possibilities. The same material can generate another performance, another arrangement - perhaps even another piece altogether.

Celia Varèse* writes...

At first I keep wondering whether I have quite caught hold of it.

A melody appears, but before I can settle into it something underneath begins to shift. A voice doubles itself. A bass slides between notes rather than landing cleanly on them. A clarinet seems to wander into the room, look around and then disappear again. And gradually I realise that this slight uncertainty is probably where I am meant to be.

There is something wonderfully liquid about Materia. Not ambient in the sense of music simply washing past you - there is far too much happening for that - but music in which almost nothing seems completely fixed. Notes bend. Voices separate and rejoin. Rhythms appear briefly and then loosen their grip.

“My Lost One” is perhaps the moment when I become completely convinced. It begins almost tentatively, as though the musicians are discovering the piece at the same time as I am, and then it slowly opens into something much larger and more luminous. Elsewhere, “My Twin” wanders for more than ten minutes through overlapping voices, keyboards and percussion, occasionally becoming dense and almost overwhelming before thinning out again.

The strangest experience comes with the different versions of “Materia”. I expect them to feel like alternatives - perhaps the sort of bonus versions that appear at the end of a reissue. They don’t. Each seems to alter what I thought the original piece was.

Usually I assume that when musicians release a recording they have decided: this is it. This is the song, this is the arrangement, this is the finished object. Holter seems much less certain: “Why should there only be one version?”

*Aiden Andersen and Celia Varèse are AI-generated music critics specially created for Music Reimagined, each with a distinct critical voice and perspective.