The Many Choirs of Julianna Barwick

Put a stethoscope to the surface of the moon and hear, perhaps, the sounds of Julianna Barwick. The Brooklyn-based artist creates not so much music as tonal atmospheres in which looped voices wade through a hypnotic haze of crescendoing synths, piano and strings. She invokes worlds beyond while remaining wholly personal and often intimate, as though her productions’ celestial pulse and her own were one. Her work is frequently compared to that of Brian Eno and Steve Reich, but, as Barwick has said, was forged in part in the tradition of Enya. Barwick’s sophomore album Nepenthe (2013) brought her to Iceland to collaborate with Alex Somers of Sigur Rós, the string quartet Amiina and the experimental pop group Múm, while her most recent effort, last year’s Will, saw a return to the bare-bones setup of her debut EP The Magic Place (2011) — a microphone, pedal, laptop and her own voice — to chart new universes.

For all its otherworldliness, the origins of Barwick’s music are mundane. Born in Louisiana to a youth minister, she grew up singing in a cappella church choirs. “I would sing to myself and get so lost in it I would cry,” she told Pitchfork. Choir imparted in her a love of reverb; later, she sought staircases, parking lots, and bathrooms as places to sing and hear the way her voice echoed. Listen to the King’s College Choir, performing “Miserere mei, Deus” by Gregorio Allegri, for a sense of how sound carries in church.

Barwick — often described as a one-woman band — suffuses her music with qualities of her childhood choruses. In the clip below, she performs her song “One Half,” weaving her voice into seemingly endless waves to a light piano and string accompaniment. The effect is booming and endlessly resonant, her open, searching sounds expanding to fill and transcend the recording space.

The music video for “Nebula,” from Will, was filmed in the evening at the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Conn. Amidst Barwick’s undulating voices and arpeggios courtesy of the Moog Mother-32, the landmark structure becomes a cathedral, illuminated in pieces before being unveiled by the video’s close in warm twilight.

Like her music, the environment of Barwick’s live sets tend toward the lo-fi. Hear her perform live at FORM Arcosanti, a music festival about 60 miles north of Phoenix. Enrobed in submarine blues, she took the stage at night, her sounds arcing through the darkness.

In this video for WNYC, Barwick reveals the simplicity of her essential materials. From equipment occupying but a quarter of her bed, she siphons a seeming eternity of voices, as only one can who never stopped hearing where she came from.