Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place

This is one of the strangest albums I’ve heard in a long time. It’s instrumental music constructed mainly from Julianna Barwick’s vocals which she’s looped and distorted into a wash of ambient sound. There are snippets of some instruments such as piano and organ but they merely flesh out the vocal atmospherics. It probably sounds terrible but it is on fact very listenable particularly after you get your head around the unusual sound. I was expecting a regular gentle folky album and when I first played it I was about eight minutes and three songs in wondering when the intro to the first song was going to end. It’s probably not an album that you’d stick on and listen to very regularly but it suits a certain mood and shouldn’t be overlooked. If you ever feel the need to calm an upset child then this is the perfect music for you…6/10