SPIN Magazine: Spektral Quartet, With Julia Holter And Alex Temple, Release A Masterpiece - Behind The Wallpaper

SPIN Magazine: Spektral Quartet, With Julia Holter And Alex Temple, Release A Masterpiece - Behind The Wallpaper

The music deftly walks that landscape, played with great dimension by Spektral violinists Clara Lyon and Theo Espy, violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen. The group disbanded last year and this is one of their final releases, capping a stellar legacy of carving out their own routes in the crowded world of post-Kronos quartets. Holter, whose own music shares this sense of borderless artistry and personal exploration, is a perfect partner, giving voice to the full range of emotions and experiences in Temple’s poetry.

Chicago Reader: Julia Holter and Spektral Quartet’s Behind the Wallpaper promises that better worlds are possible

Chicago Reader: Julia Holter and Spektral Quartet’s Behind the Wallpaper promises that better worlds are possible

Behind the Wallpaper was a staggering achievement in 2015, when Temple wrote it for Los Angeles-based avant-pop vocalist Julia Holter and Chicago’s Spektral Quartet. But on the long-awaited studio recording, released this month by New Amsterdam, the piece is transcendent. Thanks in part to the spectacular work of audio engineers William Brittelle (Roomful of Teeth) and Zach Hanson (Bon Iver), Temple’s 11-movement suite takes new life, particularly in the electronic layers unique to this recording. Here, Holter’s voice is expressively distorted and echoed, and the Spektrals’ strings are also occasionally processed. (The decision to render their jaunty waltz theme in “Masquerade” as a crackly phonograph recording was a stroke of genius.) It’s not quite classical, not quite pop, and not quite monodrama—but it’s all scintillating brilliance. Kudos to the production team for managing to bring still more dimension to the imaginative abandon of Temple’s dre

NPR All Songs Considered: The Best Releases Out on March 3

NPR All Songs Considered: The Best Releases Out on March 3

“I want to flag a new album from Spektral Quartet and Julia Holter, it’s called ‘Behind the Wallpaper.’

Spektral Quartet, a group from Chicago, and Julia Holter, a singer we’ve followed for a while now, together they’ve made this really lovely, transfixing album. It’s part ambient, part contemporary classical – very atmospheric – with Julia Holter’s voice at the center. Really gorgeous. Spektral Quartet and Julia Holter, the album – ‘Behind the Wallpaper.’”

–Robin Hilton

The Quietus: Julia Holter adds measured grace to a song cycle about personal transformation

REVIEW: Julia Holter adds measured grace to a song cycle about personal transformation

Composer Alex Temple’s Behind the Wallpaper is a dreamlike but modern work about change. Inspired by her own transition, she has created a narrative tale that is as bizarre as it is beautiful and realised it through collaborators Spektral Quartet and Julia Holter.

With the exception of a few found sounds and odd percussive details, Chicago string quartet Spektral Quartet provides the only instrumentation on the album. Behind the Wallpaper doesn’t follow set song structures, and the quartet’s contributions take on multi-dimensional characters in the work, from shuddering rhythms to playful pizzicatos to sharp, slicing dissonance. It is equal parts cinematic, romantic and terrifying, and essential to the world building around Temple’s story.

For as dense and vibrant as Spektral Quartet’s instrumentation can be, Behind the Wallpaper is not afraid to peel it all back and embrace minimalism, allowing for Holter’s voice to be accompanied by a single string instrument, for her to sing unaccompanied, and for soft, staticky silence to stretch out for seconds.

As an artist who has collaborated across many and varied genres, Holter is a perfect vocalist for the project. Her vocals are distinctive, instantly recognisable, and yet, as a convincing nod to the fact that she’s lending her voice to someone else’s story, more measured in their phrasing and inflections than she would be on her own work. Holter takes on the role of a narrator, relating the story of a ‘you’ main character, inviting the listener to envision their place in the vividly strange story. Even the winking outro of ‘Unnatural’ follows this course: ‘And you thought, “You make me feel like an unnatural woman.”’

The lyrics shift throughout the album from the surreal (whole fish pouring out of your mouth and the ocean flooding your living room) to the tangibly mundane (the people riding along on a bus). ‘Joline’, the album’s meandering standout, sets a scene of a fantasy horror film, featuring a mystical forest and a house producing new walls and exacting violence on its visitors. The song propels through different movements, tumbling from creaking wood to jaunty rhythms to a see-sawing dissonance. Reaching the end of the song feels like coming through the other side of something, but the emotion of having done so is more conflicted than concrete.

Behind the Wallpaper has the feeling of metamorphosis around it – something new and beautiful that emerges from a painful process. It is not to minimise Temple’s personal story to suggest that the theme will resonate broadly; the lyrics are abstract but will feel familiar to anyone who has made a difficult change in their lives. Indeed, it’s a suitable soundtrack for being unmoored.

–Amanda Farah

Sequenza 21: Julia Holter and Spektral Quartet record Alex Temple (CD Review)

Out this Friday, March 3rd, via New Amsterdam Records  is composer Alex Temple’s cycle Behind the Wallpaper. Vocalist Julia Holter joins the Spektral Quartet in this song cycle inspired by Temple’s gender transition. 

Holter, as always, is a marvel, with expressive, liquescent singing throughout her soprano voice’s range. The Spektral Quartet is given a variety of styles to play, from doleful lyricism reminiscent of Shostakovich’s string quartets to post-minimalism. The musical smorgasbord reminds me in places of Elvis Costello’s collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters. Temple is fluent in marshaling these materials. Behind the Wallpaper deals with a significant event in Temple’s life, yet her touch is light and lyrics affirming. Recommended.

–Christian Carey

Brooklyn Vegan: 26 New Songs Out Today

SPEKTRAL QUARTET - "NIGHT AFTER NIGHT" FT. JULIA HOLTER

Alex Temple composed Behind The Wallpaper, the new album from string ensemble Spektral Quartet, which features Julia Holter on most of its songs. The latest single is the beautifully orchestral "Night After Night."

Chicago Tribune: After more than a decade, Chicago’s Spektral Quartet hangs up its bows. The Grammy-nominated group is going out ‘with a bang.’

Chicago Tribune: After more than a decade, Chicago’s Spektral Quartet hangs up its bows. The Grammy-nominated group is going out ‘with a bang.’

If the walls of Spektral Quartet’s Rogers Park rehearsal space could talk, they’d tell you about all the remarkable music they’ve heard there in the past 12 years, selections from Debussy and Schubert sitting comfortably alongside, say, Sufjan Stevens arrangements.

Then, they’d probably groan about the godawful viola jokes they’ve overheard.

Violinists Clara Lyon and Theo Espy (who previously performed under the name Maeve Feinberg), violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen are unrepentant on that point — after all, you’re talking to the quartet who once released an album cover of Armbrust mid-tumble on Northwestern University’s quad.

“Humor is pretty essential to what we do and how we approach our programming,” Lyon says.

It’s also precisely what endeared them to classical music acolytes, serious and not-so-serious alike. During that time, the string quartet blossomed from a local treasure to an internationally renowned, Grammy-nominated juggernaut, especially in the sometimes-niche sphere of contemporary classical music.

Limelight Magazine: ENIGMA – A startling string quartet, like you’ve never heard it, for these pandemic times.

Limelight Magazine: ENIGMA – A startling string quartet, like you’ve never heard it, for these pandemic times.

Suspended and caught in the moment between sleeping and waking, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Enigma inhabits a hazy, hallucinogenic dream-world of half-formed shapes fusing hypnotically in and out of focus. It’s a striking first string quartet by the young Icelandic composer, rendered here with glacial grandeur by the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, whose acutely detailed, inordinately sensitive playing precisely pitches itself at the boiling centre of still-forming immensities.

Textura: Spektral Quartet – ENIGMA

Textura: Spektral Quartet – ENIGMA

Spektral Quartet brings a surgical precision to every aspect of the score, which demands from its interpreters sensitivity to quarter-tone pitch alterations, subtle gradations of bow pressure, and the ability to play at the level of a whisper. Beyond the usual bowing and plucking, scrapes, slides, taps, clicks, pops, and other tactile gestures are required for the realization of the work. Such effects are in keeping with the composer's concept, which has to do with the “in-between,” the shadowy zone between sound and silence. Immense concentration by the players is needed for the three-movement work to blossom and transform at a measured pace that feels natural. Texture and sound design override melody in her micro-detailed tapestry, which isn't a critical observation but rather a descriptive one. Enigma isn't without emotion either, as moods and tones arise ranging from solemn and cryptic to ecstatic and lyrical.

Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: August 2021

Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has consistently evoked the sounds and vistas of the natural world in her instrumental writing—the fecund valleys and stark coasts of her homeland, in particular—and her first string quartet is no exception. Masterfully performed by Chicago’s Spektral Quartet, this three-movement gem balances astringent abstraction—including unpitched noises and percussive extended techniques—with melancholic grandeur, often voicing those polarities at once. The aptly titled Enigma is fueled by a sense of mystery, translating sounds foreign and familiar to our holistic experiences on Earth in order to deliberately smear the line between the quotidian and the sublime. Sounds from each side of the divide overlap, collide, and inform one another, producing a deliciously ambiguous trip that seems apropos for our fraught times. Despite the emotional uncertainty some passages transmit, spiked as they are with dissonance and brittleness, there’s an abiding humanity at the heart of the music that provides a guiding light.

Read the entire article here

NPR Music: Spektral Quartet, 'Enigma: III' (Anna Thorvaldsdottir)

Describing Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Enigma – her first string quartet – is not easy, but imagine you're suspended in some primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet. In the final section of the half-hour piece, long arcs of shifting sound deliver melodies in slow motion, while the composer's extended techniques for the players can make a violin sound like a woodwind or a synthesizer. Percussive creaks and snaps collide with slippery glissandos that flash across the score like tails of cosmic particles in the black nothingness. The performance, by the Spektral Quartet, makes the music feel vast and intimate at once. In an introduction to the score, Thorvaldsdottir dispenses some colorful advice: "When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling." Good luck.

Read the entire article here

Headphone Commute: Spektral Quartet performs Anna Thorvaldsdottir

Headphone Commute: Spektral Quartet performs Anna Thorvaldsdottir

The voices on the three-movement piece sigh and howl, caress and gash, cry out and whisper. Some scratching sounds inevitably give me goosebumps on the skin, the way the human nails kiss the chalkboard (I wonder what the articulation for those “notes” looks like on a sheet), as I imagine phantoms in the dark, their shadows on the walls and in between my bedsheets. There is a movement in the corner of my room, but when I look it’s gone, and only curtains slowly sway with their disdain and laughter. This music is unnerving, ominous and raw, and, once again, I wonder how these sounds can convey a real feeling.

I Care If You Listen: Anna Thorvaldsdóttir and Spektral Upend the String Quartet on Enigma

I Care If You Listen: Anna Thorvaldsdóttir and Spektral Upend the String Quartet on Enigma

Spektral’s execution is so microscopically precise that it gives it a voltaic momentum.

…

But this is no mere collection of eerie sound effects — Enigma evolves as the mysterious noises gradually blend into the chordal structures. In the third movement, particularly, multiple layers of sound spin centripetally into harmoniously stable grounds, only to ebb away at last into the pitchlessness of the opening. With that deceptively simple approach, Anna upends the string quartet genre and takes the listener on a nearly psychedelic trip into the unknown.

And yet, what is most disquieting about Enigma is that its most harrowing and despairing moments — contrasted by those elusive, not-so-consoling chorale progressions — make the listening experience uncomfortably familiar in our time. Whether a dirge for the countless Covid-related deaths that could have been avoided, or for the depletion of our natural resources, it is a death knell for the 21st century cast in a centuries-old musical form. Listen with the lights off.

An Earful: Record Roundup - Enigmas And Excitations

An Earful: Record Roundup - Enigmas And Excitations

Those are some reasons I was all aquiver when I heard that Anna Thorvaldsdottir, one of the preeminent composers of our time, had written a string quartet. The work, called Enigma, premiered in Washington DC in 2019 and is finally being released on August 27th in a stunning performance by the Spektral Quartet, beautifully produced by Dan Merceruio for Sono Luminus. Right from the start of the three-movement work it's obvious that Thorvaldsdottir is operating on her own trajectory, with little reference to what's come before in the medium. Beginning with some mysterious alchemy that has the strings sounding like a distant wind, or someone's breath, Enigma is instantly arresting. Long, drawn-out chords further the pi

Chicago Tribune: Live audiences are (hopefully) coming back. Where does that leave streaming concerts?

In a year all but bereft of upsides, streamed concerts have offered something close to a silver lining. They’ve flung open doors to otherwise inaccessible performances — whether fiscally or physically — and abetted novel performances that might not have happened otherwise, like a freewheeling Pauline Oliveros opera staged over Zoom last April, cellist Seth Parker Woods’s audiovisually mouthwatering performance of a work inspired by The Chicago Defender (and composed by the inimitable Nathalie Joachim), and Spektral Quartet’s lineup of side-splitting, chin-stroking conversation series.

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