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.

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

“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

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.

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.

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.