Composer, vocalist, and producer Julianna Barwick crafts ethereal, largely wordless soundscapes built around layered loops of her voice. Inspired by her early years singing in rural church choirs, she begins most tracks with a single phrase or refrain, then uses a loop station and hints of other instrumentation to build her songs into intricate compositions with a powerful emotional impact. Barwick’s transcendent music draws comparisons to ambient legends like Brian Eno and Steve Reich, dream pop luminaries such as Sigur Rós and Cocteau Twins, conceptual artist Meredith Monk, and the soothing sounds of new age music, but the humanity in her approach is unique. She explores the intimate and vast aspects of her sound in continually fresh ways, from the relatively down-to-earth feel of 2011’s The Magic Place to 2013’s ambitious, polished Nepenthe. Though she added more elements and collaborators on albums such as 2020’s Healing Is a Miracle, Barwick’s music remained as distinctive as ever. While growing up in Louisiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma, Barwick fell in love with vocals and the power of natural reverb, whether singing rounds in an a cappella church choir or by herself in a parking garage. Her other formative musical experiences included high school vocal lessons and listening to everything from pop and R&B like Whitney Houston and Lionel Richie to film scores (John Williams’ music for Empire of the Sun was a favorite) to alternative music icons like Björk and Tori Amos. Barwick discovered experimental music after moving to New York, where she played DIY shows and recorded exploratory guitar pieces. However, her signature approach to making music began when a friend loaned her a looping guitar pedal in 2005. She used the pedal to record her self-released 2006 debut album Sanguine, which found her discovering the parameters of her sound. Following shows in Lisbon and London, Barwick graduated to using a full-fledged loop station for June 2009’s Florine EP, another self-released collection of tracks that embellished her vocals with touches of synth and piano. The growing praise for Barwick’s music led her to remix Radiohead’s “Reckoner” and sign a deal with Asthmatic Kitty. Recorded in a Brooklyn rehearsal space and named after a giant, hollowed-out tree trunk where she sang as a girl, February 2011’s The Magic Place presented a more refined and expansive version of her transfixing sound. In the wake of the album’s acclaim, Barwick issued that April’s Frkwys Vol. 6, a recording of an October 2010 live collaboration with Ikue Mori, and that October’s The Matrimony Remixes, a collection of Magic Place reworkings by Prince Rama, Diplo, Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange, and others. She continued to work on collaborative projects into 2012, appearing on Sharon Van Etten’s album Tramp and reuniting with Lange for their project Ombre, which released the album Believe You Me that August. In 2013, Barwick returned to her solo career. She issued the Pacing seven-inch on Suicide Squeeze in March, and in August she released her third full-length Nepenthe on Dead Oceans. To make the album, she traveled to Reykjavík, Iceland to record at Sigur Rós’ studio Sundlaugin with producer Alex Somers, marking the beginning of a long-running friendship. Inspired by the death of a relative, Nepenthe’s sound was more musically and emotionally complex than Barwick’s previous work and featured the string ensemble Amiina as well as members of Múm and a young women’s choir. Like her previous releases, Nepenthe earned glowing reviews. Next came June 2014’s Rosabi EP, a collaboration with Dogfish Head Brewery that incorporated recordings of the brewery into its pieces. The following year, she performed alongside Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson at the Flaming Lips’ reimagining of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at Carnegie Hall and played a pair of shows with Yoko Ono. Meanwhile, she recorded her fourth album in such distinct locations as Asheville, North Carolina; upstate New York; and Lisbon, Portugal. The results were 2016’s simpler and more grounded Will, which also featured Mas Ysa’s Thomas Arsenault, Dutch cellist Maarten Vos, and Chairlift drummer Jamie Ingalls. After 16 years in New York, Barwick moved to Los Angeles in 2017. Her first project after relocating was a July 2019 performance in Lincoln, Massachusetts that was part of visual artist Doug Aitken’s nomadic art project New Horizon, which sent a mirrored hot air balloon across the state. That December, the RVNG Intl. imprint Commend There issued Circumstance Synthesis, Barwick’s AI-enhanced score for the lobby of New York’s Sister City hotel. Barwick moved to Ninja Tune for her next album, July 2020’s Healing Is a Miracle. Based on improvisations she made just for herself, the album’s pieces were created with studio monitors given to her as a gift by Somers and his partner, Sigur Rós’ Jónsi. Jónsi also contributed to the album, along with two more of Barwick’s longtime friends, harpist Mary Lattimore and producer Nosaj Thing. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi

Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore, two of contemporary music’s most celebrated composers, come together for a unique show and album collaboration, TRAGIC MAGIC, in partnership with the Philharmonie de Paris. With extraordinary access to the Musée de la Musique’s instrument collection, the album, due January 2026 via French label InFiné, features seven immersive, evocative compositions guided by the human spirit – intimate, grounded in friendship, both earthly and cosmic – and part of a greater continuum, reflecting the solace and transformative power of artistry across generations.

Co-produced by Trevor Spencer (Fleet Foxes, Beach House), TRAGIC MAGIC was created in just nine days, a testament to the “musical telepathy” that has developed between Barwick and Lattimore over years of touring and friendship. Arriving in Paris from Los Angeles shortly after the 2025 wildfires, their sessions combined improvisation with the emotions and experiences they carried, in a setting both inspiring and deeply supportive. Lattimore selected harps tracing the instrument’s evolution from 1728 to 1873, while Barwick chose several iconic analog synthesizers, including the Roland JUPITER and Sequential Circuits PROPHET-5. In freeform dialogue between voice and instrument, they create a meditation on tragedy, wonder, and the restorative power of shared experience.

“unearthly dissonance: the auditory equivalent of awakening in the fog of a bad dream only to discover you’re still trapped in the nightmare” -The New York Times*“a titanic feat.., music that sounds simultaneously 300 years old and somewhere from the distant future.”* -The Guardian*“The duo traverses the art world and DIY noise scenes, and their music revels in the tension between elegance and disquiet, subverting the stereotypes associated with their chosen instruments.”* -Pitchfork (8.0 Album Review)*

“avant-pop that sounds unlike anything else”* -The FADER*”the ambient DIY duo making transcendental punk music”* -i-D*”a collaboration that stretches the possibilities”* -PAPER*”pure, shimmering, ethereal…doesn’t sound much like anything else”* -Document*“wildly sinister”* -Bandcamp*“subverting the baroque connotations of its arrangement in favor of something haunting and novel”* -Resident Advisor

LEYA – the duo of harpist Marilu Donovan and vocalist/violinist Adam Markiewicz – has long inhabited a beguiling world, blending Medieval-sounding origins with modern folk, classical, pop, and more. From deep roots in the NYC underground to international recognition as a crossover force, their work has found its way into spaces ranging from the club to fashion runways to Pornhub, and beyond.

The basis of LEYA is the unique tuning system of the harp, designed by Donovan for the project, which pairs with the distinctly wide, operatic singing range of Markiewicz, who further blends these vocals with processed violin tones. This sonic template is found on their 2018 debut The Fool and further developed on their 2020 breakthrough follow-up Flood Dream, which The New York Times called “the auditory equivalent of awakening in the fog of a bad dream only to discover you’re still trapped in the nightmare.” This sense of unease has become a distinctive tone for the project, a sort of collision of beauty and calamity that both soothes and disturbs its listeners.

LEYA’s distinctive sound was quickly noticed by other artists, starting with the release of their first single. In 2018 they were approached by rapper Brooke Candy to provide scoring and live acting for her adult film I Love You, which was produced by Pornhub for its Visionaries’ Directors Series and featured sound design by Sega Bodega. After an initial feature on The Fool, they followed in 2019 with the collaborative EP Angel Lust with Eartheater, with whom they have continued a close working relationship. In 2020 they released work with Actress, Liturgy, Drew McDowall (Coil/Psychic TV), and Christina Vantzou. In 2022 they released a fully collaborative mixtape comprised almost solely of features titled Eyeline. Other notable collaborators have included Ecco2K, Varg2TM, Julie Byrne, Okay Kaya, claire rousay, Deli Girls, James K, and many more.

LEYA’s latest release, I Forget Everything, marks their first return to the studio since 2022’s Eyeline and their first solo work since 2020’s Flood Dream. It comes on the heels of a relentless multi-year touring schedule, which began when COVID travel restrictions were lifted in 2021 and saw the duo performing steadily across the world through late 2023. Amidst this time, while working with many of the aforementioned collaborators, they also paired with fashion designers including Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein x i-D, Acne Studios, Elena Velez, HoodbyAir, video artists including Charles Atlas and Jeremiah Carter, choreographers including Loni Landon, and myriad others in varying modes of performance, scoring, and installations.

Since returning from tour, LEYA have sought to return to the basics of their raw sound but have also reimagined their language, harnessing production experiments percolating in their tangential work in recent years. I Forget Everything marks their first solo release containing elements of electronic production, sourcing from home-recorded to high-fidelity sounds, tracing the bounds of new experiments, while remaining rooted in harp, strings, and voice as the sole source of these sounds. The work regards a “haven scorned,” shifting in perspective between the larger world and one that is private, even imagined. A reaction to calamity, it imagines that abandonment is necessary. The work will mark only the beginning of a new path for LEYA amidst ever-expanding horizons.