Old Fire Shares New Single “Window Without A World” Ft. Julia Holter
Old Fire–the recording project of Abilene, TX-based composer and producer John Mark Lapham–today shared “Window Without A World” ft. Julia Holter, the third and final advance single from his sophomore album, Voids. A largely collaborative album due out November 4th, 2022 (Western Vinyl), Voids features vocalists Holter, Bill Callahan, Adam Torres, and Emily Cross, as well as a myriad of musicians. The icy, glistening, and ambient “Window Without A World” ft. Julia Holter is the album’s most unconventional collaboration, yet also exemplifies Lapham’s way of building songs out of pieces of others across Voids.
He explains: "I randomly recorded a vocal sample off Julia Holter’s song ‘World' and had it laying around my hard drive for a while. Some time after, I sampled some sounds from 'Don’t You Go' and started re-arranging them (most Old Fire ideas begin this way). It struck me quite randomly that Julia’s vocal would fit nicely on top of this arrangement, and amazingly, it fit perfectly like they were written for each other. I had pursued her initially for a collaboration but the timing was always off. When this track came together, I knew this would in some sense be our ‘collaboration.' I was really happy to have her beautiful voice appear on the album. I originally had programmed a lot of the woodwind parts to appear on the instrumental closer ‘Circles,' then transposed them in an arrangement for 'Don’t You Go,' then finally moved them over to this track. The way all the parts fit so well together felt serendipitous. My good friend David (DM) Stith provided some vocoder vocal textures for the end." Holter adds, "I loved to hear the way Old Fire sampled ‘World’ and made it into something of their own and very moving." “Window Without A World” also features Robin Allender (electric guitar/loops), Christian Madden (vocoder), Audrey Harrer (harp), Thor Harris (xylophone), Joseph Shabason (saxophone), and Joe Ryan (drums). Voids is now available for pre-order.
“Window Without A World” ft. Julia Holter follows previous singles “Dreamless” ft. Adam Torres and “Don’t You Go” ft. Bill Callahan—a cover of British singer-songwriter John Martyn—which saw praise from Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, NPR Music (#NowPlaying for “Don’t You Go:” “a delicate elegy with cinematic scale”), Cool Hunting, and more.
Composed of 12 genre-fluid, yet impressively cohesive tracks that span baroque dream-pop, filmic ambient, raga-like drones, avant-country, and even spiritual jazz, Voids was created over five difficult years. “I was feeling the brunt of a relationship ending, and the emptiness it left behind,” says Lapham. “Over the course of compiling the album, I lost both my parents, and the pandemic started. These recordings were born out of that loss, and that isolation. The title Voids was a natural fit.” Half the songs feature a guest vocalist, half are fully instrumental (Voids’ array of diverse musicians also includes pedal steel legend Bob Hoffnar, keyboardist Madden, guitarist Alex Hutchins, ambient composer Wayne Robert Thomas, Warren Defever of His Name Is Alive, multi-instrumentalist Harris, saxophonist Shabason, drummers Robb Kidd and Ryan, and more), and many dovetail seamlessly into the next or are born out of parts, loops, samples, or textures of another—creating a captivating sonic collage.
In the age of remote collaboration, features can easily feel glued-on; the disparities in recording locales, artistic visions, and sensibilities sometimes compound inside each psychoacoustic detail to the point of disproportion. Voids makes clear, however, that one of Lapham’s many talents is selecting contributors whose timbres and temperaments soak effortlessly into every atom of his sonic sculptures. “I usually send a collaborator a piece of music with some general ideas of what I'm looking for, and let them develop it as they see fit. I give them some preliminary lyrics I've written, or at least some themes of what the song is about, then they write lyrics and ideas based around that,” he explains. “Sometimes there is a lot of back and forth before we get it right, and almost always there are unexpected turns in the process where it ends up being something very different from what we started with. I bring it all together, but the album exists because of their contributions.”
Lapham’s music and visual art—he doubles as a video editor and animator, and has made music videos for bands such as Goat, Throwing Muses, Night Beats, Moon Duo, Jane Weaver, and many others—are stitched with threads spun from the dissonance between his identity and the doggedly conservative cultural atmosphere in which he was raised, ventured away from by adulthood, and ultimately returned to in 2013. As evidenced by the alternating apprehension and expansion on Voids, Lapham wields his creativity as a covert weapon against his once and future surroundings as if the act of creating something, anything, is in itself defiant of the cultural, structural, and even climatic deterioration of many West Texas towns. Across the album, and through the concept of Old Fire as a project, he builds a mythical, noir-ish version of his home state and its wide open spaces, painting these fictional narratives with the music.
Read Old Fire’s full bio/download photos & album art HERE.
Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
www.westernvinyl.com