Julia Holter performing at the Teragram Ballroom in Downtown Los Angeles

Los Angeles is about to light up with music from some of your favorite acts as FYF Fest kicks off this Saturday, August 27 and Sunday, August 28. Today’s featured FYF undercard is Julia Holter.

Even more prolific than our previously featured FYF Undercard, Julia Holter has released six albums since she began back in 2008, and since then the Los Angeles native has contributed collaborations with everyone from Nite Jewel to folk-legend Linda Perhacs. Unlike our other featured FYF folk-crooner, Holter’s compositions are filled-out, and flooding at the brim with lush instrumentals from strings to brass, which surge in the background. Right from the get-go, Holter has had a penchant for experimentalism and crafting austere albums. Her first release, the aptly named Tragedy, was inspired by Eurpides’ play Hippolytus, was not without a few electronic junctures. Since then, she’s exercised at putting her vocals on an even keel with her dreamy instrumentals, which was seemingly the purpose of her latest work, last year’s Have You In My Wilderness.

Less the traditionally cliche— pastoral, nature-bound imagism of most folk performers—Holter focuses less on locale and more on emotion, capturing the crushing freedom and isolation of the wide-open spaces her songs echo within. On songs like “Feel You,” her soft but spry vocals (which reflect a shadow of Jenny Lewis) jump and twirl alongside a flurry of backing strings, while the sublime promenade that is “Sea Calls Me Home,” dives from whistled melodies and weeping electric guitars to a tangle of distortion that is joined back by Holter’s howls, and into a twinkling fade out. With music as emotionally and mentally mesmerizing as Holter’s, it’s too bad her FYF set wasn’t scheduled for sunset. Needless to say, this is one FYF Undercard you do not want to miss.

Julia Holter performs at FYF Fest on Sunday, August 28 at 4 p.m. on the Club Stage. Julia Holter’s latest album Have You In My Wilderness is available digitally and physically.

Words: Steven Ward