Julie’s Haircut harness avant-rock experimentation and channel intoxicating psychedelic grooves fuelled by a kosmische engine on In the Silence Electric

There’s a particular kind of thrill about hearing new material from a band who are unknown to you but have an already storied career. Such was my experience encountering Julie’s Haircut. Hailing from northern Italy, the band have been putting out material since the late nineties, but it took Andrew Weatherall playing two of the tracks from In the Silence Electric on his NTS Radio show in 2019 to open the door for me. The polyrhythmic dream-into-nightmare of the African-steeped “Pharaoh’s Dream” hit me like a psychedelic depth charge when Weatherall dropped it. Something like a sonic appropriation of The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles or The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni, with the primacy of another culture subsuming the not-wary-enough interloper. Weatherall ended the show on “Sorceror”, an intoxicating man-machine howl and propulsive groove somewhere along the lines of Roy Orbison making the dirtiest kosmische musik possible. In other words, two tracks in and I was hooked.

The rest of the album is just as exhilarating. Free of back catalogue expectations, I decided to keep it that way for a little longer, tried to experience In the Silence Electric for what it was on its own terms. This may be the band’s tenth LP, but there are zero signs of fatigue. Quite the opposite in fact, for there is an exploratory thrust throughout, a desire and ability to push the music to organic extremes in different directions. Psychedelic avant-rock is fuelled by a krautrock engine as drones seep through from dimensionally unstable corners. Lyrics carved out of deep time contain brimming-with-life imagery around, for example, “the raging sea” or a “divine horde” on “Until the Lights Go Out” and “For the Seven Lakes”. These songs, like the others surrounding them, are incantations to the beyond, bled out from the everyday.

Julie’s Haircut avoid pretension, harness their experimentation and channel their influences back into the music. They dig deep and keep grounded in the groove. Makes perfect sense that Andrew Weatherall would champion them and thank the gods that he did.

Sleeve: copyright Annegret Soltau.

julieshaircut.bandcamp.com

Stewart Gardiner
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