Following Celia Hollander’s profession is a bit like chasing the white rabbit by way of Wonderland. Her work takes on a large number of types, from scoring to sound installations to visible artwork. She has been releasing forward-looking albums for years, and her work is stuffed with inside lexicons that give every bit a singular logic. The present iteration of Hollander’s musical profession is the end result of years of ceaseless inventive pursuits in quite a lot of mediums. This variety of expertise and talent to attract surprising connections makes her work so efficient. Her latest album, Excellent Situations, is a sonic exploration of the proper situations for all times on Earth. It’s each her most conceptually layered and musically adventurous work up to now. 

Rising up in West Los Angeles, Hollander’s earliest ardour was drawing, a follow she nonetheless maintains. “Once I was in elementary college, I had a comic book strip. Each two weeks, I mailed it out to all people that I knew. I saved that up for just a few years.” Hollander’s multimedia sensibility would quickly turn into obvious when, at age seven, she started learning classical piano and, in center college, joined Jazz Band, which turned out to be significantly revelatory.

“It blew my thoughts as a result of then music additionally included improvising and taking part in with different folks and this entire social side. That’s additionally after I began to develop my very own music style. So actually, by way of jazz, I began to like music and felt it as extra of a inventive factor than an instructional factor.”  

In highschool, Celia Hollander continued to discover new avenues of musicianship, taking part in keys for buddies’ bands. Nevertheless, she typically discovered that taking part in different peoples’ music was extra essential socially than artistically. “It was enjoyable, but it surely didn’t really feel like a inventive mission for me.” Nonetheless, by way of this course of, she was launched to the ability and freedom of recording.

“It occurred to me, by way of listening to another person’s work, that I may simply, in a scrappy approach, file the entire components myself. So, I bought a digital four-track, and with that, I began recording.” This intersection of artwork and know-how would turn into indicative of Celia Hollander’s musical and multimedia work and an appreciation for calculated limitations. “I actually fell in love with music by way of recording, and particularly by way of recording with very primitive, restricted means.”

After highschool, Hollander attended Wesleyan College in Middletown, Connecticut. “I went to check music, however I ended up connecting with the artwork division and an structure professor, and I ended up formally learning and majoring in structure and studio artwork.” Whereas she took a category with the famend experimental composer Alvin Lucier and took part within the college’s Javanese Gamelan ensemble, her inventive trajectory appeared to take a brand new route.

After graduating, Celia Hollander returned to Los Angeles, interned for an structure agency, after which transitioned to working as a studio assistant. “I began working for artists, doing loads of work, utilizing my design background. After which, slowly, by way of my 20s, as I spent my days in artwork studios fabricating or designing work within the visible artwork realm, I’d come dwelling and make music on my pc at evening.”

The steadiness between music, artwork, and design has taken varied types for Hollander over time. “In highschool, I used to be recording with this four-track, and I didn’t actually file music aside from some experiments on GarageBand in faculty, after which it wasn’t till after faculty after I was working professionally extra within the artwork and design house that I found Ableton, and I used to be very threatened after I found Ableton, as a result of I used to be like, ‘This can be a rabbit gap. If I get into this, it may destabilize my entire trajectory.’”

Hollander ended up happening that rabbit gap, however figuring out the perils she did so in a measured and regarded approach. “I went to Marfa, Texas, to stay there for a short while, intending to show myself Ableton and file some music. It was a self-imposed, capped residency, after which I’d return to LA and proceed my structure trajectory, and I simply grew to become obsessive about Ableton and stayed in Marfa for over a 12 months.”

Out of this time in Marfa, Hollander’s earliest releases emerged, first, with $. underneath her 3:33 AM moniker after which her album – – — — – – – underneath $3.33. These recordings made approach for Draft, a four-song experimental piano album recorded in Los Angeles. Initially self-released in 2014, Draft could be rereleased in 2017 by Leaving Information.

Whereas working as a studio assistant, Celia Hollander additionally started creating musical scores for dance, movie, and video installations. With music taking extra of a outstanding house in her inventive {and professional} life, Hollander immersed herself in music-making and entered the California Institute of the Arts to pursue her MFA in Music Composition & Experimental Sound Practices.

After graduating on the finish of 2019, in March 2020, Hollander launched her first album underneath her title, Current Futures. The throws of the pandemic upended her plans for that file, but it surely additionally knowledgeable the ruminations of her follow-up, Timekeeper, in 2021. With its clear level of focus and accompanying schematic, Timekeeper makes the significance of techniques in Celia Hollander’s course of specific. It’s a meditation on the expertise and phenomenon of time. Knowledgeable by the temporal disorientation of COVID lockdown, it explores totally different experiences and notions of time, from the non-public and linear to the cyclical and cosmic.  

Orson Welles famously quipped, “The enemy of artwork is the absence of limitations.” Celia Hollander’s work exemplifies this maxim. Her 2023 album, 2nd Draft, got here out of her every day improvisations on the piano as a Composer in Residence on the Kimmel Harding Nelson Middle for the Arts, Nebraska Metropolis, Nebraska. It’s maybe extra reflective of a devotional follow than a theoretical assemble. Nonetheless, it supplied the mandatory boundaries that Hollander has come to depend on to realize a way of inventive freedom, “As an alternative of me being the one who’s at all times making the selections, I prefer to outsource it to this idea or construction that I made.”

Celia HollanderCelia Hollander
Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

Like Timekeeper, the techniques that govern Excellent Situations are clear. Every monitor pairs two of the 4 components with the 16 mixtures realized on the album. The sonic qualities of every ingredient react in radically other ways relying on the pairing. It doesn’t depend on musical conference however as an alternative lets the parameters dictate occasions, typically leading to thrillingly surprising moments. The impact of it’s ambient soundscapes morphing into deep grooves and moments of rapturous kineticism. She makes use of frequency, timbre, and movement to counsel elemental qualities that change in relation to their pairings.

For example, whereas fireplace, by itself, within the case of the composition “Fireplace / Fireplace“, has a hypnotizing melodic high quality, when fireplace meets water within the case of “Fireplace / Water“, the strain of the weather creates a driving momentum not in contrast to a steam engine. All of this aesthetic variation comes from the conceptual buildings that Celia Hollander places in place. Simply as the shape life takes is a response to extremely specific evolutionary circumstances or situations, the shape and motion of those compositions are responses to myriad influences. 

This fascinating extramusical idea gives an entryway into Excellent Situations. “However on the finish of the day, it’s actually not about particular person components. It’s a metaphor for combining forces and the fantastic thing about what occurs with that.” One doesn’t want context to be riveted by the music. The file doesn’t buckle underneath the load of its rigor. The parameters are a information for Hollander’s sonic experiments. Nevertheless, that is removed from a purely tutorial train. As a composer, Celia Hollander reveals a deep sense of management. The compositions would possibly outcome from a system, however it’s a system of Hollander’s creation. 

She arrived on the album’s construction by way of a psychological train to calm a stressed thoughts earlier than sleep. “I create little structural calming video games for my thoughts to strive to go to sleep typically. I’d think about earth over water after which attempt to think about what that may very well be. It may very well be like mud or water underground. Then I’d flip it and be like, okay, what’s water over earth? That’s like a river or an ocean or the entire seen examples of the place water sits on high. I’d slowly work my thoughts by way of the entire mixtures. It turned out to be a really efficient and soothing psychological exercise.”

The construction informs Excellent Situations‘ numerous soundscapes and energetic qualities, and though at instances Celia Hollander seems to be in novel musical terrain, that isn’t solely the case. “I feel many individuals who’ve come to my music in the previous couple of years will see this as one thing very new for me. It’s one thing that’s very previous. It’s like going again to music I made way back earlier than I shared music with folks.”  

There may be an urgency within the music underscored by the truth that Celia Hollander is self-releasing the LP. “When working with a label, any label, it’s important to wait a really very long time earlier than the file comes out as a result of they have already got a schedule. There’s a backlog of releases. With this album, I can’t wait, actually.”

The impulse for immediacy may replicate a collective want for perspective. Exploring the proper situations for all times is a daring proposition. It is usually profoundly obligatory. In a time that may really feel overwhelming in all types of the way, it may be fortifying to confide in life on a grand scale, realms outdoors our day-to-day lives however important to them.

Celia HollanderCelia Hollander
Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

On the quilt of Excellent Situations, we see two marbled Earthlike spheres splitting. That could be a refined nod to James Lovelock’s Gaia speculation. Merely put, the Gaia speculation means that Earth is alive. Environments form organisms, however organisms additionally work together with their environments to create self-regulating techniques that synergistically maintain life. Whereas we all know it once we see it, “life” is a surprisingly elusive time period. It’s typically outlined descriptively as having options equivalent to homeostasis, adaptability, response to stimuli, and the flexibility to breed.

Earth, with its varied self-regulating techniques, displays most definitions of life besides copy. However on the quilt, we see an abstracted Earth doing exactly that: performing the ultimate high quality of life and reproducing. Whereas Hollander doesn’t essentially counsel that the Earth will replicate in a literal sense, she provides further complexity to the album’s conceptual construction. 

Excellent Situations reminds us of how awe-inspiring, wondrous, and unusual life is. Not merely how uncommon our instances are or human life over the centuries, however the phenomenon of organisms rising from inorganic matter, taking up varied interconnected types and offering the primordial situations to which we owe our existence. It’s simple to take this interdependent matrix without any consideration or consider ourselves as outdoors of it. Nonetheless, Hollander’s LP zooms us out and in of elemental interactions from the seemingly molecular to the cosmic. It leaves one feeling much less like a person life on Earth and extra like part of Earth’s dynamic life drive.

Shortly after Excellent Situations was launched, on 8 January, Hollander and her companion, Evan Shornstein (Photay), misplaced their dwelling within the Eaton wildfire in Altadena, California. They’re secure, however together with their dwelling, their belongings and music gear had been destroyed. Like 1000’s of others, they’ve discovered their lives upended. This catastrophic catastrophe that has affected all Angelenos displays a worldwide disaster that’s basically linked to how we see ourselves and relate to the environment.

Excellent Situations appears prescient in mild of this devastation. It underscores that the perfect situations for all times are additionally precarious. Hollander’s music positions us not as passive observers however as lively members able to tilting a fragile steadiness towards destruction or concord. Whereas the album emerged from a conceptual train, its implications are solely concrete. 

An excerpt of Celia Hollander and Photay performing stay at Leaving Information’ “Hearken to Music Outdoors within the Daylight Below a Tree” is featured on the expansive 98-track fundraiser compilation, Staying: Leaving Information Help to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires.

On behalf of Hollander and Shornstein, Iyla Shornstein and Ivan Money organized a fundraiser to assist the musicians as they rebuild. You may contribute on the hyperlink under.