Julia Easterlin

Biography

Julia Easterlin is a sophisticated musical mind who wields composition, production and performance in one fell swoop. One part siren and one part techy, she uses looping hardware to build a one-woman chorus live on stage. Trained as a classical pianist and jazz vocalist, Julia began performing at 15. After garnering acclaim from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, the John Lennon Foundation, Downbeat Magazine, and the Gibson/Baldwin GRAMMY Jazz Ensembles, she ventured into unde...

Julia Easterlin is a sophisticated musical mind who wields composition, production and performance in one fell swoop. One part siren and one part techy, she uses looping hardware to build a one-woman chorus live on stage. Trained as a classical pianist and jazz vocalist, Julia began performing at 15. After garnering acclaim from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, the John Lennon Foundation, Downbeat Magazine, and the Gibson/Baldwin GRAMMY Jazz Ensembles, she ventured into underground electronic, experimenting with her voice, manipulating it to mimic electronically generated sound waves. Combining electro/acoustic texture with the musical roots of her classical and jazz training, Julia composed and performed with the assistance of her “magic box” – a loop machine. This requires her to record, organize, maintain and trigger up to 20 different loops over the course of one song. When asked how she keeps track of it all, she says, “I visualize a song as a series of colors and shapes. Each sound I make has a corresponding shape, and the song form is represented by a pattern of all the shapes moving together. What I see in my head over the course of a song looks like a scrolling quilt or a painting that moves.”

Julia graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston and has performed at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago and the CollegeMusicJournal (CMJ) festival in New York. She received acclaim for her recording of Radiohead’s “There There”. Julia’s currently working with a new band, combining her loop station with two drummers and a bassist (and lots of dancing) to construct a new body of work. She plans to premiere the work in 2012.
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