Julianna Barwick

In 2010, Brooklyn's Julianna Barwick opened for the beloved Eluvium at the Cat's Cradle to a crowd, according to her, of seven people. Last January, she returned to Chapel Hill as the opening act for The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, a highly inconsequential band featuring John Lennon's son, Sean. The Local 506 was sold out. She stood in the corner of the stage in front of a few blinking consoles on a cheap folding table. She began to sing elliptical and highly textural phrases, catching fragments of songs in a loop station and letting them cycle and build, like an a cappella version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports. Some light drum and synthesizer sequences were the only accompaniment for her voice, which transformed the 506's mustiest tiles into the vaults of a cathedral. Barwick, then, is an Enya for people who are too cool for Enya.

What happened in between those two shows? Barwick's self-released Flourine EP—her second recording, after 2006's formative Sanguine LP—gained traction via nods from Pitchfork, eMusic and countless blogs, at a time when indie music was wide-open to ambient and new-age tropes, thanks to chillwave and D.I.Y. post-minimalism. By early 2011, excitement was high for her second LP, The Magic Place, which found her signed to Sufjan Stevens' Asthmatic Kitty label and employing more concrete instrumentation, like drums and piano, than ever before. Still, she didn't compromising the fundamentally vocal center of her hypnotic, ravishing music.

While her recorded output sounds ephemeral, she recreates it live with startling accuracy, and she does it without any backing band. Expect this to be an interstice of sublime stasis in a hectic schedule—Hopscotch's equivalent to the chill-out tent. —Brian Howe