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After years spent performing and recording with other artists and groups, most notably Antony & The Johnsons (with whom she continues to work), Rasputina, Stars Of The Lid and Michael Gira's Angels Of Light, New York City-based Julia Kent found her own voice with her solo debut, Delay, an exploration of the private emotional worlds that exist within the disjunctions and disorientations of travel, hailed for its “lovely, melancholy” compositions, full of “aching romanticism…rich melodicism, and detailed arrangements.”
She toured to support it throughout Europe and North America, and subsequently released an EP, Last Day in July. In Green and Grey, her following solo record, she continued to use looped and layered cello, electronics, and field recordings to explore the intersections between the human world and the natural world, the melding of the technological and the organic, the patterns and repetitions that exist in nature and are mirrored in human creations, and the complexity and fragility of our relationships with one another and with the world that surrounds us.
In March 2013 she released a third full-length solo record, "Character," on the Leaf Label. Kent recorded Character alone at home and further developed the layering techniques that she explored on her past solo work. It features cello accompanied by found sounds and field recordings.
"Incorporated sounds are important," Kent said in a statement. "They contrast and complement the cello, my primary instrument, and also evoke the concept of a voice without being, literally, a voice. So I used a lot of found and processed sounds to try to achieve that: from matches being struck, to wineglasses, to the sound of pen on paper, to an ancient autoharp that, over time, ended up being detuned in a way that created an amazing sonority."
There are also elements of looping in Character, the title of which is inspired by the notion that a person is a character within his or her own life story.
"I ended up thinking about the process of life," she said. "How sometimes a narrative in fiction is meant to mirror the chronology of human life, and how our lives, in a way, can resemble works of fiction, but without the possibility of controlling the outcome the way an author can."
She was music composer for the Canadian documentary film The Boxing Girls of Kabul and the short film Birthplace.Her song "Dorval" was used in the 2008 film Trinidad. She has toured throughout Europe and North America, including appearances at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, the Donau festival in Austria, Meltdown in London, and the Unsound festival in New York City.
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