Julia Holter joins Old Fire on new song "Window Without a World"

"Window Without a World" follows earlier releases "Dreamless" featuring Adam Torres and Bill Callahan collaboration "Don't You Go".

Old Fire, aka John Mark Lapham, says of the track, "I randomly recorded a vocal sample off Julia Holter’s song "World" and had it laying around my hard drive for a while. Some time after, I sampled some sounds from "Don’t You Go" and started re-arranging them (most Old Fire ideas begin this way). It struck me quite randomly that Julia’s vocal would fit nicely on top of this arrangement, and amazingly, it fit perfectly like they were written for each other. I had pursued her initially for a collaboration but the timing was always off. When this track came together, I knew this would in some sense be our ‘collaboration.' I was really happy to have her beautiful voice appear on the album. I originally had programmed a lot of the woodwind parts to appear on the instrumental closer "Circles", then transposed them in an arrangement for "Don’t You Go", then finally moved them over to this track. The way all the parts fit so well together felt serendipitous. My good friend David (DM) Stith provided some vocoder vocal textures for the end."

Holter adds, "I loved to hear the way Old Fire sampled "World" and made it into something of their own and very moving."

Voids was created over five years, and as well as featuring guest vocalists including Emily Cross, the other part of the album is fully instrumental.

"I was feeling the brunt of a relationship ending, and the emptiness it left behind," Lapham says. "Over the course of compiling the album, I lost both my parents, and the pandemic started. These recordings were born out of that loss, and that isolation. The title Voids was a natural fit."

He adds of the collaborations, "I usually send a collaborator a piece of music with some general ideas of what I'm looking for, and let them develop it as they see fit. I give them some preliminary lyrics I've written, or at least some themes of what the song is about, then they write lyrics and ideas based around that. Sometimes there is a lot of back and forth before we get it right, and almost always there are unexpected turns in the process where it ends up being something very different from what we started with. I bring it all together, but the album exists because of their contributions."