Old Fire, the project of Abilene, Texas-based composer John Mark Lapham, has shared a new song, ‘Window Without a World’, which features Julia Holter. It’s the third and final single off his sophomore LP Voids, which is out November 4 and also includes collaborations with Bill Callahan, Adam Torres, and Emily Cross, among others. Listen below.
The new track also features Robin Allender on electric guitar and loops, Christian Madden on vocoder, Audrey Harrer on harp, Thor Harris on xylophone, Joseph Shabason on saxophone, and Joe Ryan on drums. Discussing the song in a statement, Lapham said:
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 added, “I loved to hear the way Old Fire sampled ‘World’ and made it into something of their own and very moving.”
