“Chaitius” could soundtrack a ballet “Everyday Is an Emergency” sounds trapped inside a haunted mansion. Each Aviary track is an extreme and immersive sensory experience. Exploring the album feels like walking through a house, where each of its 15 tracks is a room, a repository for another brilliant idea: medieval polyphony, Tibetan Buddhist chanting, the poet Sappho, Dante’s Inferno, even the outer limits of new wave. If Holter’s preceding records were novellas, Aviary feels more like a meticulously organized compilation of mind-altering field notes in which a single page can be a world, and its depth is stunning. Evoking Holter’s live performances, her seriously locked-in ensemble brings an improvisatory energy to Aviary, weaving together strings, trumpet, and the fantastic drone of bagpipes. In the wake of her enchanting trio of singer-songwriter LPs-2012’s Ekstasis, 2013’s Loud City Song, and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness-this feels like gleeful anarchy.

That sense of muchness makes for the purest and most daring realization of Holter’s experimental tendencies yet. She says the title came from a line in a book by the Lebanese-American writer Etel Adnan-“I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds”-and is meant to evoke the way memories, beautiful and horrifying, fly around in our minds, echoing the grating noise of the world. Holter’s new album, Aviary, is an odyssey stretching, sky-like, across 90 glorious minutes.

Julia holter rar