Julia Holter's Ekstasis album is released next week. Follow up to last year's Tragedy, it's one of 2012's more interesting records so far and is beginning to whip up a fair bit of anticipation. In advance of its release you can stream the album in full, now, via NPR - click the link to listen.

A contemporary and friend of Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel's Ramona Gonzalez, on the surface Holter's music cleverly melds current and traditional folk forms with modern compositional techniques and electronics. Listen more closely still, and what's unusual about Ekstasis is how complex its arrangements are: it's packed with layers all operating independently of one another, but the busy mix is never allowed to overwhelm the songs themselves. As a result the tiniest shift in the way Holter music is vertically built makes a dramatic difference to atmosphere, and it's always in motion on the horizontal axis too, often passing through two or more quite different segments over the course of a single song. It's an album composed of microscopic fragments that constantly, almost imperceptibly, play with the mood of the listener.

Eskstasis is released through RVNG Intl. on March 6th.