Following Celia Hollander’s career is a bit like chasing the white rabbit through Wonderland. Her work takes on a multitude of forms, from scoring to sound installations to visual art. She has been releasing forward-looking albums for years, and her work is full of internal lexicons that give each piece a unique logic. The current iteration of Hollander’s musical career is the culmination of years of ceaseless creative pursuits in a variety of mediums. This diversity of experience and ability to draw unexpected connections makes her work so effective. Her newest album, Perfect Conditions, is a sonic exploration of the perfect conditions for life on Earth. It is both her most conceptually layered and musically adventurous work to date.
Growing up in West Los Angeles, Hollander’s earliest passion was drawing, a practice she still maintains. “When I was in elementary school, I had a comic strip. Every two weeks, I mailed it out to everybody that I knew. I kept that up for a few years.” Hollander’s multimedia sensibility would soon become apparent when, at age seven, she began studying classical piano and, in middle school, joined Jazz Band, which turned out to be particularly revelatory.
“It blew my mind because then music also included improvising and playing with other people and this whole social aspect. That’s also when I started to develop my own music taste. So really, through jazz, I started to love music and felt it as more of a creative thing than an academic thing.”
In high school, Celia Hollander continued to explore new avenues of musicianship, playing keys for friends’ bands. However, she often found that playing other peoples’ music was more important socially than artistically. “It was fun, but it didn’t feel like a creative project for me.” Still, through this process, she was introduced to the power and freedom of recording.
“It occurred to me, through listening to someone else’s work, that I could just, in a scrappy way, record all of the parts myself. So, I got a digital four-track, and with that, I started recording.” This intersection of art and technology would become indicative of Celia Hollander’s musical and multimedia work and an appreciation for calculated limitations. “I really fell in love with music through recording, and especially through recording with very primitive, limited means.”
After high school, Hollander attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “I went to study music, but I ended up connecting with the art department and an architecture professor, and I ended up formally studying and majoring in architecture and studio art.” While she took a class with the renowned experimental composer Alvin Lucier and participated in the university’s Javanese Gamelan ensemble, her creative trajectory seemed to take a new direction.
After graduating, Celia Hollander returned to Los Angeles, interned for an architecture firm, and then transitioned to working as a studio assistant. “I started working for artists, doing a lot of work, using my design background. And then, slowly, through my 20s, as I spent my days in art studios fabricating or designing work in the visual art realm, I would come home and make music on my computer at night.”
The balance between music, art, and design has taken various forms for Hollander over the years. “In high school, I was recording with this four-track, and I didn’t really record music except for some experiments on GarageBand in college, and then it wasn’t until after college when I was working professionally more in the art and design space that I discovered Ableton, and I was very threatened when I discovered Ableton, because I was like, ‘This is a rabbit hole. If I get into this, it could destabilize my whole trajectory.'”
Hollander ended up going down that rabbit hole, but knowing the perils she did so in a measured and considered way. “I went to Marfa, Texas, to live there for a short time, intending to teach myself Ableton and record some music. It was a self-imposed, capped residency, and then I would go back to LA and continue my architecture trajectory, and I just became obsessed with Ableton and stayed in Marfa for over a year.”
Out of this time in Marfa, Hollander’s earliest releases emerged, first, with $. under her 3:33 AM moniker and then her album – – — — – – – under $3.33. These recordings made way for Draft, a four-song experimental piano album recorded in Los Angeles. Originally self-released in 2014, Draft would be rereleased in 2017 by Leaving Records.
While working as a studio assistant, Celia Hollander also began creating musical scores for dance, film, and video installations. With music taking more of a prominent space in her creative and professional life, Hollander immersed herself in music-making and entered the California Institute of the Arts to pursue her MFA in Music Composition & Experimental Sound Practices.
After graduating at the end of 2019, in March 2020, Hollander released her first album under her name, Recent Futures. The throws of the pandemic upended her plans for that record, but it also informed the ruminations of her follow-up, Timekeeper, in 2021. With its clear point of focus and accompanying schematic, Timekeeper makes the importance of systems in Celia Hollander’s process explicit. It is a meditation on the experience and phenomenon of time. Informed by the temporal disorientation of COVID lockdown, it explores different experiences and notions of time, from the personal and linear to the cyclical and cosmic.
Orson Welles famously quipped, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” Celia Hollander’s work exemplifies this maxim. Her 2023 album, 2nd Draft, came out of her daily improvisations at the piano as a Composer in Residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, Nebraska. It is perhaps more reflective of a devotional practice than a theoretical construct. Still, it provided the necessary boundaries that Hollander has come to rely on to achieve a sense of creative freedom, “Instead of me being the one who’s always making the decisions, I like to outsource it to this concept or structure that I made.”
Like Timekeeper, the systems that govern Perfect Conditions are clear. Each track pairs two of the four elements with the 16 combinations realized on the album. The sonic qualities of each element react in radically different ways depending on the pairing. It does not rely on musical convention but instead lets the parameters dictate events, often resulting in thrillingly unexpected moments. The effect of it is ambient soundscapes morphing into deep grooves and moments of rapturous kineticism. She uses frequency, timbre, and motion to suggest elemental qualities that change in relation to their pairings.
For instance, while fire, on its own, in the case of the composition “Fire / Fire“, has a hypnotizing melodic quality, when fire meets water in the case of “Fire / Water“, the tension of the elements creates a driving momentum not unlike a steam engine. All of this aesthetic variation comes from the conceptual structures that Celia Hollander puts in place. Just as the form life takes is a response to highly particular evolutionary circumstances or conditions, the form and movement of these compositions are responses to myriad influences.
This fascinating extramusical concept provides an entryway into Perfect Conditions. “But at the end of the day, it’s really not about individual elements. It’s a metaphor for combining forces and the beauty of what happens with that.” One does not need context to be riveted by the music. The record does not buckle under the weight of its rigor. The parameters are a guide for Hollander’s sonic experiments. However, this is far from a purely academic exercise. As a composer, Celia Hollander exhibits a deep sense of control. The compositions might result from a system, but it is a system of Hollander’s creation.
She arrived at the album’s structure through a mental exercise to calm a restless mind before sleep. “I create little structural calming games for my mind to try to fall asleep sometimes. I would imagine earth over water and then try to imagine what that could be. It could be like mud or water underground. Then I’d flip it and be like, okay, what’s water over earth? That’s like a river or an ocean or all of the visible examples of where water sits on top. I would slowly work my mind through all of the combinations. It turned out to be a very effective and soothing mental activity.”
The structure informs Perfect Conditions‘ diverse soundscapes and energetic qualities, and although at times Celia Hollander appears to be in novel musical terrain, that is not entirely the case. “I think many people who have come to my music in the last few years will see this as something very new for me. It’s something that’s very old. It’s like going back to music I made long ago before I shared music with people.”
There is an urgency in the music underscored by the fact that Celia Hollander is self-releasing the LP. “When working with a label, any label, you have to wait a very long time before the record comes out because they already have a schedule. There’s a backlog of releases. With this album, I can’t wait, literally.”
The impulse for immediacy may also reflect a collective need for perspective. Exploring the perfect conditions for life is a bold proposition. It is also profoundly necessary. In a time that can feel overwhelming in all sorts of ways, it can be fortifying to open up to life on a grand scale, realms outside our day-to-day lives but essential to them.
On the cover of Perfect Conditions, we see two marbled Earthlike spheres splitting. That is a subtle nod to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Simply put, the Gaia hypothesis suggests that Earth is alive. Environments shape organisms, but organisms also interact with their environments to create self-regulating systems that synergistically sustain life. While we know it when we see it, “life” is a surprisingly elusive term. It is often defined descriptively as having features such as homeostasis, adaptability, response to stimuli, and the ability to reproduce.
Earth, with its various self-regulating systems, reflects most definitions of life except reproduction. But on the cover, we see an abstracted Earth doing precisely that: performing the final quality of life and reproducing. While Hollander does not necessarily suggest that the Earth will replicate in a literal sense, she adds additional complexity to the album’s conceptual structure.
Perfect Conditions reminds us of how awe-inspiring, wondrous, and strange life is. Not simply how unusual our times are or human life over the centuries, but the phenomenon of organisms emerging from inorganic matter, taking on various interconnected forms and providing the primordial conditions to which we owe our existence. It is easy to take this interdependent matrix for granted or think of ourselves as outside of it. Still, Hollander’s LP zooms us in and out of elemental interactions from the seemingly molecular to the cosmic. It leaves one feeling less like an individual life on Earth and more like a part of Earth’s dynamic life force.
Shortly after Perfect Conditions was released, on 8 January, Hollander and her partner, Evan Shornstein (Photay), lost their home in the Eaton wildfire in Altadena, California. They are safe, but along with their home, their belongings and music equipment were destroyed. Like thousands of others, they have found their lives upended. This catastrophic disaster that has affected all Angelenos reflects a global crisis that is fundamentally connected to how we see ourselves and relate to our environment.
Perfect Conditions seems prescient in light of this devastation. It underscores that the ideal conditions for life are also precarious. Hollander’s music positions us not as passive observers but as active participants capable of tilting a delicate balance toward destruction or harmony. While the album emerged from a conceptual exercise, its implications are entirely concrete.
An excerpt of Celia Hollander and Photay performing live at Leaving Records’ “Listen to Music Outside in the Daylight Under a Tree” is featured on the expansive 98-track fundraiser compilation, Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires.
On behalf of Hollander and Shornstein, Iyla Shornstein and Ivan Cash organized a fundraiser to support the musicians as they rebuild. You can contribute at the link below.