Julia Holter’s take on ambient pop earned her spots on Pitchfork Media’s coveted “Top 50 Albums” list in 2013 and NPR’s list of Best Outer Sound Albums of 2011. This February she conspires with the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet for the world premiere of Alex Temple’s “Behind the Wallpaper.” Holter’s hypnotic and intimate mezzo-soprano is a perfect match for Temple’s multi-movement, avant-pop slide into the sometimes cozy, sometimes sinister landscapes of isolation and otherness. The narrator of this set of songs is undergoing an unnameable change that manifests itself in many mysterious ways. She tries to confess a secret, but instead live fish flop out of her mouth. She encounters a man with a foul-smelling purple stain on his forehead and finds a house that’s constantly growing. She attends a masquerade ball at an art gallery and discovers a vast secret world superimposed on our own. She takes a lonely midnight bus ride through the suburbs.

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