(Photo Courtesy: Alison Dias)

Today, alt R&B artists Juletta + Ishan released their first ruminative single together, “But Judi, Everything Changes.” The track recants a trip to the coast Juletta took with her family, during which she watched her grandmother get knocked over by waves. “To me, the song is about processing and understanding age,” she says. “I examined the lives of my lineage: my grandmother, and her mother and her mother for guidance and wisdom.” Producer Ishan layers her vocals to create a harmonic space in the vein of Brian Wilson’s work with The Beach Boys. The New York duo is also working on a larger project inspired by real stories Juletta collected from 30 women she interviewed over the past two years in New York City. 

Juletta’s ethereal vocals blend perfectly with Ishan’s impeccably arranged electronics to create a balancing act entirely their own. Ishan describes the dynamic: “Working with Juletta was like letting me loose on a playground. The beauty of her voice and her openness to my experimentation allowed me to grapple with ideas that had possessed my mind as a producer, but that I’d never had the chance to fully explore: blending folk and house music, bringing something new to what the great musicians of the past have achieved, and manipulating voice to create a hybrid between human and machine.”
 
Raised in California before moving to Italy and then New York, Juletta met producer and DJ Ishan in 2018, when they released a folk-pop EP Wild Nature plus a string of singles under Juletta’s name. As they continued to work together, their sound expanded to incorporate elements of hip hop, deep house, and electronic music. Their upcoming project marries Ishan’s driving, house-influenced production with Juletta’s introspective songwriting for something familiar yet completely new.