Julianna Barwick has always been fascinated with singing.

She grew up singing in church congregations and school choirs in Louisiana, and spent time singing with the Tulsa Opera before moving to New York City at age 21. But while many people focus on the words being sung, Barwick always found herself honing in on sounds such as a change in inflection or a well-executed harmony.

“Even as a kid I was just constantly singing and making up stuff,” Barwick said recently from her home in Los Angeles. “And I feel like it wasn’t always words; it was just kind of like (sings syllables), just making sounds with my voice. It’s always been way more about sounds and harmony. And of course the congregation I sang with in church growing up, we sang a cappella in these reverberant spaces. So it was just all about the voice and the tone of the song.”

That influence helped set Barwick on the musical path she’s traveled since the mid-2000s. Her music — based around electronically manipulated, looped vocalizations, usually wordless and often set to minimalist piano, guitar or string instrumentation — has earned her fans and collaborators such as Yoko Ono, electronic musician Ikue Mori and composer Philip Glass.

“I noodled around with trying to figure out how to be Cat Power when I was like 20, and got an electric guitar and tried for a second to write songs,” Barwick said of her early musical experiments. “It just was so hard and not natural. But as soon as I got my hands on a looping pedal and started messing around with that, it just clicked.”

Most recently she worked on commissions for the New York City Ballet offshoot Balletcollective and the Sister City hotel in Manhattan, for which she created a 24-hour music cycle with sounds triggered by camera images captured on the hotel’s roof. That project was documented on last year’s EP, “Circumstance Synthesis.”

She will return to Central Oregon for a one-off show at the Suttle Lodge & Boathouse on Thursday. Her last, and only other time, playing the region was in 2013, opening for Icelandic avant-garde rockers Sigur Rós at Les Schwab Amphitheater.

“My friend, (former Silver Jews guitarist and solo artist) William Tyler, played the show (at Suttle Lodge) last year and had really good things to say,” Barwick said.

The show falls in a rare quiet period for Barwick, and will be her first solo date since an October performance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Along with performing tracks from her previous studio albums, including most recently 2016’s “Will,” Barwick will try out material from her upcoming album, “Healing is a Miracle.”

“If you think about it, it is kind of a miracle if you cut your finger while you’re cooking or something, and then just days later you can’t even tell that that happened,” Barwick said. “… And of course applying it to what happens in your life and getting through things. When I was thinking about the physical aspect of that, ‘Healing is a Miracle,’ that phrase came to mind, and I just thought, ‘I like the way that sounds.’ I love that phrase. When I told people what the name of the album is, people who are close to me too kind of just nod, like, ‘Yep.’ Like with most things that happen when you make stuff, it just kind of magically appeared.”

That’s a pretty good description of Barwick’s creative process in general. Her compositions usually begin with improvisation. Sometimes that involves sitting at the piano; other times she will create looped vocals on the fly or experiment with sound samples.

The echoing vocals on the first track on “Will,” “St. Apolonia,” is a prime example. Barwick recorded them while experimenting with her voice below an underpass in Lisbon, Portugal, she revealed in a 2016 interview with thefader.com.

“And then I make the record or the piece, and then the challenge then is to go back and teach it to myself or have it notated or write it down,” she said. “I usually map it out for myself with whatever key it’s in and repetitions; I have all my weird, personal notes to myself to remember to do what, when, where, with what effect or whatever. But it’s always a challenge to — you have to go back (to) what you made just kind of winging it, and then piecing it together like math, and then later teaching yourself how to play it live.”

While Barwick’s performances may not be improvised, per se, she leaves room for interpretation.

“What I like about the songs that I make is they’re not just like, ‘Oh, weird, she threw in an extra verse; what’s this verse about?’” she said. “It’s still pretty loose. If I loop it six times or eight times, it’s not gonna throw the whole track off. I love that because every show’s different in its mood and the way the sound system sounds. It’s kind of fun to play with the looseness there.”

Barwick shook up that process somewhat for “Healing is a Miracle.” Since her 2009 EP, “Florine,” she has recorded using the Apple program Garageband and her Boss RC-50 Loop Station. Her 2013 album, “Nepenthe,” was recorded in a full studio with producer Alex Somers.

For “Healing is a Miracle,” Barwick used monitors — a gift from Sigur Rós side project Jónsi & Alex — for the first time. She also experimented with a new vocal effect pedal.

“Up until this record, I was doing a lot of recording with my actual loop pedal, and I still incorporated that into this record in moments,” she said. “But there’s just a bit of a shift with I guess hardware and technology, so that led to some new sounds.”

More Information

What: Julianna Barwick, with Hanna Haas

When: 6 p.m. Thursday, doors open at 5 p.m.

Where: The Suttle Lodge & Boathouse, 13300 U.S. Highway 20, Sisters

Cost: $12 plus fees in advance, $18 plus fees day-of-show

Contact: thesuttlelodge.com or 541-638-7001