“We get lots of inspiration from the natural world: its quietness, rhythms and beauty”
Mary Lattimore and Walt McClements are two of contemporary music’s most renowned innovators. Lattimore’s inventive harp processing and looping has brought the instrument to a new audience and her prolific run of celestial solo albums and evocative film scores have redefined the instrument in the modern consciousness. Her genre-agnostic collaborations include work with Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Jeff Zeigler, Meg Baird, Bill Fay and Thurston Moore.
McClements, who tours as a member of Weyes Blood, is an acclaimed composer in his own right, sculpting glacial atmospherics from the accordion.
Recorded in the cozy setting of McClements’ apartment during a rainy December in LA, their new collaborative LP Rain on the Road unfurls as a series of sonic vignettes, rolling landscapes hewn from longform improvisations for harp and accordion. Embellished with additional instrumentation such as the shimmering constellations of hand bells on “Stolen Bells” that glisten like lights on wet pavement, or the stately piano figures on “The Top of Thomas Street”; their pastoral pieces manage to paint vivid images.
Currently in the middle of an extensive European tour, I was very happy they agreed to have a chat about the album, the origins of their collaborations and why Spotify sucks.
When did you first meet, and how long did it take for you to decide that you wanted to work together on music?
Walt – We met in 2017 when we were both playing a festival with the same band. I feel like we became friends then and did some collaboration here and there, Mary played some harp on an old project of mine’s record. But maybe not until the pandemic did we start to connect more musically. I had started making more instrumental ambient/drone work, and Mary was a big influence and supporter. I played on her porch when she started hosting socially distanced outdoor shows, and then we went on tour together in 2021, and I started to sit in on a few songs at the end of Mary’s set, which was so fun, and that led to the idea of making a record together.
Mary – We both grew up in North Carolina and turns out we attended some of the same shows. This collaboration and friendship feels meant-to-be. I’m a big fan of Walt’s ear and aesthetic and sonic curiosity, so it was natural to ask him to sit in when we were on tour together. It feels like a really organic way of getting to know someone, personality and musical sensibility and instincts going hand-in-hand.
You’ve described Rain on the Road as an attempt to capture “the liminal experience of touring life”. Touring must have both highs and lows – how do you go about translating such a wide-ranging experience into a single musical project?
Mary – This record to me feels like a pure expression of our friendship. It’s so nice to be understood, and because of our shared history of touring a lot, we have this in common. In this record, it’s a document of the simpatico lifestyle that can be so strange and alienating sometime, but also with such unusual and beautiful moments. Two drifters!
Walt – I think since we’d been on tour before the recording the collaborative energy just reflected our experiences on the road. Certainly one can’t capture all of an experience in sound so it’s just one perspective, one way of looking at the road reflected through our sounds.
Did you capture some of the field recordings you used on tour? Were there any environments that were especially rich in terms of capturing an evocative environment?
Mary – Walt captured the field recordings and incorporated them into the music. It’s like a time capsule, listening back. I like how some of the recordings come from our shared home state of North Carolina.
Walt – Yes, all of the field recordings were taken from tour. The richest environment was certainly this beautiful old cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. It was raining all morning making the best sound on the roof, but the birds were still singing. And then a family of bears came to hang out right between the house and the car, which made it hard to load our stuff and make it to the show on time, but was really magical to watch these baby bears playing and climbing trees.
The sound on much of the new album is incredibly expansive, especially given it was recorded in your cosy apartment Walt. Was it a challenge to make it sound as ‘big’ and cinematic as it does?
Walt – Thank you! I think because both me and Mary are used to taking our respective instruments and turning them into larger soundscapes with processing live it wasn’t too hard of a task. We basically recorded our live setups in addition to some extra mics just capturing the acoustic sound of the instrument. This gave a lot of options to make things big or strip things down to something we weren’t necessarily hearing, since we had headphones with all our processing, sometimes just listening back to the acoustic mics gave a new minimal palette, since we didn’t have all the effects acoustic in the room.
Mary – We had such sonic freedom and were also able to add other instruments like piano, my string synth the Roland RS-09 and handbells. With this palette and the harp/accordion combination, we had so many colors to work with. Walt recorded us and engineered the record and experimented with mics to give a lot of variety. It was a fun time holed up in the garden apartment in the LA winter!
How do you feel about humanities increasing alienation from the natural world? How do you each personally attempt to ensure the connection isn’t lost in terms of your own relationship with nature?
Walt – I don’t feel like I can speak for all of humanity, as certainly there’s a lot of people in the world still living connected with nature in all sort of different ways. But for myself, I do feel lucky to live in a part of Los Angeles where I can get lost in a big park and not see any buildings or people. I know its still in the city, and I try to get out of the city when I can, but it does feel easier to be in nature here than it did for example in New Orleans, where I used to live.
Mary – I agree – California has so much wildlife, so we are really lucky. We both have yards and gardens. We get lots of inspiration from the natural world and it’s quietness and rhythms and beauty. Its really cool to live pretty close to the ocean too. I think a lot of people, in pandemic and beyond, have felt more akin to nature and finding refuge in it.
There was a recent initiative to give Nature its own Spotify artist page, so that royalties can be put back into environmental causes. Do you see this as progress, or a cheap gimmick?
Walt – Ha I hadn’t heard about that. Given how little Spotify pays I couldn’t imagine it having much of an effect, so my vote is cheap gimmick.
Mary – Yeah, I agree with Walt…cheap gimmick and Spotify is the worst!
Many of the pieces on the album unfold so naturally and beautifully that I assume they were almost entirely improvised. Is that the case, or is there a lot of careful planning that goes on behind the scenes?
Mary – No planning! We were just going with the flow!
Walt – All of the pieces stemmed from improvisations, that we recorded live. Many of them were quite long improvs, 30 minutes or so that we then choose the best parts of or chopped up, and then added a bit more to shape them.
How important do you think your connection to North Carolina is in influencing the music you create? If you were from elsewhere, would you be making entirely different music?
Walt – This feels like a difficult question to answer, in some ways one can never know. But of course place influences sound, although I moved away from NC when I was 18 or 19, it does feel like it has a really grounded beauty in the state, it’s not as flashy as the west but there’s magic in the older mountains, and the rolling hills. Also, for me growing up in Durham, though I might of not appreciated it at the time, I realize I was actually really lucky to grow up in a place with such a thriving music scene, and a place where bands usually stopped on tour. I got to see a lot of really amazing bands, and a lot of touring bands and experimental artists in really small spaces, like the Skylight Exchange or Go Studios. It was pretty special.
Mary – I love this answer, Walt. I think growing up in the mountains (Asheville) and being around a vibrant arts community, having a mom who played harp with the orchestra and conducted a harp ensemble, was really important. I think all of the elements aligned but as Walt said, maybe it was harder to see it when we were actually in it. I’m proud of having grown up there now, though.
Are there any plans on the horizon for a future collaboration?
Walt – We are scoring a short art video soon, otherwise I hope so! I’ll be putting out a new record next year so will be busy with that, but I bet we’ll make another record one day (or a trio record??)
Mary – We are on a big UK tour this autumn and I bet it will inspire more music together!
Rain On The Road is out now on all platforms.
The Predatory Wasp 