Tag: mary lattimore

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Julianna Barwick, Mary Lattimore – The Four Sleeping Princesses

It’s very encouraging to have an album this good released so early in the year. Tragic Magic pairs Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore in a collaboration recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris, made with rare access to instruments from the Musée de la Musique collection through InFiné. Co-produced with Trevor Spencer, the album was created in nine days, building from improvisation and the emotional carry-on of the moment.

Lattimore chose a run of historic harps that map the instrument’s evolution from the early 18th to late 19th century. Barwick worked with classic synthesisers including a Roland Jupiter and a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, bringing soft-edged harmonic colour and air around the notes. The Four Sleeping Princesses may be a highlight, but its far from the only reason to immerse yourself in this forest of lushness.

https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/track/the-four-sleeping-princesses

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Music

Mary Lattimore, Roy Montgomery – Blender in a Blender

On the strength of its final 30 seconds alone, Blender in a Blender would be one of my favourite pieces of music this year. A collaboration with guitarist Roy Montgomery, the track was first drafted by Lattimore during an artist residency program in UCross Wyoming, and later evolved over the duo’s pen pal correspondence. Montgomery’s chords emerge from the harp-induced haze in the outro, and are completely and utterly mesmerising. It’s taken from Lattimore’s new LP Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, an album so obsessed with nostalgia it could have been tailor-made for me.

https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/album/goodbye-hotel-arkada

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Micah Frank & Chet Doxa – Ave Maria (feat. Mary Lattimore)

This is the lead single from Micah Frank and Chet Doxas’s forthcoming LP The Music of Hildegard von Bingen Part 1, which lands in November. Ave Maria combines a masterful harp performance from Mary Lattimore with Doxas’s meandering woodwind, gently billowing electronics and the late addition of a softly pulsing kick drum. Deep chill.

https://micahfrank.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-hildegard-von-bingen-part-one

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Music

Mary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena – This Time Juliane Landed Softly

Press releases are usually at best informative and at worst a complete waste to everyone’s time. However the one for Mary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena’s new collaborative album West Kensington struck me as particularly well-penned, so here’s an excerpt that does a better job of evoking its strange and beautiful atmosphere better than I could.

It is shocking what your mind will choose to forget. Almost always it needs a tear, a clean dash, a straight passage into what you’ve already known. Looking back, West Kensington has achieved that very goal: creating a landscape for memory, an imprint of that horizon, suspended in the cosmos.

https://threelobed.bandcamp.com/album/west-kensington

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Music

Mary Lattimore – Til A Mermaid Drags You Under

The earliest harps were discovered a long old time ago: around 3500BCE. Back then and for years after, they were the instrument de jour, but despite their popularity around the globe for centuries, and depiction in several cultural cornerstones (see: Guinness, Ireland in general), you have to go a little out of your way to find much modern music based around a harp. Mary Lattimore is arguably the most well-known proponent of this unwieldy instrument, and her new album Silver Ladders is engrossing, transportive and gorgeous, with the 10-minute epic Til A Mermaid Drags You Under an intense, occasionally unsettling but completely enthralling highlight.

https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com

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Music

Julianna Barwick – Oh, Memory feat. Mary Lattimore

Julianna Barwick's new album, Nepenthe, comes out August 20.

I’ve loved pretty much everything Julianna Barwick has done over the past decade, so waking up to a new album of hers today was a very welcome surprise. Healing Is A Miracle is everything I’d hoped it would be: immersive, soothing, emotional, fragile, beautiful. Oh, Memory is an early highlight, and further cements my yearning for live shows come back in some form really soon, as if I don’t have the opportunity to listen to this in a church or similarly reverential venue I’m going to be very disappointed.

https://juliannabarwick.com