Longtime friends and sometime collaborators, on Tragic Magic their debut album as a duo Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick combine baroque harp, with its pretensions to a certain delicacy and restraint, with droning or buttressing synths and soaring vocals redolent of Cocteau Twins or This Mortal Coil or Julee Cruise in the company of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. The raw materials are thus hardly unique but the contrast feels both original and native to these two familiar artists, who embarked for Paris shortly after their home base was wracked by last year’s devastating series of Los Angeles wildfires.
Tragic Magic opens through the tender strings and wispy vocalisations of ‘Perpetual Adoration’. As its spare and sentimental frame is filled out by a rumbling synth drone, the staggered, lagging, almost overly patient strums of Lattimore’s harp and Barwick’s cherubic voice lull us in while carrying the deathly chill of a memento mori. Time lapses and a stagnant end awaits, the duo seem to say, both breathless and entombed as Barwick’s vocals fall in spirals through the repetitions of Lattimore’s harp, like dewy leaves which darken and gather ice on their way to the surface.
It’s not all wilting sentiment though, as ‘The Four Sleeping Princesses’ surges with a certain resolve or tenacity of spirit, more ethereal and impish but a bit like ‘Go Long’ one of the standouts from Joanna Newsom’s stunningly defiant triple album Have One on Me. Over the course of its seven songs Tragic Magic continues in this vein, a kind of seamless stitching or mucking together of the tangible and rooted versus the gossamer or diaphanous, the just out of reach or the helplessly slipping away.
‘Rachel’s Song’ – composed by Vangelis for Blade Runner with vocals from Mary Hopkin, but not released until the soundtrack dropped more than a decade later in 1994, as the song played no part in the feature film – opens with what sounds like a trundling down tracks or running water, as Barwick embellishes the crackling recording through a series of synthesised harmonics or blips and beeps. The duo’s rendition of the piece duly conjures a moss people or mermaid fantasy, calling to mind a bit of Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney, or more particularly ‘Greensleeves’ and Shakespeare’s contemporary frolic A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A reedy and whistling interlude – as though from panpipes or a conch shell – gives Barwick a timely break from her cooing (most of the songs on Tragic Magic feature vocalisations rather than decipherable lyrics) before ‘Rachel’s Song’ draws to a harrowing, spectral climax through a swirl of banshee wails.
‘Haze With No Haze’ is also bucolic, with a sense of ambiguity as Lattimore and Barwick are both sirens, Maid Marians and Robin Hoods or his merry band of gamboling men. On this especially limpid track the possible comparisons are again numerous and transparent, from Antonina Nowacka to Grimes on Halfaxa at her most elfin or nymphic, to the ruins of Grouper or to Celtic harp playing and new age ambiances, elements which combine for instance in Enya and her ‘Orinoco Flow’ otherwise known as ‘Sail Away’. The lapping arpeggios of Lattimore’s harp seem to wash away old memories or cover up old wounds and sores while Barwick’s deftly layered, multi-tracked vocals suggest the spectre of roads not taken, a kind of purification or its correlate which is the runaway splintering of self.
And on ‘Stardust’ the duo again inhabit that ‘Falling’ frame, almost transposing the Twin Peaks theme into a lapsed vision of the space age, replete with new age synths and jangling percussive gestures, as if straining so hard to ascend some interstellar abyss that the song eventually buckles under its own weight and breaks down into a cosmic dance number, a floating web of dream pop or shoegaze which conjures the Frankie Rose album Interstellar and suggests the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey stargate sequence as an analogue of the discotheque. For all of its musical and temporal juxtapositions, between the folk or baroque and new age ambiances for instance, and for all that Tragic Magic can feel somehow stranded in time, Lattimore and Barwick prove more than willing and the frame of the memento mori in fact requires them to embrace the moment and have some fun.
Finally on the album closer ‘Melted Moon’ the vocal cords of Barwick shift shape and begin to produce legible words. Over plunked keys and a motif which sounds like something from The Weeknd’s brisk nightscape After Hours, cosseted by the harp and surrounded but not buffeted by that clangorous peal of keys and chimes, she begins – in a manner that falls somewhere between ‘A Real Hero’ the College and Electric Youth ode made famous by its starring role in the film Drive and ‘Landslide’ as sung by Stevie Nicks, fittingly for its metaphor of ecological or environmental disaster – ‘A winding ocean drive / A forest mountain high’.
Clopping percussion comes in, with the keys and strings lingering in their higher registers, now offset by a steep and oscillating synth drone as Barwick continues ‘A blaze like a volcano / A prayer for rain / At least let me find something, a ruin / At least finding hope again’ and sweeping out from beneath, the song title ‘Under the melted moon’. It’s a poignant and transportive song which clearly reckons with the Los Angeles wildfires both for their dire environmental and enduring psychological effect, with the music twinkling towards an ethereal summit as Barwick concludes ‘The lights are all out / A strange taste in my mouth / You may never go home again / At least not the home you know’ as the duo like tendrils coil and unite, repeating gestures then glistening and smearing into the beckoning silence.
Probably they found respite as well as a sense of eerie remove on their visit to Paris, where they were invited by the French label InFiné and the Philharmonie de Paris in order to showcase the Musée de la Musique’s historic collection of instruments. Housing thousands of musical instruments and objets d’art, the museum traces the history of the Western canon from the sixteenth century, with Lattimore opting to play a Jacob Hochbrücker harp from 1728, Érard single and double-movement models from 1799 and 1873 and the tuning bells of a Pleyel chromatic harp from 1900 while Barwick took control of a couple of contemporary classics in the form of the Roland Jupiter and Prophet-5 analogue synthesizers. They created Tragic Magic in just nine days, no doubt infused by their sojourn in the city.
