After years of touring together, Los Angeles-based composers Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have developed what the former refers to as a “musical telepathy”. Tragic Magic, the pair’s first collaborative album, evidences this bond: born out of a short series of improv sessions in Paris, it’s a wonderfully immersive set of new age and ambient tracks, where Barwick’s airy, reverbed vocals and atmospheric synth washes interweave with, and accentuate, Lattimore’s twinkling harp.
The album sessions took place shortly after last year’s California wildfires, which the two musicians experienced as residents. Accordingly, tragedy and hope cut through the dreamlike haze of these unfurling compositions. With its delicate harp loop and hushed whispers, opener Perpetual Adoration is as sweet and dreamy as a lullaby, while the gorgeous, moving Haze With No Haze carries a quiet desperation in the brittle, staccato melody and Barwick’s yearning high register. As always, her lyrics are indiscernible, words blurring into texture and shapeless whispers, but teem with feeling.
Even at their most spartan, the songs feel more grand and cinematic than the pair’s respective solo work; Lattimore’s harp is given particular room to shine. Occasionally, the duo reach towards epic heights, as in their murky take on Rachel’s Song from Blade Runner, which rushes into an effervescent flurry in its final minute, or on Stardust, the album’s climax, where soaring synths and celestial harp flickers are bolstered by a drum kick five minutes in, the closest things get to pop sensibilities. But just then, they strip it all back for the fluttering, near-nine-minute closer Melted Moon – the emotion lingering where the fullness doesn’t. The effect is both intimate and expansive.
Also out this month
Aquáticos, the new collaborative album from Brazilian guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento and Los Angeles producer Eddie Ruscha, is a lush, meditative listen (Music from Memory). Across these nine wandering tracks, the trickling percussion and spritely guitar plucks and strums are buoyed up by warm, bubbling synths, a combination that evokes slow summer days. Even the most stripped-back recordings in Tashi Dorji’s discography are characterised by a quiet freneticism that comes from his improvisational approach. On his new album Low Clouds Hang, This Land Is on Fire (Drag City), however, the Bhutanese-American guitarist opts for something much calmer. These reverb-drenched recordings are spacious, soft and introspective – his attempt “to find the silence”. French composer and sound artist Charlène Dannancier paints an eerie portrait of ambiguous relationship dynamics on her new album Baisée (Strange Therapy). Across 10 haunting tracks, each devoted to a different relationship stage or feeling, her breathy vocals fragments twist around dense, discordant electronics.
