Mary Lattimore - Silver Ladders

The Quietus

The closest most of us get to a harp is through the biblical narratives being played out on renaissance frescos, or the Celtic harp on a cold pint of Guinness. The sad fact is that you will have to go out of your way to see a 6ft Lyon & Healy Concert Grand specimen being played in your lifetime, as they will rarely come to you. Even harp music in general is a rare breed, with the instrument usually reserved as a mere tendril of the greater philharmonic organism. Into the politics of modern harp music enter aspiring one-woman choir Mary Lattimore, who has taken on the responsibility of taking the harp from the hereafter and into the here and now. From concertos to RA Live. From conventional classical to contemporary cool.

Mary achieves this in a number of ways. Firstly and most importantly she does not play classically minded even though she is classically trained. Her arrangements are free flowing, organic and unrestrained by the customs of formulaic concerto compositions. Second, she makes extensive use of effects and synthesizers to complement the fundamentals and harmonics of her harp. In Silver Ladders Mary adds guitars to that list of supporting actors through the artisan guitarwork of Slowdive’s Neil Halstead. Together they take the listener on a barefoot midnight stroll past serene starlit waters and windy beaches strewn with the gear of surfers swept out to sea never to be seen again.

Throughout the record Mary and Neil use their instruments as tools to translate the more subtle shades of emotion, the moods that straddle the veritable shadow realm of feeling. Not the elementary feelings that are so clearly identified and presented as caricatured emotions when sung, the warbling of love or the mooching of sadness, but the more profound emotional backdrops that words can often fail to lucidly convey.

Silver Ladders is not premeditated in its ability to inspire these reflections either. The first track ‘Pine Trees’ does not weigh on suspense or drama to set the scene, instead it launches headfirst into a soft and unpretentious waltz of light loose strings that feels like a warm hug from a long-lost musky aunt. Eventually higher notes are plucked as a subtle organ starts to breathe, staining the background with distant blotches of fuzzy sound.

The strings of the title track sound like a celestial lullaby. A wordless nursery rhyme to ease the existential angst of a baby bodhisattva’s final rebirth. Towards the end the jingles of one of the string movements condense and vibrate until they sound like a snow-capped cherry blossom shedding its petals in a great gust of pink and white. The air itself vibrating with the strong harmonics and atmospheric delay generated from Lattimore’s harp.

In the ten-minute-long ‘Til A Mermaid Drags You Under’, Halstead’s pastoral twangs twinned with his mantric chords lay a velvet carpet for the eventual entrance of Lattimore’s tickling of diamond dusted notes. The harp generates a subtle electricity of motion over Halstead’s wails and contortions, sucking the listener into a whirlpool of beautiful melancholy. Those roles are reversed in ‘Sometimes He’s In My Dreams’ and ‘Don’t Look’ with Lattimore’s seraphic strumming forming a pier of sound for Halstead to make his night dives from. His delayed chords are then left to swim in an ocean of black glass as the harp in the background forms a surface light that just about manages to pierce its depths.

There is no momentum or force that drives Silver Ladders onward. No direction in its stirrings of mood and sound that flutter and beat like a leaf caught between walls of wind. The beauty of the album is in that feeling of organic spontaneity, in the movements that suddenly depart and retreat into lightless caves before assimilating back into their icy harmonies. In Silver Ladders, Mary Lattimore brings the harp back down to earth still covered in clouds, but also threaded with veins of gloom that marble its silvery glow.

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A Closer Listen

Mary Lattimore’s evocative soundscapes are too often framed by the absence of other contemporary harpists. Her previous work has been compared to both the prog folk odysseys of Joanna Newsom and neo-renaissance fanfare, two milquetoast associations that only highlight the true singularity to her expansive, nebulous musings. Her latest record, Silver Ladders, recorded with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead over nine days along the English Coast, widens that musical gap with her most implacable work yet. Over seven tracks, Lattimore and Halstead create darkly ethereal moods that could only emanate from forty-plus strings in constant motion.

Silver Ladders squarely begins in the forest, with the windswept waltz of “Pine Trees”. Unlike Hundreds of Days, Lattimore’s first big leap into the instrumental canon, there is immediately a newfound richness and depth to every single pluck. Although Halstead had never previously recorded a harp, he fits right at home with the robust tonalities of such a delicate instrument. The relative quick cutoff of the harp creates an entirely new ambient palette to draw from, leagues away from the resonant overtones of any type of keyboard. Using loop pedals and hushed bass notes, the opening track eventually swells into a profound mantra full of both empty space and lulling immersion. From here on out, Lattimore thrives in this liminal space between texture and stark melody.

The title track functions similarly, focusing on the harp’s movements and oscillations. The name comes from a trip Lattimore took to Croatia, where she found herself climbing down “silver ladders right into the sea”. Thematically and literally, it begins to destabilize the grounded clarity of the harp, further drifting into murky, ominous territory. 

The following track, “Til A Mermaid Drags You Under,” is an early apotheosis, a ten-minute descent into more unexplored timbres. The pulse of Halstead’s guitar creates even more space for the flurry of Lattimore’s arpeggios. It’s one of the few moments where the influence Slowdive’s stark shoegaze becomes apparent, calling back to the hushed ruminations of Pygmalion. While Lattimore operates well in smaller moments, the lengthy runtime is necessary to hammer in the tactile, opaque beauty of quick plucking. It appropriately sounds like the overwhelming fury of the ocean in riptide, sucking the listener deeper into some grotesque transcendence. 

In turn, the rest of the album continues sinking into abstraction, adding the occasional synthesizer or bass to heighten tension. Lattimore’s specialization begins to encroach into the realm of storytelling, with fluctuating notes and chords exploring the more nuanced shades of feeling. “Chop On The Climbout” paints a vignette of a turbulent plane ride, ending with a wall of sound once melodic notes can no longer functionally depict a mood. Album highlight “Don’t Look” almost breaches the hypnosis with a more classically indebted melody before the harp spirals out of control like a creaky ceiling fan. “Thirty Tulips” closes the record with a sampler of what’s come before, drifting through every octave and— as a culminating thesis of Lattimore’s work— reaching brief moments of clarity among the waves. (Josh Hughes)

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Read Jemima Skala’s review of the album.