Mary Lattimore - Collected Pieces
A Closer Listen
The harp is one of the more evocative instruments out there, its sound echoing down the millennia and tapping into our deep sub-consciousness. There’s a reason that the clichéd ‘flash-back’ effect in movies and TV shows is a harp, as listening to it you can close your eyes and imagine a previous time. Think of an ancient court in Egypt or Persia, you can easily place a harpist in there; if you picture a pastoral scene in mythology amidst the frolicking there will be harp or lyre player somewhere entertaining the nymphs and cherubs. My former piano teacher had a cat called Jubal named after “the father of all such as handle the harp” back in Genesis. Even Guinness has a harp as its logo to emphasise it has been around a long time. The instrument has evolved over the centuries but the sound made by plucking tuned strings will not have changed much.
Capturing moments and memories is prevalent in Mary Lattimore’s work on the harp. A look at her Bandcamp or Soundcloud pages reveal a sequence of recordings that have a connection to a specific location or time. Some of these have been collated into the excellent Collected Pieces, available as a cassette or download – and there are plenty of stand-alone works as well if you want to explore further. But let us focus on the six tracks here. I recently DJ’d at a friend’s party, and as a warm-up track I played “Wawa By The Ocean”, the opening track here. It was a tangible moment that stopped party-goers in their tracks, and weirdly echoed the moment when Spotify put this on my Discovery playlist. I’m only a casual Spotify user but this instance the algorithms got it exactly right. “Wawa By The Ocean” is a brilliant work, a genuine track-of-the-year, the harp perfectly capturing the ebb and flow of the waves. This gentle rise-and-fall forms the basis for variations and diversions fluttering and flickering over the top, all the while the main theme acting as a kind of soothing lullaby. The fact it was inspired by a convenience store in New Jersey somehow makes the effect more magical.
What’s even more pleasing about Collected Pieces is that it doesn’t feel like a front-loaded album, as the other five tracks here complement “Wawa” beautifully. The works included here were recorded across five years or so and it’s full marks for the way it has been put together. The six tracks here reflect different approaches to the instrument – sometimes on the longer works it is sent through any number of effects pedals almost, I imagine, just to see what happens and how unlike a harp this harp can sound.
Elsewhere, on “We Just Found Out She Died”, a poignant and most emotionally direct piece here, the harp is the basis for an ethereal chorus. It’s dedicated to Margaret Lantermann, who played the Log Lady on Twin Peaks and it is almost overwhelming at times – it is clearly of a piece with the other tracks here yet somehow echoes the music of Angelo Badalamenti from the TV show to such an extent you could close your eyes and see the waterfall from the title sequence.
Aside from the allure of past centuries that a harp supplies, there is clearly a close relationship between instrument and musician, borne of its sheer size and imposing nature. You can’t just pick up a harp and pop it in an overhead locker – it requires commitment and dedication and a pretty big vehicle to transport it around. That is possibly why each piece here is virtually date stamped with a map reference; rather than taking a selfie or tweeting about it – why not record something on the harp that’s in the front room / lying across the backseat / set up for a performance? These works are clearly personal to Mary Lattimore but they aren’t exclusive anymore and will create their own moments for the listener. Grab Collected Pieces, live with it, and then go on your own journey of discovery by exploring the back catalogue. (Jeremy Bye)
Available here
Thu Aug 31 00:01:04 GMT 2017Pitchfork 76
A few years ago, harpist Mary Lattimore ventured from her Philadelphia home and traveled across the country, making music at various stops along the way. But her resulting album, 2016’s At the Dam, wasn’t a travelogue in the literal sense. Lattimore’s solo harp work is usually instrumental and often improvised, and thus not easily pinned down to specific meanings. The record did work as a diary of her trip, though, with its wide range of sounds and moods suggesting open-ended adventure and keen sensitivity to changing environments.
Now settled in Los Angeles, Lattimore has had time to reflect on what she left behind. Collected Pieces is like an audio scrapbook, comprising songs she recorded between 2011 and 2016, previously available only as downloads or streams. These songs aren’t just from the past—they’re largely about the past, too, recounting places and people that Lattimore encountered in Philadelphia and can now only revisit through recollection. Once again, her pieces are too abstract to carry clear narratives. But through titles that indicate a song’s subject, and music that’s patient and contemplative, Collected Pieces has a sense of time frozen into the snapshots of memory.
In some cases, those snapshots are quite specific even if the music is open to interpretation. The name of opener “Wawa by the Ocean” refers to a convenience store Lattimore frequented whenever visiting the New Jersey beachfront town of Ship Bottom. It’s not hard to hear Lattimore’s delicate string plucks as waves gently tapping at a shore, or to hear the song’s rising and descending notes as analogs to the sun’s slow summer cycles. But what’s more interesting is the way Lattimore repeats and massages her melodic figures, modifying them throughout the song’s 10 minutes while never veering too far away. Her variations blur on top of each other to form a single motif, much the way memory can turn many specific events into one general one. It’s the musical equivalent of a thousand instances of “I'm going to Wawa” becoming one big “I used to go to Wawa.”
That sense of the past as a living mental space pops up a lot on Collected Pieces. Lattimore’s slow plucks on “We Just Found Out She Died” echo like fading pictures—the title references a “Twin Peaks” actress that Lattimore had seen speak not long before she passed away, and the song itself eventually morphs into ethereal hums akin to Julee Cruise’s dreamy meditations. On “”It Was Late and We Watched the Motel Burn”—which Lattimore actually did one night—effects give her harp sounds their own ghosts and shadows, which slowly subsume the 13-minute piece until it feels like it’s composed of remnants of music that ended a while ago.
Not everything on Collected Pieces can be mapped to an event from Lattimore’s past, but each track seems to tell a story. Often that’s because her melodies are simple and unabashedly pretty, taking on the qualities of a nursery rhyme meant to stick in your ear. Yet Lattimore’s playing is complex and daring in subtle but distinct ways. You can hear it in the small strums she adds to the gentle sway of “Bold Rides,” skewing them just enough from the song’s rhythm that the tune is hard to predict, at times even interestingly uncomfortable. During closer “Your Glossy Camry,” she plays cleverly with pace, feinting toward an acceleration that doesn’t quite materialize, though your brain might fill it in anyway.
Such layered playing makes Collected Pieces more than a compilation of disparate, isolated songs. Lattimore’s approach to the harp is so thorough that she can practically talk through it at this point; she’s created a language. That helps explain why music that is, on the surface, just a collection of string plucks can paint evocative pictures of the unique hold memory has on the past, and vice versa.
Sat Apr 15 05:00:00 GMT 2017