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Mary Lattimore: The Potential for Experimentation


In 2017, Armando Bellmas from the McColl Center in Charlotte, North Carolina reached out to me about designing a poster for a show that he was bringing to the arts center that April. It was an experimental two-person show called the New Rain Duets. I knew one of the performers, Mac McCaughan, from his band Superchunk. The other artist, a harpist, I hadn’t heard of to that point. The performance was transportive—set up in one of the rooms of the old stone church that had become a place for artists’ residences—with visuals on one of the walls.

That night, Mary Lattimore, the harpist, was using her instrument as a sound generator as much as she was playing it traditionally—augmenting the voice of the strings with effects and what seemed like samplers. Bellmas told me later that both artists were originally from North Carolina, which was interesting to me. After that night, I paid attention to the work that Lattimore was making.

Cecil Forsyth in his sprawling early 20th century compendium of orchestral instruments, Orchestration, wrote, “This beautiful instrument should have a special place of honour. Alone of all the ancient ‘plucked’ instruments it survives in daily orchestral use.” It’s not hard to find similar sentiments across time about the harp; it’s revered as a bridge to a distant primordial musical past. Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, of course, made their important contributions to jazz and the avant garde through the harp. But it’s not, unfortunately, widely considered to be an instrument of much contemporary import beyond the classical setting.

Mary Lattimore, though, is just that rare harpist who is equally at home on symphony stages as she is backing artists like Thurston Moore or Steve Gunn. Her willingness to experiment with effects or different voices or surprising collaborators puts her in a space of her own. Her solo work crafts ancient instrumentation into beautifully-conceived pieces that weave seemingly disparate threads of musical inspiration into a very singular sound.

Most recently, Lattimore released Tragic Magic, a collaborative album with Julianna Barwick. Lattimore took some time out from tour preparation in her home in Los Angeles to talk about the key to great collaboration, the idiosyncratic path of her solo career and the pendulum swing between her need for secluded spaces and the rich artistic communities of the cities she’s lived in.

Eric Hurtgen

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New Rural (NR): Your work is wonderful and my first exposure to it was the performances that you did with Mac McCaughan of Superchunk—the New Rain Duets—that eventually became an album. I think I assumed at the time that you were only involved in more experimental and avant-garde work but I found out later that you had this serious grounding in classical harp and that your mother had played in orchestras. I can imagine, maybe at first, your mother's harp playing was an impetus to play, but what kept you on this trajectory where you're making all these albums and playing with all these collaborators all over the world?

Mary Lattimore (ML): Thank you so much—I think my trajectory has been very organic. Hearing my mom play as a child led into me wanting to learn how to play, led to taking lessons in Charlotte, led to going to conservatory in Rochester, NY. That brought me to live in Philadelphia, where I had friends from Rochester who were in a band. Philadelphia is a great community for music and these friends asked me to be a part of a music project and I met other people who played in bands.

That kind of got me started writing parts for recordings, which led to my playing with Thurston Moore for a few years. That led to me exploring an improvisatory side and then start to make my own loop-based music. That led to more collaborations and now film scoring. So it's different aspects of one music-life kind of feeding off each other, morphing into other avenues. Saying yes and being open to experiences is the key and to really trust your instincts with who you should be hanging out and playing music with. If you feel happy and comfortable socially, you'll probably make cool music together.





NR: I think that’s true—even beyond making music. I’d love to hear about the way you view harp music and where you find yourself in that continuum.

ML: I see the harp as a real vehicle for beauty and light, for transportive and meditative sounds, for therapy. But I also see it as having a potential to deliver you to heartbreaking places, or strange and unsettling places, and has such potential for experimentation. It has 7 pedals which change the accidentals in the scale and mine has 47 strings, so there are so many colors and so many different moods that can be conjured. It's very fun to hear how other people play the harp, how other personalities choose to express themselves through this ancient instrument. I find myself in a happy place in the continuum, where I'm reverently enjoying harpists who came before and I'm constantly psyched to hear new ways the harp is being used. It's a small community and feels like a little club where everyone who loves the harp is welcome.

NR: I'd love to hear a little bit more about the collaborative element of what you do. At least from a distance, it seems like a pendulum swing between like the solo work and then the collaborative work and my assumption is they both seem to mutually feed the other.

ML: I love playing music with people and the camaraderie of that and the musical conversation and seeing how our instruments sound together and getting to know the person I'm collaborating with. But then I also like to retreat to my studio by myself and I like being in full control you know just like kind of paint the pictures that are there in my heart by myself. I think it really fits my personality to have a little bit of both.

I played in a lot of orchestras growing up but my first non-orchestral project that I was invited to do was called the Valerie Project and that was with some friends of mine that I met during my time in Rochester. I met up with them when I was living in Philly and they were there in a band called Espers. Greg Weeks from Espers was really in love with this Czech new-wave film, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and he wanted to get together to have a little orchestra to re-imagine the score and he invited me to be a part of that. It was a big group of people and a lot of different cool instruments.

That was really the first time that that I had to compose something myself for the parts for the score and we took that on the road and we were asked to play Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown Festival. That kind of gave me the bug like—oh I can write parts on a harp and the harp could fit in with guitars and drums and non-classical instruments—it was 14 people or something like that and it was really formative for me.

NR: So you're doing this like symphonic-style of electric music and having these new experiences playing with a band—what was the thing that made you move toward your solo work?

ML: Well I got together with Tara (Burke) and Helena (Espvall), who's a cellist in Espers, to play. The three of us got together just for fun to kind of improvise together, which was really just very social and they both had the Line 6’s (effects pedals). And I kept wondering what would happen what would the harp sound like through these kinds of effect and I kept that in the back of my mind.

But then I was part of Thurston Moore’s Demolished Thoughts and went on the road with him for several years. That kind of taught me a lot about improvisation—playing with him and and the other musicians in the band. And then that time was over and he wanted to make a new record without a harp and I was in Philly being like, what is my purpose? My dream had just come true. I didn't have another dream because I was just so baffled that I was asked to play with Thurston, who, you know, I had been such a fan of for so long that I was like—I've already gotten everything that I wanted—to play with somebody to stretch my mind in that way.

So I was like, what's my new dream? And my friend Jeff Ziegler in Philly had a great studio was a great producer, an engineer and musician and he was like—just come over to the studio for a day; experiment with the harp and I'll plug you into some stuff and you can mess around with pedals and everything and so I did that and that kind of cracked my brain open. As far as like solo car stuff goes—that’s where my first record, The Withdrawing Room, came from; just messing around with with affects and with recording little improvisations and melodic ideas.

That experience led me into more solo work because The Withdrawing Room came out on the small label called Desire Path. (Ghostly Records owner) Sam Valenti liked that record and he asked me if I wanted to put something on Ghostly. And that was the beginning of that.




NR: With all this traveling and living in different cities, I’m wondering if geography and your experience of geography affects you in any way—does where you’re recording or playing have a bearing on what you make or how you make it?

ML: I would say that’s a major thing in my music. I really love to go places to make records. I got an art residency at Headlands, outside of San Francisco, for a couple months to record among the redwoods. That’s where I made Hundreds of Days—barely any cell phone service, very rugged beach, and it was in a national park. I got so much inspiration from just being alone there in a cold, misty Northern California barn.

I recorded some of At the Dam at Joshua Tree in a house that my friend let me stay at. I would wake up really early with the sunrise. I love these remote, quiet places where you’re just feeding off of nature. Nature really shapes my music. But I’m also really a city person—I love the cultural influences that come from living in a city—going to the movies all the time, the record store, seeing shows and seeing art. That’s really important to me. I also really love being in different countries where I don’t really know the language—your brain is extra turned on and you feel like an alien in the most challenging way. I think that’s really important.

So yeah, geography really does affect the music because a lot of my records and songs are like snapshots of places that I’ve been. I have a really terrible memory and I feel like the songs are ways for me to preserve a memory for myself. I’m also from North Carolina—my parents live on a farm and have for a long time now—and I really love rural spaces. But there is something in me that’s like, I can’t live there. I love to visit but I need to be in a more urban place.

NR: That back-and-forth makes sense. So many of your albums—even the ones you just mentioned—it seems like they were recorded somewhere remote. I think of your Silver Ladders album with Neil Halstead—I don’t know that it was out in the countryside exactly…

ML: Oh yeah—his studio is in a village, like a 30-minute drive from town, out in an airfield in the middle of nowhere. You’re taking in the site—the big waves, the little pubs—and all of that affects the music like colors!

NR: Are there musical thoughts that you have when you’re out of the country that you might not have when you’re in the States?

ML: Yes and no—a lot of it is just emotional—what’s going on in my personal life. Sometimes I’m (out of the country) and I’m processing that but sometimes it’s not. Silver Ladders came to me when I was playing for a wedding in Big Sur—a very tiny wedding on the side of a cliff—and I just looked out at the ocean. I was testing my harp, getting set up to play the wedding, and no guests had arrived yet and this melody came to me. I made a voice memo and then I kind of expanded that with Neil. But yeah, it’s just like a melody that comes directly from yourself—or it’s kind of like plucking it from the sky…




NR: Is it that the same in the states as well—is there any difference between your musical experiences on the West Coast versus the East Coast? You've lived up and down the East Coast at this point, and now you’re in Los Angeles…

ML: I don't know…I think it has to do with my age and experience. I recently listened to a song that I made when I was living in Philly and I could hear my experimental brain—my playful 32-year-old brain being like—I’m gonna try this. I was singing and using a microphone with effects. I remember I was doing it while I was babysitting and I could hear the mic banging on something and I’m like, wow, I actually left that in. My East Coast music had this sort of experimental innocence that I’m always trying to get back to.

So I don’t know if it has to do with where I was so much as just getting older and having more experience—and not using GarageBand but using Logic—it’s made me want to strip down my instrument and be scrappy again and not worry about whether something’s going to get reviewed.

NR: You would know more about this than I do—I probably come at it from reading too much—but it seems like there is that thing about the East Coast where you have that whole experimental lineage from John Cage to the Velvet Underground to Sonic Youth and that whole movement that kind of gets memorialized at the end of the ’70s with No Wave...that heavy experimental thing coming out of New York. And then L.A.—it seems like you have this wonderful ecosystem there because of the film industry, you have this collection of people who are just amazing at their instruments in a real symphonic way. I know people personally who pendulum swing between composing for film and then making their own work, and I could see that having some bearing on things...

ML: I really love composing for film and I think it’s a dream come true that I get to do it. Though, I’m not really a tinker-perfectionist as much as I’m like, OK, this music is coming from my soul (laughs)l. I love to score films but the endless revisions part drives me a little crazy. It makes me feel like I’m a factory a little bit and I don’t want to get too used to that. But also, that being said, if anyone is reading this interview and wants me to score their film—absolutely.

NR: I know that you collaborate with a lot of people, but Juliana Barwick seems to be a huge collaborator for you. It seems like you have a really great musical relationship. Does this new project feel like it’s coming from a place where this is not just a one-time collaboration? It feels like something really special. Did it feel that way when you were recording it?

ML: She and I are very close friends and we have done a lot together. I’ve DJed with her, I played on her album, she did a remix for me, we did a song called “Canyon Lights” for a conference. But this is the first real collaboration because we were able to travel to Paris to record over the course of 10 days in the Musée de la Musique—the museum of musical instruments of Paris—and so this record was made entirely on very rare, special instruments taken from the museum.

That’s a crazy opportunity in itself, but also just being in Paris with one of your best friends. And our friend Trevor engineered it—I’ve worked with Trevor, he mixed Goodbye, Hotel Arkestra. He and I became friends and I was like, he would be the perfect person not only to mic and guide this recording but also to hang out with. The three of us just had a really amazing, profound time in Paris.

This was also about two weeks after the L.A. fires and we were still processing that. Juliana wrote the lyrics for “Melted Moon” in just ten minutes. She was processing the effects of the fires on her brain and after she sang the lyrics to us and we made this song, we were all just crying. It was a very tender, very sensitive time for us to go over there because we had just lived through this crazy time in our city where the whole city was on fire. Being so on edge and then going to Paris to be in the basement of this museum—it was very surreal. But yeah, it feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I’m really glad that we captured it in recording. In my opinion, it’s really special.

NR: My last question—at the beginning of the interview, you said that you were really excited about learning some new instruments. Are there any that are already on your radar?

ML: I’ve been enjoying my synthesizer and I’ve been practicing the piano more. There’s a vintage synthesizer museum here in L.A. where you can bring in your computer and pay by the hour and record yourself, or you can hire an engineer for a great price to work with you. My friends from Iceland were telling me about it yesterday—that they had gone there to record and that the collection is absolutely overwhelming in a really thrilling way. I feel like that’s going to be in my future.

But I also feel like I’m not going to be around very much this year because of touring with Juliana. I just finished working on another record with Neil (Halstead) and that feels like it’s in a good place—he’s tinkering with it now. So that’s something I’m looking forward to.

NR: I have to say, as a lifelong Slowdive fan, and as someone who really loved Silver Ladders, that’s really great to hear.

ML: I had collaborated with Rachel (Goswell, of Slowdive) and it made me think—I just found this perfect producer for my music that fits with me so well…why not go back there and revisit that environment? And this time it was cool because I wasn't so intimidated by him—this time there was this great feeling of camaraderie. And it was really fun and I loved it.




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