Right in time for another pandemic weekend, the great harp player Mary Lattimore has released a Friday drop, a full album of music that is at once lush and austere, fragile and full-bodied. Such are the wondrous contradictions in her hypermodern (improvisational and digitally enhanced) employment of an instrument generally associated with dusty antiquity. The seven tracks are quite varied. Some, like “Silver Ladders,” sound like gentle machine augmentation of the familiar harp sound, while others layer in pronounced additional instrumentation (notably the heavily delayed guitar on “Til a Mermaid Drags You Under”), or suggest the sort of complexity only a much larger ensemble could accomplish (“Sometimes He’s in My Dreams”). That guitar part comes courtesy of Neil Halstead, best known as a member of the band Slowdive. Halstead hosted Lattimore at his Newquay, Cornwall, studio for over a week and produced the resulting album, which is titled Silver Ladders.
Get the record at marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com. More from Lattimore, who is based in Los Angeles, at marylattimore.net.