Review: Mary Lattimore & Julianna Barwick • Tragic Magic
Tragic Magic — the beauty that remains when everything else burns down. Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore record in Paris, with harps from three centuries ago, an album born from the ashes of California.
The beauty that remains when everything else burns down. Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore record in Paris, with harps from three centuries ago, an album born from the ashes of California.
Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore arrive in Paris in January 2025 carrying the smell of smoke — California had just begun to burn, Barwick had been forced to leave home, and the Philharmonie de Paris's invitation to use the historical harps of the Musée de la Musique turns into something no one had planned: a refuge, a room full of ancient instruments and nine days of time.
The harps Lattimore chooses are not just any instruments. A German Höchbrücker from 1728, a single-action French Érard from 1799, a double-action Érard from 1873, the tuning bells of a chromatic Pleyel from 1900. Three centuries of a single instrument's evolution, placed in the hands of someone who had lost her home days before. There is something almost unbearably fitting in this: going to seek consolation in objects that have passed unharmed through wars, revolutions, entire centuries, while your house of wood and drywall became ash in a few hours.
"Perpetual Adoration" opens the record and states the pact at once. Lattimore lets fall a sequence of harp notes that pierce the silence, and shortly after Barwick's voice enters. The piece begins from a minimal detail: the sign for the perpetual adoration chapel in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Montmartre, and a nun's singing caught in passing. From there a cathedral of analogue synths builds slowly, until it becomes an immersive electroacoustic landscape blending historical harps, celestial synthesizers, and Barwick's ethereal voice.
"The Four Sleeping Princesses" takes its name from a remark made offhand in front of the museum's harp collection — four instruments lined up like sleeping princesses. And that is exactly what the piece is: music perpetually on the edge of waking that never wakes. The harp builds through repetition and minimal variation, an almost minimalist structure in the manner of Philip Glass, while Barwick's voice acts as a drone, a monotone anchor beneath the waves. The synths rise low, slow, lifting the melody without ever breaking its spell.
"Rachel's Song" is the most fascinating short-circuit on the record. It is a Vangelis cover — Rachael's theme from the Blade Runner soundtrack, the future imagined in 1982. Playing it today on an 1799 harp means colliding three different times: the remote past of the instrument, the retro-illusory future of the piece, the present of those recording it. It is hauntology in its purest state — the nostalgia for a future that never arrived, filtered through the wood and strings of two centuries ago. Barwick and Lattimore don't reinvent it: they had already brought it to the stage, they know it in the body, and they stay faithful to the original form, letting the context transfigure it. There is less harp here, and a few spectral whistles that evoke certain Morricone soundtracks.
"Haze with no Haze" is perhaps the emotional peak of the record. Lattimore's sparkling glissandos and Barwick's vocal loops merge into a reverb that turns on itself, over a synth that despairs beneath. It is the piece where the room counts as much as the musicians — the recording lets the echo of the Philharmonie breathe, the emptiness around the instrument becomes a haze that isn't there, as the title says. An interior fog with no weather conditions.
And then "Temple of the Winds", two and a half minutes that are the record's secret heart. It is not by Barwick and Lattimore — it is a composition by Roger Eno, Brian's brother, played on the oldest harp in the archive, the 1728 Höchbrücker. Everything is reduced to the bone: voice and strings, no synth, no reverb to cover. It has an aura that recalls Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, sacred music that does not pray but contemplates. There is something inside it that hovers between a song of resurrection and a request for nature's permission — the same wind that carried the flames and now carries the breath back. The harp's timbre becomes almost a lute, and Barwick's voice crosses the melody like a madrigal, crystalline but with a whisper of withheld mystery. It is the shortest piece and the barest, the one that could collapse if pushed a single millimetre further.
"Stardust" brings the synths back to the centre. It is the piece where Barwick takes command, where the keyboards draw the main melody and the harp becomes luminous ornament. The most sophisticated dialogue on the record — the constant exchange between the past evoked by the strings and the glass-edged present held by the synths. It is the moment when the collaboration stops being a sum and becomes a third thing, something that wouldn't exist without both.
"Melted Moon" closes, and it is the piece of the fires. Eight and a half minutes, the barest and most direct voice Barwick has ever recorded — almost without filter, almost without reverb. But what stays with you is how Lattimore plays the harp here: she doesn't pluck it the way you pluck a harp, she makes it speak the way Robert Smith makes the guitar of the Cure speak, steering the melodies toward a longing. It is the only piece with a recognisable lyric, the only one that names loss instead of merely evoking it. And just as the tension mounts, the voice emerges like when the clouds break open — and what it says, without saying it, is a single thing: forward.
Anglo-Saxon reviews have used words like new age, fairy world, woodland fantasy. They aren't wrong, but they stop at the surface. Tragic Magic is not an escape into an enchanted world — it is what remains when the real world has stopped being habitable and you have to find somewhere else to breathe. The two musicians said they found, in those nine days, something that went beyond themselves: the sense that even when not everything is right, beauty endures. Not as cheap consolation. As a brute, stubborn fact. The moon melts, the house burns, and a harp from 1728 keeps sounding exactly as it sounded three centuries ago. Tragic magic is not magic that ends badly. It is magic that keeps working even after everything else has ended badly.
https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/album/tragic-magic
Artist: Mary Lattimore & Julianna Barwick
Album: Magic Tragic 2026 (InFiné Éditions)
Duration: 42'33"
Genre: ambient, neoclassical
Tracklist: Perpetual Adoration, The Four Sleeping Princesses, Rachel's Song, Haze with no Haze, Temple of the Winds, Stardust, Melted Moon
tuie. nasce da un’idea condivisa tra amici, in un pomeriggio di primavera.
Contatti
info@tuie.it