Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick met with co-producer Trevor Spencer at the Philharmonie de Paris to record Tragic Magic in just nine days. Remarkably so, given that the album forms part of a series of collaborations in which the label InFiné works with the Musée de la Musique, incorporating historical instruments into contemporary compositions – a process that sounds as though it would require complex adaptation to unfamiliar possibilities. Yet for the two US artists this was not the case: Lattimore selected various harps whose timbres trace the instrument’s development from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, while Barwick turned to different analogue synthesisers.
Tragic Magic is not, however, an experiment. It is a quiet meditation on sound and pain. Spherically grounded and grounded in the spherical. And therein lies what distinguishes this record: from the opening bars of »Perpetual Adoration«, the synthesisers ascend towards the sacred. Lattimore and Barwick do more than simply open up a sonic space. Their compositions abound in spirituality.
While other albums within the genre currently cultivate soundscapes and electronic interstices, Tragic Magic radiates warmth and calm in every second. There were early precedents in the initial crossings of ambient and folk, yet no album has previously attained this degree of beauty. At no point does it resemble a theoretical cabinet of curiosities; rather, the energies converge throughout. Barwick’s acute sense of space combines with Lattimore’s harmonic playing to create a near-celestial experience. A delicate, finely wrought, elevated masterpiece.
