Een van de meest interesseante instrumentale componisten van nu is voor mij harpiste Mary Lattimore uit Los Angeles. Niet alleen de albums die ze zelf maakt, zijn altijd zeer de moeite waard, maar ze werkt ook graag mee aan albums van artiesten van divers pluimage. Zo werkte ze bijvoorbeeld mee aan For the World van Ed Askew, maar ook aan Music for the Age of Miracles van The Clientele. Maar altijd aan albums, waarop het experiment niet wordt geschuwd.
Haar nieuwste album Goodbye, Hotel Arkada bevat gelukkig weer alleen maar splinternieuwe composities. De titel is een verwijzing naar een door Lattimore geliefd hotel in Stari Grad, Kroatië, dat gerenoveerd werd. Lattimore heeft trouwens een voorkeur om te verblijven in oudere hotels. De sfeer na een renovatie in zo’n hotel is natuurlijk veranderd. Het hotel staat hier symbool voor universeel verlies dat gedeeld wordt.
De melancholie druipt dan ook van de tijdloze composities af. Muziek waardoor de luisteraar heel gemakkelijk in een dromerige roes geraakt. De gastlijst van meewerkende artiesten mag er zijn : Lol Tolhurst (The Cure), Meg Baird, Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Roy Montgomery, Samara Lubelski en Walt McClements. Het wordt trouwens hoog tijd dat Lattimore naar Nederland komt voor concerten, zodat we bijzonder fraaie Goodbye, Hotel Arkada live kunnen horen.
Voor meer toelichting in het Engels op de afzonderlijke composities overgenomen uit het persbericht, zie hieronder :
For the opening track, “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me,” Lattimore looks to two of her closest friends — songwriter Meg Baird, her collaborator on 2018’s Ghost Forests, and accordionist composer Walt McClements, who she’s toured and performed alongside — to surface a core memory. As a kid, Lattimore won a drawing contest through a country radio station and got to see Sesame Street Live! in Asheville. She and her mom were invited backstage, and there the benevolent icon Big Bird “gave me an incredible hug with his scratchy yellow wings.” The trio channel the enveloping warmth of that portrait, the feeling of innocent escape, flying away towards a childhood dream that is just out of reach, surreal, and tinged with sadness. In a rare vocal passage in Lattimore’s library, Baird softly hums with the rolling washes of harp above McClements’ tranquil drone; just for a moment, we are held in a sublime canary yellow embrace.
“Arrivederci” features the synth work of Lol Tolhurst, an original member of The Cure and one of her musical heroes. Lattimore started the song after getting fired from a project because she hadn’t played the harp parts well enough. “So I came home and cried my eyes out and then wrote this song to try to recapture my love of playing the harp with nothing to mess up. I received Lol’s parts on New Year's Eve when I was hosting a party. I secretly went into my room and listened to the song and it felt just so magical to have such an influential musician connecting with a song that I made, especially a song I made when I was feeling like a total failure.”
On “Blender In A Blender,” Lattimore connects with guitarist Roy Montgomery, a pioneer of New Zealand’s underground. First drafted by Lattimore during an artist residency program in UCross Wyoming, the track later evolved over the duo’s pen pal correspondence. Montgomery adds chords that first feel distant, hazed behind a high-drama harp pattern, before thundering into the foreground in a thrilling outro. The title refers to the trend of teenagers blending their cell phones; Lattimore and a friend were joking about all stuff that could be blended, including another blender. Humor is an unsung key to Lattimore’s craft; titles and anecdotes provide unexpected, counterbalancing levity.
The subdued and striking “Music For Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow” is a tribute to the earthly rituals of preparation. “I wanted to make a song for the green rooms,” she says, recalling a moment in the mirror when a tourmate readied herself to go out into the unknown of performance. “It originally was made after googling ‘what does space smell like’ and getting an answer of ‘walnuts and brake pads’ and thinking about the wooziness of space, somehow smelling familiar earth smells in unfamiliar territory. Once I started adding more layers, I started thinking about what I hoped the song would soundtrack and what I wished a song would do.”
In the case of “Horses, Glossy on the Hill,” the narrative is nearly inextricable from the sonics. The percussive clacking resembles hooves in an anxious gate. There’s a storm cloud in the sky; from a car window, Lattimore captures the silvery sheen coming off the horses’ striated shapes as if photographing the scene through sound. Her shimmering strings accelerate and distort under twisting effects as the herd becomes one with the horizon.
There’s a crumbling elegance to the closing track, “Yesterday's Parties,” indebted to the reveries of Julee Cruise and the droning down-tuned strings of The Velvet Underground. We join Lattimore on a midnight stroll through the streets of Brussels; she looks through stained glass windows into quiet apartments and thinks of late nights with her friends who were out of town. Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell sings a wordless hymn as the harp, a special one Lattimore keeps in Brussels, glides with violin from Samara Lubelski. Leaving Lattimore in this place, itself a memory of yearning for connection, is an appropriate end to an album devoted to remembering and manifesting through shared expression.
Theo Volk
Releasedatum : 6 oktober 2023 Ghostly International/De Konkurrent
Website : http://www.marylattimore.net/