Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore : Tragic Magic
It’s fairy music. That’s about as concise a description of Tragic Magic as I can muster, the new collaborative record from Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore. They both have always made music that is often, let’s say, glade-adjacent, where you could easily imagine a dewy sunbeam and a fawn eating from a maiden’s hand. But before, this was an image set that was more potentialized within the music, not substantiated, one that if someone told you to imagine it you could rather than the one that comes naturally. That they commit fully to the sentiment here, with everything from the title invoking magic to the cover being, well, a glade, let alone the fantastical pastoral cant of the music itself, is a fun way to spin a unique image on their bodies of work which by now have grown in number to leave what can sometimes feel like little in the way of unexplored territory.
Barwick and Lattimore both can be described as ambient or new age composers and players, but this tag makes their music sound more passive than it often is (ignoring for now how active-tense most ambient listeners approach the material). Lattimore’s harp playing, for instance, has across her solo and collaborative records leaned as far to the active tense as progressive music and alternative rock and pop, especially of the shoegazing sort, while it has leaned as far back as delicate folk pieces and the prerequisite contemporary classical solo compositions. Barwick, more electronically focused, is much the same, with records like Will and Nepenthe having a riven depth of mood that swims from the foreboding to the ministerial to the becalming to the entrancing. That she is tagged as ambient describes more the lack of hard-driving beats or anthemic vocals rather than the stylistic constraint of her work, which like Lattimore’s is rich with a variety of tones and approaches.
It is not that neither woman has approached fairy music before. Barwick, for instance, has The Magic Place and the EP of extended versions of pieces from Healing Is A Miracle; Lattimore meanwhile comes closest on Ghost Forests, a collaborative record with Meg Baird. Perhaps we have the rise of dungeon synth as a dominating form in underground electronic and ambient music to thank for this gentle shift in focus. Here, the mastery Lattimore has over her harp, which acts as the spine of each piece, offers a tangible acoustic musical element that Barwick is able to dress and festoon with synth pads, ghostly choirs of distant voices, and the reverb-drenched steel drum sounds which call to mind the image of fairies and the spells natural to water. At its best, this record approaches the sonic space of Faten Kanaan’s A Mythology of Circles, and it makes me fondly ponder the idea of a collaborative project or tour between the three, letting those resonant elements intermingle naturally with each other.
“The Four Sleeping Princesses” (see what I mean?) is the standout for me, picking up after a less compelling opening track to deliver a piece of progressive folk that builds in layers over its seven minutes until it is throbbing with richness but never abandons its ambient direction. It feels like the thesis piece, the exemplar of the concept space of this record, with subsequent tracks both more contained and more lengthy and progressive teasing out isolated elements present in that seven-minute gem of a piece. The final two tracks, “Stardust” and “Melted Moon,” play like a synth-driven progressive electronic song suite, suddenly feeling like Tangerine Dream at their most icy and foggy. I still personally struggle with music I associate with dungeon synth aesthetics; it lacks a certain drive for me and escapes being deeply emotionally resonant for me, despite how richly resonant the material, especially this record, can often be. But where other records I might associate with the style strike me as competent but ultimately boring, Tragic Magic retains that magisterial beauty that both of these artists are so capable of on their own. The playfulness and sudden inspiration are apparent; no moment feels overthought and the music ends before it feels like the ideas did. You get the sense that there is an open door toward potential future work. With fruits this glistening and beautiful, that’s an enticing offer.
Label: Infiné
Year: 2026
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Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore : Tragic Magic
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