Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore: Like Tears in Rain
Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore join The Tonearm to discuss 'Tragic Magic,' their debut collaboration recorded in nine days at the Philharmonie de Paris using instruments pulled directly from the museum's historic collection.
Today, we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore.
Julianna is a composer, vocalist, and producer whose music is built almost entirely from layered, looped human voices. Mary is a harpist who has spent years pushing that instrument into a vast, exploratory realm.
In January 2025, the two flew to Paris just days after the LA wildfires tore through their community. There, they spent nine days recording with instruments pulled from a museum, including harps dating back to 1728 and vintage analog synthesizers. The result is Tragic Magic, out on InFiné, and it’s one of the most talked-about records of the year so far.
Julianna and Mary just returned from Big Ears Festival and, in a few days, are heading back to Paris to perform these songs live with those same instruments. We caught them as they were preparing for the trip.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore’s Tragic Magic)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Julianna Barwick at juliannabarwick.com and follow her on Instagram and Facebook
• Visit Mary Lattimore at marylattimore.net and follow her on Instagram and Facebook
• Purchase Tragic Magic from InFiné, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
Recording Location:
• Philharmonie de Paris — Musée de la Musique — the museum whose instrument collection made the album possible
• Musée de la Musique collections database — searchable archive of the museum’s historic instruments
Collaborators:
• Roger Eno — composer of “Temple of the Winds,” written for voice and harp after a shared lunch with Barwick and Lattimore in Melbourne
• Trevor Spencer — engineer, additional producer, and mixer on Tragic Magic; known for his work with Fleet Foxes and Beach House
Instruments:
• Jacob Hochbrücker — maker of the 1728 harp used for “Temple of the Winds”; one of the oldest instruments on the album
• Érard harps — the French instrument maker whose 1799 and 1873 harps Mary Lattimore used throughout the sessions
• Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 — the synthesizer Julianna Barwick chose; introduced in 1978 as the first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizer
• Roland Jupiter-8 — the second synthesizer Barwick used; the “Jupiter” referenced throughout the episode
• Korg VC-10 Vocoder — used by Barwick on “Stardust” and elsewhere on the album
Visual Art — James Turrell:
• James Turrell — the light artist whose work both Barwick and Lattimore cite as a significant influence
• James Turrell: Into the Light at MASS MoCA — where Barwick and Lattimore opened Turrell’s newest Skyspace, C.A.V.U.
• Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima — permanent Turrell installations on the Japanese island Mary mentions visiting
• James Turrell retrospective at the Guggenheim — the 2013 exhibition (Aten Reign) that first brought Mary to Turrell’s work after reading a New Yorker review
Previous InFiné / Musée de la Musique Collaborations:
• InBach by Arandel (2020) — the first album in InFiné’s Musée de la Musique series, featuring Baroque instruments
• Saturn 63 by Seb Martel (2022) — the second album in the series; Tragic Magic is the third
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
The Tonearm, Episode 299: Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore
Lawrence Peryer: I wanted to start by asking you about the conditions in which you arrived at the sessions—leaving Los Angeles in the circumstances you did, immediately following the fires. I'm wondering how you both arrived in Paris and what you showed up with emotionally and interpersonally. Mary, you look like you're bursting at the seams.
Mary Lattimore: I would say a lot of gratitude for the opportunity to just get out—out of a city that had been so terrifying in the weeks before. Gratitude about this opportunity that was being offered, and really glad that I could be there with Julianna, that we could both kind of process together. A lot of the music that I think we both make comes from our hearts and how we feel. So having the opportunity to process that through music in a gorgeous city was something to be really grateful for. There was also some guilt about leaving a place that had been so traumatized and going off to Paris. Julianna and I talked about that, too. You feel very privileged, and with that comes a recognition that not everybody gets to do this—there's a little guilt in leaving so soon after such a disaster.
Lawrence: Julianna, how about you?
Julianna Barwick: Same. We flew to Paris on the 25th, so it was shortly after everything happened here. It was a mixed bag for sure—complete and total elation. Mary and I had probably dreamt for ten years of making a duo record. This was just an unbelievable opportunity for us. But we were making our way to Paris with really heavy hearts.
Mary: A lot of processing. It was heavy. It was a heavy trip.
Lawrence: Well, all right. With all of that in the air for the two of you, the next thing I'm really curious about—and I promise not to get too deconstructionist with you—is place and space and how it affects your work. I'm really curious about the role of Paris, the role of the rooms you recorded in, and, most special on this album, the role of the instruments. Maybe we could start with location. Mary, tell me about Paris and tell me about the actual rooms you were in.
Mary: The rooms were in the basement of the Philharmonie and the Musée de la Musique. The rooms themselves were unremarkable. One was more like a storage room that we started out in until the bigger room was available, and that was a rehearsal room with no windows. There was a beautiful grand piano, but the rooms themselves felt very utilitarian—given such an ornate place and the architectural gem of the Philharmonie, these rooms felt like where the work happens behind the scenes. And it was fun to get to know that side of it. I always like behind the scenes—the secret little twisty hallways and the coffee machine where you go when you go to work there. The behind-the-scenes stuff is always fun to glimpse. But the potential that these nondescript rooms had to hold this creative laboratory for us was amazing.
The instruments themselves couldn't go very far. So the curator had to deliver them down the elevator and be very delicate with them, because they came straight from the museum exhibit. There were little signs in the museum where the instruments had been on display that said, "Sorry, you can't view this harp because it is on loan to Mary, who is making music with Julianna." It was really cool that we were seen as important enough to merit that little card. Once in a lifetime.
Lawrence: It's really funny, because hearing you talk about the unremarkable nature of the spaces, I was thinking that a utility closet in Paris is still more romantic than a concert hall in other places. (laughter)
Mary: Yeah, gray walls, very conference-room vibes. It was—within the bigger picture of Paris, the most beautiful city on earth.
Lawrence: Julianna, could you tell me about the instrument selection? That was something I didn't quite gather from listening to the album and reading some of the material. Did you stroll through the collection and pick items? Did items call out to you? I don't mean to overlay a mystic element onto it, but I'm curious about the actual selection process.
Julianna: We were sent a list of available instruments to choose from. Since I'm a vocalist, and the only thing I really know how to play outside of my own voice is keys, I was looking at what keyboards were available. So I chose the Jupiter and the Prophet-5. I did say I would've loved to play the harpsichord, and that didn't end up happening. Once I saw it in person, I understood why—every square millimeter of it was painted in this beautiful pastoral oil painting from who knows what century. So I understood why it hadn't been prepared for me. That's how I chose the keyboards, and also because I have no experience with Jupiters or Prophet-5s, so I thought, why not learn something new.
I also chose the vocoder because I could do things with my voice through that.
Lawrence: That seems like a natural fit.
Julianna: Yeah. And Mary got to choose from some very special harps, which are amazing.
Lawrence: I'd like to hear about that, because it's interesting—when you think about choosing a synthesizer or a keyboard instrument, you can approach it with some idea of what it's going to sound like or what it's capable of. But I'm curious about the analog with a multi-century-old harp. How do you know what you're going to use?
Mary: I chose based on playability. Frankly, it didn't feel like, "Oh, I'm choosing this harp because it's my favorite." I felt like I was choosing it because it was closest to what I play now—the instrument through which I could best express the music Julianna and I make, but give it the voice of something from the 1800s, a kind of merging of the centuries. Some of the harps that were offered were in a condition that wasn't playable—the string tension was really off, the tuning was really off, which meant they couldn't be merged with a more modern instrument. I basically picked the harps I felt could be translated into this modern voice most easily given the time constraints we had.
We did use the double-strung chromatic harp—a very fascinating instrument. There were little tuning bells above each string that you pressed on, and a little chime would indicate how it should be tuned. Our engineer, Trevor, incorporated those tuning bells into "Stardust."
Lawrence: There are a few tracks I want to ask you about, and I was going to get to this a little later, but you brought up "Stardust" and you mentioned Trevor. "Stardust" was the first piece I heard from the record, before I even knew I was going to have the opportunity to speak with you both. It grabbed me and really pulled me in—I was listening to a playlist as I was working or reading, and it was one of those tracks where I was like, "Oh, wait—what is going on there?" Can you tell me about that piece, the recording, the composition? And I'm really curious about how deep the collaboration with Trevor was, because just that little anecdote about the decision to record the bells—that's not just engineering. There's some creative input and thought there. If either of you wants to chime in on that particular track, I'd love to hear about it.
Julianna: "Stardust" came together maybe the third or fourth day. The first week we were in the room that almost felt like a storage room, and the second week we were behind a big stage with the grand piano and everything. It was one of the first things we worked out, but Mary and I went in with a handful of demos and a couple of things already arranged—we had covered "Rachel's Song" from Blade Runner previously, and we came in with the Roger Eno piece—but a few things just happened in real time. "Stardust" was born out of me messing around with the Jupiter. I wanted at least one track on the record to highlight that synthesizer. The chord progression is just something I've loved since high school—I think it might exist in some of my other songs. It's kind of the first thing I'll play on a keyboard.
So with the songs that were made in real time, we were just exploring the instruments. We hit record, and then Mary said she just wanted to add harps—like millions of glittering stars all over it. I thought that was a really beautiful thing to say, and she did exactly that. Then we put the drum machine beat in and finally added the vocoder vocals a little later. It all just came together over a few days.
Lawrence: Was everything on the album recorded there, or was there post work done?
Julianna: Everything was recorded there.
Lawrence: Wow. Before we stay in the present, I want to go back for a moment. Correct me if I'm wrong, Mary—you didn't necessarily fall head over heels in love with the harp initially. It took you time to really connect. If I'm describing that correctly, when did it become your musical voice? Was there an epiphany? Could you talk about that a little bit?
Mary: It's so funny, because in doing this podcast you asked to have my Wikipedia page included in the prep materials, and I read my Wikipedia for the first time in a really long time, and it said something about me not initially connecting with the instrument, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I hope my mom doesn't read my Wikipedia." My mom is a harpist.
It's true. Wikipedia is correct. When you're a child, you don't necessarily want to practice all the time. I started playing the harp when I was eleven. I had a pretty strict classical background, and it's very tedious to sit down and play scales. The way you learn the harp in general is one finger at a time—you spend about a year just learning the pointer finger and the thumb, a lot of deliberate technique building. Combined with my mom being a harpist, it just felt normal to me. It wasn't, "Oh, the harp, it's so magical." The harp was my mom's job. The harp was something in the house a lot—which is a privilege. But then when I started to get better at it, and started to play Debussy or some kind of beautiful cadenza, and had it click after studying for six months or so, it started to get really fun. You start to see the small nuances you can make in classical music—how you can make something sound your own, add your own tone and emotions to pieces that have been played for so long. I think that's when it started to feel like my voice, rather than something I was just studying because of my mom.
Lawrence: Do you happen to know whether the pedagogy or methodology around instruction has changed? I ask that specifically because I talk to a lot of artists, particularly piano players. When I was a kid, I had the classic kind of strict older teacher, and for the first year I wasn't even allowed to touch the instrument—I had to write notes in the theory book. It was the worst thing you could do to a five- or six-year-old, and it took me years to actually want to play. Whereas my oldest son, when he started taking piano lessons, they just put him at a piano, and the next lesson at a drum—it was about playing. Has the harp evolved in terms of how it's taught?
Mary: Like teaching the harp? I don't know. I think some of that technique-first approach is actually about injury prevention. A lot of that structured foundation is about building the strength very deliberately in order to develop the stamina to play. Maybe the strictness of it has changed—I'm sure there have been changes in how the instrument is taught, and there are a lot of different ways to approach it. That said, you still have to go slow and not just immediately start with all the fingers playing.
Julianna: I can attest to that, because one time I sat down at Mary's harp and just started playing and playing, and I had blisters on my fingers almost immediately. (laughter)
Lawrence: That's really funny, because I couldn't imagine being around a harp and not wanting to fiddle with it. I'm glad you did that. And I'm sorry it hurt your fingers.
Julianna: It's an irresistible object.
Lawrence: Was it easy to make a noise out of it that sounded interesting? As a non-player approaching it, could you make it do anything?
Julianna: Sure. My brain was like, "Oh, this is kind of like a piano—it's the notes of an octave." And I thought, if I play every other one, that's like harmony. But any understanding beyond that was beyond my grasp.
Lawrence: I have a similar question for you. You said it very plainly earlier—your primary instrument is your voice, yet you approach it in a very interesting way. Could you tell me a little bit about that journey of discovery, the looping and layering, how you stumbled across that, what intention you had in it? Just a little context about your approach.
Julianna: Sure. I grew up singing every which way—I just sang all the time. I found reverberant spaces as a child and would sing and make myself cry, just singing in a parking garage or whatever. I always loved to sing. My mom was always singing; she's a beautiful singer. I was always in choirs throughout school, sang in church with the congregation a cappella in these reverberant spaces. So my brain was constantly being informed by singing and by the effect the space it's in has on how it sounds.
In high school I took voice lessons. I was in an opera chorus after high school, had a little Fostex four-track recorder, and ended up with some effects pedals that I would put my voice or an electric guitar through. I was just finding my way, trying to figure out what kind of music I could make that didn't just sound like trying to be somebody else. And one of my best friends showed me a DigiTech digital delay pedal meant for guitar. He showed me that if you held the pedal down, it would loop.
That just ignited something in my brain. I had to borrow it. I took it home and just made millions of loops, experimenting. Everything clicked. I could compose just in the moment—start a loop not knowing where it would go, and end up sitting back like, "Where did that come from?" It just fit my musical constitution perfectly, and still does.
Lawrence: It seems like there's also an analog to having grown up singing in church with other voices—there's an element of hearing your voice in the context of many voices, and being able to do that on your own is kind of fascinating.
Julianna: Totally. I sang in choirs starting in about third grade, and then my whole life going to church three times a week—hearing rounds, hearing the sopranos, altos, tenors, bass, baritone, all the different parts, the men singing this and the women singing this, the harmonies, the rounds, even the clapping. I could hear all the layers. So once I figured out how to loop my voice, it was so fun to harmonize with myself—instantly, with looping, you put one layer down and then add onto it, harmonize with yourself, add beats, whatever you want.
I also have a lot of fun using my voice in different ways and timbres—sometimes making it really soft, other times making it honky or brassy. I just like playing with my voice, kind of like a palette.
Lawrence: Before we leave the topic of your voice and how you use it, tell me a little bit about some of the vocal decisions you made for "Melted Moon," because that piece feels so vulnerable. Your voice is a big part of that—it's a bit more naked, or less treated. There's still a lot of ambience and reverberation, but it's very much you. What is it like to strip away some of that? Is vulnerability the right way to think about it, or are you just responding to what the song needs?
Julianna: All of that. It's a little bit uncomfortable. I've always used tons of washes of reverb and delay, just to make a hazy curtain of sound. That's the kind of thing that helps out if you hit a semi-wrong note—just wash over everything. Most of my music has been pretty much wordless, and most of the lyrics were improvised on the spot, just playing around.
Some of the lyrics on my previous records kind of just sound like someone talking in their sleep. It was just whatever came to my head as I was doing it. But with this project, there was a unique opportunity, there was a novelty, and there was a kind of reverence that really needed to happen. I didn't want to just wash everything. I wanted to make the uncomfortable decision to honor the opportunity by making it stripped down—making it timeless, for a few of those songs. The looping that's there is here and now, but with "Perpetual Adoration" and "Melted Moon," I wanted it to feel like: what century is this from? And it also meant stretching a very weak muscle, which is lyric writing—not something I normally do. It was very different from what I'm used to, what I'm comfortable with, but I felt this project needed that.
Lawrence: How do you feel about it now, revisiting it or listening back?
Julianna: I love it. Mary and I just finished a West Coast tour—the first run of shows we've done with the record. I just love singing those songs. It's a new thing for me. It's really new. I was even saying from the stage, "I'm doing a whole new thing with this record."
Lawrence: Mary, you've used the word "privilege" a couple of times already. I think an adjacent question touches on the privilege of the instruments themselves. I'm curious about the harp you used for the Roger Eno piece, "Temple of the Winds." My understanding is that it was a particularly old and potentially rare instrument. Tell me about that song, that pairing, and what responsibility comes with the privilege of handling that object.
Mary: It was terrifying, really. To be entrusted with the tuning and playing of that instrument—we knew we wanted to feature it somewhere on the record, but using it every day, handling it and looping it, didn't feel right. With this song, it felt like the proper way to honor it. That harp was unaffected—we just heard the natural sound of that very early pedal harp, the Jacob Hochbrücker harp from 1728. It was extremely delicate. Trevor had to literally hold it on my shoulder so that it wouldn't fall. It was light as a feather. The strings were very close together, the tension very different from my harp.
This piece was written by Roger after we met him in Australia. We had a really fun lunch together—we were all playing the same show later that night—and got along really well. Then he went to a park by himself and wrote us this piece and presented it to us at the concert. He said, "You guys, I just wrote you a piece this afternoon—'Temple of the Winds.'" So we'd been saving it for the right moment to record it. When I came across the Jacob Hochbrücker harp, I thought, okay, this would be the right one to use for this song. The song was very tricky—it sounds really simple, but it was pretty hard to learn. We wanted to do it in one take, no cutting and pasting or punching in. Just play it through twice. It took a lot of time and practice to get it right, especially using such an unfamiliar instrument.
Lawrence: That's such a beautiful offering—to have someone respond to time spent together by coming back with a composition.
Mary: Roger is a really cool person. He's really funny and amazingly talented, and I really feel like it was destiny that we got to meet him that time.
Lawrence: Funny and talented seems to be an Eno family trait. Tell me about "Rachel's Song." There's a lot in your collaborative presentation of it—the field recording of the rain, which I'd love for you to describe rather than have me recite something from the press material, the themes of the song, how it's used in Blade Runner. There's a lot of weight in that composition. I wonder if either or both of you might want to tell me what that song means to you.
Mary: The rain sample came from our friend Rachael—Pony is her nickname. She took all the press photos for us, too. We were chatting, and she lives in LA, and she said, "It just started raining—the first time in eight months, the first time since the fires." And we said, "Please go outside and send us a recording. We want to hear it—we want to be able to experience the relief with the rest of our city." So we listened to it, and we were like, "Oh man, maybe we should slow this down a little and include it in the recording." The recording in totality feels like a time capsule—it holds all the memories of that time in our lives and that experience. We wanted to include that moment, that very important moment, along with all the other things we'd collected during that recording period.
Lawrence: Julianna, that's such a fascinating impulse—to say, "Please record it. We want to experience it." I don't know if I have a question around that so much as it just strikes me. What's that about?
Julianna: That was all Mary—Mary asked Rachael to do that. But it just goes to show how, even though we were so enthralled with Paris and our experience at the Philharmonie, our hearts were very much back in LA. To hear that it was raining there was deeply emotional. There were moments of us just crying on and off throughout the whole recording process, and hearing that it was raining back home was one of them. I put that recording into my sampler, so we've been playing it live. It's wild that this is the actual first rainfall after what happened to our city, and it's on the record, and it's there every time we play it live. It's a really beautiful amalgamation of all those elements.
And with "Rachel's Song"—Mary mentioned a few years ago that she would love to hear me sing it. So we worked it out to play live. I think the first time was at Making Time or at Zebulon, January 2024. We played it a couple of times, just to work the Prophet-5 into it, and Mary's harp just sounded perfect in there. The chimes, everything came together. Even the horrifying vocals at the end—I just kind of pressed every button on my effects pedal, and that's how we arrived there.
Lawrence: Could you tell me a little bit from your individual perspectives about this collaboration—whether it's the bond you have as artists or interpersonally? When did you realize there was something between you? And I'm also curious about whether the chemistry has to be cultivated and tended to, or whether it's just there when you get together.
Julianna: It's both, for me. Just from meeting each other for the first time, we both make hard-to-categorize, one-person looping music—Mary with her harp, me with my voice. We had that camaraderie from day one. And it just so happens that we're two tall women from the South who like a lot of the same things. Our first set of shows together was late 2016—we played eleven shows in eleven days and barely knew each other, and it was just awesome. There's always been a kind of sisterhood in every way. Mary lived in Philadelphia for thirteen years, I lived in New York for sixteen years—so many similarities and through lines.
Mary: Even our moms—we play the same instruments as our moms. We both grew up with these instruments. We both grew up going to church a lot. So many things in common, similar philosophies about music making and life.
Julianna: Definitely. Through the years we've done all kinds of things together—toured, played runs of shows where we'd improvise at the end, DJ'd together, guested on each other's records. And through the years, people who like our music would say, "You guys should make a record together." And we were always like, "We know, we want to." So for that opportunity to arrive in this package was just kind of ridiculous—in Paris, which I'm pretty sure is each of our favorite cities. It was just unreal. And it still is. After the fact, people would ask, "So how was Paris?" And I just said, "It was perfect." It was perfect. We've done our first run of shows and it was awesome.
Lawrence: There's something I've been really excited to talk to you both about: James Turrell. I lived in New York for around twenty years, and I was fortunate enough to see his installations there and in LA—didn't he do one in Texas at the same time? I think so, but I saw his work at LACMA and at the Guggenheim. I think about those experiences quite often. There's such a natural connection between light art and the kinds of sounds artists like you make. What does his work do to you, and how does it connect to you as artists? How do you refract that light back?
Mary: I first discovered him around the Guggenheim show. I read the review of that show in The New Yorker, and I really loved the way his work was described—the words "luminous" and "ravishing" were ones I remember reading and thinking, "I must see this." I'd never heard of him in my life. I rode the bus up to New York to go see it, and my brain was just blown open. Personally, I feel like I do some Turrell tourism. I went to Japan, to Naoshima, to see a couple of his works there on that island, and to Villa Panza in Italy. Julianna appreciates his work just as much as I do. We even had the honor of opening his newest Skyspace at MASS MoCA—we played for the opening and he was there.
People ask, "Mary, what's your biggest dream show?" And I always say playing in the crater. Playing in the crater—that would be the highlight of a lifetime, if that could ever happen.
Lawrence: Did you go to the crater?
Mary: No. Is the crater open? Can you go to the crater?
Lawrence: I don't know exactly how it works, but I feel like some people get to.
Mary: Kanye? (laughter)
Lawrence: I was kind of hoping you were going to say that when you were with him at MASS MoCA, he said, "Why don't we all go back to my place sometime and visit the crater?"
Mary: I know. I didn't even talk to him. It would be scary to talk to him.
Julianna: Yeah.
Lawrence: Something I find very compelling about his work is the way it reproduces in photographs—it's really stunning to see a piece photographed, and then to go see it in person and it's just... that. And I don't know why I'm always so surprised. I guess because it's light art—I just expect to be disappointed in person when I've seen it so stunningly photographed. But you're instantly in a different universe.
Mary: You feel it—you don't just see it. You feel it.
Julianna: You're a part of it. I remember being a kid and looking out the window at the beautiful sun with the yellow leaves falling, not just wanting to see it, but wanting to get out of the car and be a part of it. With his work, you really are—you're within it, you're in that spongy color, you're experiencing something. It's so different from looking at a painting. You walk upstairs and you're in a piece. It's something else to be in a space with the art, trying to see where one surface ends and another begins. It's just so fun for the brain and so beautiful to your eyes.
Lawrence: And the crisp lines that demarcate the boundaries of the light and shadow—so stunning.
Mary: How does it even work? It's biology, it's science.
Julianna: Yeah.
Mary: It's science, it's magic.
Lawrence: There's math at work somewhere. Something I very much appreciate about the two of you—you didn't really indulge my attempt to get too mystical about the space and the instruments, because that could have been a whole rabbit hole I definitely would have gone down. I appreciate the very craftsperson-like approach you've both articulated here. But if I can drag you back into that for one second: something that strikes me about this work is that because of the instruments, and frankly because of their age—not only the harps, but these classic synthesizers—and the space that houses them, they have narratives, stories, histories. And now you've contributed to their stories. Some of these objects probably hadn't had their stories added onto in a while. Is there any resonance in that for you, or am I putting you somewhere you don't want to be?
Mary: It's beautiful the way you put it. You always feel like this is a living thing, a living, breathing thing. These instruments, they're meant to be played. I feel like they enjoy being played. Alexandre, the head of our label at InFiné, said, "You're waking up the sleeping princesses." And we named a song after that because it was just so beautiful. It does feel like we're waking up these instruments and bringing them into a new chapter—come join us here in the future, come with us. And we're going to play these instruments live again in April. We have three sets to be played at the museum on April 10th, where we'll have to readjust to these instruments and communicate with them once again.
Lawrence: April in Paris. Julianna, you actually put electricity through them, right? Like, they're actually sleeping—and then you wake them up. It's barely metaphorical.
Julianna: Got to have electricity. But the harps are acoustic instruments, too, and I feel like those instruments want to be played. They don't want to just sit on the shelf. I definitely have semi-emotional connections with the instruments I use—they're all machines, but I love following my nose and figuring out what they're going to do.
Lawrence: There's something very interesting about the period of analog synthesizers. I try not to fetishize analog versus digital—everything has its place and people have their tastes. But I've observed in conversations with multiple artists, as well as in the music that people return to repeatedly, that a specific era—let's call it early-to-mid-1970s to early 1980s synthesizers, just before they went fully digital—has something about its sound that seems to resonate somatically for people. That music is sort of hard to ignore because there is still that analog gruffness involved. That feels true to me, even if I can't fully explain it.
Julianna: I'm no expert, but just the way you said that—you know, I was a photography major, that's what I did in school. So I think about it the way I think about film versus digital. There are things you can capture with film, nuances, that just cannot be duplicated digitally. There's some timbre, some softness, some quality that can't be reproduced. I can totally see what you're saying, and that's my analog for it.
Harpist/Musician
Mary Lattimore is a Los Angeles-based harpist who has played on recordings by dozens of indie rock and experimental musicians, in addition to soundtrack work and her own solo releases. She typically augments her graceful harp improvisations with electronic effects, emphasizing the instrument's ethereal qualities while conjuring up fascinating new sonic vistas. She became an in-demand session musician before releasing solo material in 2012. She later collaborated on albums and soundtracks with artists like Jeff Zeigler and Maxwell August Croy, and released music on well-regarded labels like Thrill Jockey and Ghostly International. By 2018, her solo material had begun to incorporate guitar, keyboard, Theremin, and other instruments with albums like 2020's Silver Ladders augmenting her ambient harp with a wide range of accompanying sounds. Collaboration remained at the heart of Lattimore's work, showing up in the form of projects with Growing and Superchunk's Mac McCaughan, contributions from members of Slowdive, the Cure, and others on her 2023 album Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, and on 2026's Julianna Barwick team-up Tragic Magic.
(All Music Guide by Paul Simpson)
Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis
musician
Julianna Barwick (she/her) is a Los Angeles based composer, vocalist, and producer who makes deep, reflective compositions rooted in the human voice. Over the years she has made several critically acclaimed records. Julianna took a natural step into the world of composing for film and continues to take on scoring opportunities alongside her artist work.