Mary Lattimore, Lucinda Chua
Monday, November 19, 19:30adv £8
Lucinda Chua - 8.30pm
Mary Lattimore - 9.30pm
MARY LATTIMORE is a harpist living in Los Angeles. She experiments with her Lyon and Healy Concert Grand harp and effects. Memories - places, vacancies, allusions - are fundamental characters in Mary Lattimore's evocative craft. Inside her music, wordless narratives, indefinite travelogues, and braided events skew into something enchantingly new. Lattimore recorded her breakout 2016 album, 'At The Dam', during stops along a road trip across America, letting the serene landscapes of Joshua Tree and Marfa, Texas color her compositions. In 2017, she presented 'Collected Pieces', a tape compiling sounds from her past life in Philadelphia: odes to the east coast, burning motels, and beach town convenience stores. In 2018, from a restorative station - a redwood barn, nestled in the hills above San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge - emanates 'Hundreds of Days', her second full-length LP with Ghostly International. The record sojourns between silences and speech, between microcosmic daily scenes and macrocosmic universal understandings, between being alien in promising new places and feeling torn from old native havens. It's an expansive new chapter in Lattimore's story, and an expression of mystified gratitude. A study in how ordinary components helix together to create an extraordinary world.
Throughout the shifting locales there is one consistent companion Lattimore engages: a 47-string Lyon and Healy harp. The instrument wires directly into her psyche. Pitchfork's Marc Masters posits, "she can practically talk through it at this point; she's created a language." Lattimore's voice sweeps beneath the plucks and washes of opener "It Feels Like Floating," enraptured by the winding current, and reappearing in the second minute of the immense "Never Saw Him Again." The track elevates towards a shimmering apex of static and percussion before organ drone yields to signature halcyon flutters. As with much of Lattimore's work, the track titles are telling; "Baltic Birch" is a somber windswept march that sways gracefully out of step, a remembrance of a recent trip to Latvia where she was struck by the abandoned resort towns along the Baltic Sea. "Hello From The Edge of The Earth" is an earnest reflection of Lattimore's love of the natural world, recognising the thresholds of varying terrains. 'Hundreds Of Days' is out now on Ghostly International. Mary also writes harp parts for songs and recordings, performing and recording with such great artists as Meg Baird, Thurston Moore, Sharon Van Etten, Jarvis Cocker, Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Ed Askew and Fursaxa. https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/
LUCINDA CHUA is a London-based singer-songwriter whose had a very productive year. The gifted cellist was a member of FKA Twigs’ live band, composed a Tchaikovsky-inspired score for a Russian fashion documentary, and has fostered a wide-ranging community of collaborators from her city’s diverse indie scene—among them Westerman, Ben Vince, and Laura Misch. These wildly different projects show the breadth of the artist’s interests, unified by Chua’s subtle chamber pop touch. Chua’s mode isn’t vigor: her songs are understated and somber, the energy so subdued it’s practically somnolent. Chua used to tour long ago with Stars of the Lid, and indeed that ambient band’s mournful, super-delicate style offers a clear idea of how Chua approaches her music, she was also a member of Felix on kranky records too. There is an unflappable calm present in all of Chua’s work, and on the quiet and intensely-felt recent single, ‘Somebody Who’, she is breaking out on her own.
https://soundcloud.com/lucindachua
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