Album Review: Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders


Silver Ladders




When applied musically, the term ambient has (similarly to metal) ceased to have any real meaning after being used as a catch-all across hundreds of genres, niches and micro-scenes.

Mary Lattimore is an L.A.-based harpist who creates soundscapes which for some are to be enjoyed as vessels in which to escape reality, Silver Ladders following 2018’s Hundreds Of Days. Lattimore usually works alone at home, but this time there was other latent magic at work. After being introduced to Slowdive’s Neil Halstead by a mutual friend, the two hit it off to such an extent that she asked him to produce her next record.

Halstead agreed, and the two took up residency in his Cornish studio, working together in a part of Britain where it’s sometimes easy to feel displacement from the vagaries of modern life.

The obvious reference point when thinking of a harpist would be freak-folker Joanna Newsom. But Lattimore doesn’t sing, instead the angelic undulations and dotted reference points are left to interpretation, a process which befits an instrument with a powerful and nuanced voice of its own.

The duo approached the recording process with open minds, building on a handful of experimental demos and improvising the rest. The underlying principal was evocation, the title-track built up from experiences whilst swimming on holiday in Croatia, while Don’t Look references a drowning tragedy, the desultory notes struggling to take flight in its stood-still aftermath. Halstead sagely adds little more than occasional guitar or a subtle, droning synth to these elegies as if not wanting to disturb their equilibrium.

This is then far away from background notes with which to get into the Lotus position. Sliver Ladders’ inspirations are usually darker aspects of the human condition, or the ghosts of its less refined past: Chop On The Climb Out is derived from the darkly sensual thrill of being on a plane during turbulence, the flimsy tin of people versus nature, the pooled dirges a lost passenger staring out of the window with ten thousand metres of nothing below them to the surface of an uncaring earth.

Anchoring is mercifully difficult in something so nebulous, but if anything in the swirl is a centre, the near eleven minutes of ‘Til A Mermaid Drags You Under comprises it. The peril of being abducted by a mythical creature goes against reason, against logic, but as the ominous guitar phrases darken and the shadows fill with premonitions coming true, the north Atlantic waves roll in on top, dragging everything down with them.

With it goes all semblance of being able to call Mary Lattimore’s music ‘ambient’. It just is, melodious alchemies, interlocking trills and time always escaping from our grasp making it so captivating.



Words, after all, are very overrated.

8/10

Andy Peterson


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