Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 40:18 minutes | 360 MB | Genre: Electronic, Ambient
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ghostly International

Slowdive’s Neil Halstead supplies gauzy production for LA-based Harpist, Mary Lattimore’s latest suite of fairytale music for adults in suspended animation, casting her third album for Ghostly on a warm Gulf Stream of narrative melodies.

’Silver Ladders’ was inspired by Lattimore’s time spent with Halstead at his studio on an airfield near Newquay, and would appear to feel out a breezy flow of melodies that carry her Calfornian promise via mystic Cornish vistas and the Croatian islands she visited on her European jaunt. It’s all very idyllic and richly descriptive, with Lattimore’s glittering melodic touch outlining bucolic scenes absorbingly coloured with Halstead’s blushing, dreamlike production merging myriad shores into a sort of thumbed and salt stained holiday fantasy novel of an album for listeners who can’t get out there.

“At one of her festival appearances, Lattimore met Slowdive’s Neil Halstead: “A friend introduced us because she knew how big of a fan I was and Neil and I had a little chat… The next day, I just thought maybe he’d be into producing my next record.” He was. Lattimore traditionally records her albums holed up by herself, so the addition of Halstead’s touches as a producer and collaborator leave a profound trace. “I flew on a little plane to Newquay in Cornwall where he lives with his lovely partner Ingrid and their baby. I didn’t know what his studio was like, he’d never recorded a harp, but somehow it really worked.”

Recorded over nine days at Halstead’s studio stationed on an old airfield, Silver Ladders finds Lattimore exercising command and restraint. Her signature style is refined, the sprawling layers of harp reigned in and accented by flourishes of low end synth and Halstead’s guitar. The music can feel ominous but not by compromising vivid wonder, like oceanic overtones that shift with the tides. This material is colored by specific memories for Lattimore; “Neil has this poster of a surfer in his studio and I’d look at it each day, looking at the sunlight glinting on the dark wave. In these songs I like the contrast between the dark lows and the glittering highs. The gloom and the glimmer, the opposites, a lively surfing town in the winter turned kinda rainy and empty and quiet.”

Lattimore and Halstead reformed three existing demos and improvised the remaining four songs. Among the batch she brought with her, the title track recalls a trip she took to Stari Grad, Croatia on the island of Hvar. “I spent some days there just swimming in the bay, silver ladders right into the sea.” The image stuck with her when she found herself performing at a cliffside wedding overlooking the Pacific. “Before anyone showed up, I had time to set up and play and this song came to me, ‘Silver Ladders (to the sea)’, so I made a little recording on my phone to remember it.” This sketch expanded; a delicately glittering harp melody comes over the horizon, swelling and rolling towards the shore on ebbs of synth and refractory delay.

These songs are clearly tales, and yet Silver Ladders is open to interpretation. Her memories — “the Cornish landscape, the hotel from the movie The Witches, the cream tea, winning the pub quiz, the Sunday Roast, the ghosts of all of the surfers who had died in the wild waves, the night walks to the top of the hill to see the moon shining on the water…” — shine through these works without defining them. In a way, much like the sea, or the sky, they belong to everyone. Such is the beauty of her craft, which stands here in unprecedented company and clarity, the confidence of an artist in full.”

Tracklist:
1-01. Mary Lattimore – Pine Trees (03:20)
1-02. Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders (03:45)
1-03. Mary Lattimore – Til a Mermaid Drags You Under (10:26)
1-04. Mary Lattimore – Sometimes He’s in My Dreams (03:46)
1-05. Mary Lattimore – Chop on the Climbout (05:57)
1-06. Mary Lattimore – Don’t Look (08:03)
1-07. Mary Lattimore – Thirty Tulips (04:58)

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