Gainer Mary Lattimore

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.

Through evocative, emotionally resonant music, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, the new LP from American harpist and composer Mary Lattimore, speaks not just for its beloved namesake — a hotel in Croatia facing renovation — but for a universal loss that is shared. Six sprawling pieces shaped by change; nothing will ever be the same, and here, the artist, evolving in synthesis, celebrates and mourns the tragedy and beauty of the ephemeral, all that is lived and lost to time. Documented and edited in uncharacteristically measured sessions over the course of two years, the material remains rooted in improvisation while glistening as the most refined and robust in Lattimore’s decade-long catalog. It finds her communing with friends, contemporaries, and longtime influences, in full stride yet slowing down to nurture songs in new ways. The cast includes Lol Tolhurst (The Cure), Meg Baird, Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Roy Montgomery, Samara Lubelski, and Walt McClements.

On this inclement collaborative mini-album, Mary Lattimore teams up with Weyes Blood's Walt McClements, who plays electronically-enhanced accordion against Lattimore's signature looped harp flourishes. Gorgeous stuff - one for fans of the West Coast new age scene, for sure.

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. The Los Angeles-based harpist 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.

"On our first album together, New Rain Duets (also recorded live), Mary and I were improvising but going in we had a basic structure and melodic idea laid out for each of the four parts. In the Spring of 2019 we booked a short tour to support the release of that record, but unlike every tour I've ever been a part of, we were not going to be playing songs from the album we were promoting. For me this was a terrifying idea, but ultimately liberating, as it meant that each show we were starting from a blank slate with no expectations except to (hopefully) make something beautiful. Mary and I talked about the need for this kind of feeling in music then, and I find it even more important now, one long year later."