Tragic Magic finds Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore, two of contemporary ambient and experimental music’s most celebrated composers, synthesizing their respective crafts within the walls of Philharmonie de Paris, given access to the extraordinary instrument collection of the Musée de la Musique in partnership with the French label InFiné.
The collaborative album, co-produced by Trevor Spencer (Fleet Foxes, Beach House), came together in just nine days, a testament to the “musical telepathy,” as Barwick puts it, that has developed between the two artists over the years, traveling the world as friends and tourmates. Sessions crossed improvisation with loose ideas they arrived in Paris with from Los Angeles, shortly after the January 2025 wildfires. Still reeling for their community, the two artists embraced a divine setting, feeling deeply cared for by their hosts and overwhelmed by the beauty and history at their fingertips. Lattimore selected three harps tracing the evolution of the instrument from 1728 to 1873, and Barwick chose several analog synthesizers that have shaped decades of exploratory music, including the Roland JUPITER and Sequential Circuits PROPHET-5, among other treasures. Together in freeform dialogue, voice and instrument, they render a meditation on tragedy, wonder, and the restorative power of shared experience. Tragic Magic features seven immersive, evocative songs guided by the human spirit. Intimate, grounded in friendship, earthly yet cosmic, and part of a greater continuum, speaking to the solace of artistry that’s lifted us for generations.
“We were so lucky to have access to this experience. There was a lot of reverence, working with people with such warmth and enthusiasm, bringing these instruments into a modern context, literally taken off the shelves of the museum,” says Lattimore. “We wanted to honor the past while making music that we feel is a true expression of ourselves,” Barwick adds. “People ask, how was Paris? I’m like, it was perfect. It was like everything just aligned.”
The duo, often joined by Spencer, filled their free time in the city, sharing meals and seeing various museums and landmarks, each encounter leaving an impression on the next day’s session. For the album opener, “Perpetual Adoration”, the group channels an immense volume of emotion drawn from a visit to the Basilica of Sacré Cœur de Montmartre. One rainy night, they saw a sign outside the cathedral labeled “ADORATION PERPÉTUELLE” and entered the reverberant space where a nun was singing above organ drones during Sunday Mass. The resulting performance nods both to the moment and the stories within these instruments. The gilded, ornate Érard double-movement harp (France, 1873), the first modern pedal harp, remains open for innovation here. Barwick wields the revolutionary PROPHET-5, introduced in 1978 as the world’s first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizer. Her skyward synth and vocal lines ascend alongside Lattimore’s tender harp strums for a stunning, slow-building entry into the set.
“The Four Sleeping Princesses” is named after a quip from InFiné’s Alexandre Cazac as Lattimore surveyed the harp collection. “He has a very poetic sensibility, and he said something to us about, like, ‘oh, you’re gonna wake up the sleeping princesses’ in the museum.” The image stuck with them as the group outlined a piece that leaps from subtle slumber to a striking exhale of sighs and strings.
“Temple Of The Winds” was written by Roger Eno following an impromptu lunch with Barwick and Lattimore in 2019, before the artists all shared a stage in Melbourne. Lattimore explains, “We parted ways, he went off to a park, and wrote us a piece with no keyboard or anything, just from his mind. Pencil and staff paper. For voice and harp.” Barwick adds, “He’s a special musician…I could never do that in 10 million years.” To record, they opted for the oldest harp in the archive, the Jacob Hochbrücker harp (Germany, 1728). “It’s priceless,” says Lattimore. “And very delicate and light, it just barely balances on your shoulder.” Comprised mainly of voice and the ancient, metallic-sounding harp, with bass chord drones from a Steinway grand piano, it’s the shortest song on the album, elegant, stark, and subdued.“It may sound the simplest, but it was really hard to get the bass chords right.” Barwick remembers asking, “Mary, did you hear? I tried to make my voice like the wind.”
Midway through the recording week, the trio went to a James Turrell exhibit. Spencer had never experienced Turrell’s light installations before, and seeing his wonder reminded Lattimore of her first encounter and the 2013 New Yorker article that drew her there. “It said something about ravishing [‘one ravishing payoff after another: breathable beauty’] and the effect of creating a haze with no haze.” In 2021, Barwick and Lattimore opened Turrell’s Skyspace at Mass MoCA, a full circle occurrence that came back around in Paris. Their collective immersion into the light that afternoon is felt in “Haze With No Haze”, a serene track stacked with vocal harmonies and cyclical strums to entrancing effect.
Their Vangelis cover (Blade Runner, 1982), “Rachel’s Song”, builds on an arrangement first introduced at Making Time ∞ in Philadelphia in 2023 and reprised at a recent Zebulon residency in Los Angeles. For the album version, they assembled a dream list of gear, including the Erard single movement harp (1799). The track opens in slowed-down rainfall, recorded by Lattimore and Barwick’s dear friend and visual collaborator Rachael Cassells, who had texted to tell her it was raining in LA, the first rain after the fires. A blinking tone begins as Barwick’s singular voice takes hold in operatic strides, helixing with the harp in the final passage, a rare and powerful display of cathartic experimentation, “a little freak show” as they lovingly call it. The sequence sets up “Stardust”, perhaps their purest exercise in universe-building, complete with a Korg VC-10 Vocoder. Upon hearing the towering synth lines, Lattimore noted, “I just need to put millions of stars over it with the harps, you know, millions of glittering stars.” The new friend and museum curator Thierry Maniguet and Spencer tapped the tuning bells of the Pleyel chromatic harp (1900) to achieve the unique sound. A drum machine (the Akai MPC, chosen for its connection to The Cure) joins on the last pass, giving the vocoded delivery a pulsing counterpoint. The results are harmonic and immense, as if opening a portal to the heavens.
Throughout Tragic Magic, the artists locate something beyond themselves, a resonant feeling that everything cannot possibly be okay, but we hold on and find the beauty. Their means of processing life through music, of observing moments and working through emotions, of contributing what they can to the world, follow a lineage of creative expression and visionary invention represented by the very tools they used to realize this project.
The album ends beneath the “Melted Moon,” written in direct response to the fires. Barwick recalls packing up her life under the dark ash clouds, “What do I need for these trips, but also, what do we need if we can’t come back to this house?” Lattimore lends a refrain that loops and echoes in the eventide, a measure in which she plays above as Barwick, uncharacteristically free of effects, offers her lyrics in poignant clarity, both haunting and hopeful:
A winding ocean drive
A forest mountain high
A blaze like a volcano
A prayer for rain
At least let me find something, a ruin
At least finding hope again
Under the melted moon
The lights are all out
A strange taste in my mouth
You may never go home again
At least not the home you know