Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick: Live at Le Gesù

Nothing too intense, no exclamations, no imposing - perhaps what’s great about this music is its own predictability. You know it will be speaking beauty, and that it will hold you somewhere. And perhaps, that’s just as much as you were needing.

“Tragic Magic” has been sounding between my ears for a while now in a loop, in multiple lights. Experiencing it live was just as shimmering and comforting - I just wished I had closed my eyes before “Melted Moon” closing the set; it’s the kind of music to let yourself melt to/with.

This so evident and seemingly inevitable collaboration came about by invitation of the Philharmonie de Paris in the beginning of 2025, which gave the artists access to the instrument collection of the Musée de la Musique. The album was recorded in 9 days, during the fires in Los Angeles where both artists are based.

“Perpetual Adoration” opens the set, softly plucking the silence away and the light in, a calling from an ethereal home. There’s a feeling of levitation from the start, a very minimal effort just enough to ease whatever that might be feeling a little heavier. And there is still excitement, but one that is rather evoked by the curiosity in this coalescence - the duo performs “Oh, Memory” from Barwick’s latest solo album “Healing is a Miracle”, a soaring track featuring Lattimore’s harp strings. “It feels like floating” from “Hundreds of Days” by the latter was also performed later - I guess we couldn’t pass around this one (thankfully).

Easy to get lost in the hovering sounds and some evocative memories, Barwick and Lattimore take us into “Tragic Magic” with such stillness, giving us the backstories of many tracks as we go through the night together. They tell us about “Four Sleeping Princesses”, which refers to the instruments they played from the Musée de la Musique, like they were waking up sleeping instruments; and “Temple of the Winds” written for them by Roger Eno after they played a show together in Melbourne; or even the cover of Vangeli’s “Rachel’s Song”, which included recordings of the first rains in LA after the fires.

This collaboration doesn’t feel fresh or new because it simply works flawlessly - the bond is there, the presence, this mixture of darkness and light in both the musicians’ work. Both their separate musics serve us a non evasive beauty, a melancholic hope, the softest blanket to soothe our anxious nights. We’ve all been wondering just why it hasn’t happened before, although it feels like it has.