Bleep

On her new LP Silver Ladders, harpist and composer Mary Lattimore has created a set of modern ambient pieces which are at once vivid and dreamlike. Lattimore has long been an artist who is able to balance the harp’s heavenly associations with both the psychedelic qualities of new-age/fourth world composition and an earthiness drawn from folk music. Silver Ladders finds her achieving this synthesis once again, the tracks within shimmering hypnotically.

Throughout Silver Ladders, Lattimore uses studio effects and additional instrumentation to give extra body to her harpscapes. Neil Halstead produces the album, and the widescreen sounds that Halstead has conjured up throughout the years as a member of Slowdive certainly inform the arrangements here. Several numbers see Lattimore’s harp treated with delay and reverb effects, and throughout the LP we find drones, humming synth bass tones and some considered guitar work from Halstead rounding out the textures. When granular atmospherics are introduced, as they are on ‘Chop On The Climbout’, Lattimore’s music achieves the balance of home comfort and cosmic energy that is depicted in Silver Ladders’ cover artwork. That said, for all that the additional production adds to Silver Ladders, Lattimore’s harp remains at the centre of the record. Her playing delights throughout Silver Ladders, ranging from impressionistic plucked passages to trilling runs.

Silver Ladders is the latest set of harp-based ambient soundscapes offered up by the one and only Mary Lattimore.