Offset In The Shadow by Russell E.L. Butler

HTRK’s Psychic 9-5 Club

Information (2019)

LUSINE // SLUR [SERIAL HODGEPODGE, 2004]

Jacaszek ‎– Glimmer. 2011 : Ghostly International.

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Forgotten Mixes

chillin' your life away

Claviq-Russian Goddess 00:00

Boards of Canada-Bocuma 02:44

Clark-Com Touch 03:56

Kiln-“Tigertail” 07:40

Noyce-Haze 14:26

Kodomo-Concept 16 17:22

Joey Fehrenbach-Underwander (little people remix) 26:39

Boards of Canada-Whitewater 30:07

Citymouth-Holodecker 35:48

Aphex Twin-Alberto Balsam 38:29

Shigeto-Brown Eyed Girl 42:45

Lone-Banyan drive 45:46

Arms and Sleepers-Helvetica 47:54

Jagan Mai-Envy 52:58

Prefuse 73-Five Minutes Away 56:55

Summer Glass (2023)

Ghostly International

Come To Me / The Lost Tracks 3

@ghostly : Productivity Playlist

@applemusic: https://apple.co/2GxmPt4

@spotify : https://spoti.fi/2RnCD7d

Mary Lattimore feat. Meg Baird and Walt McClements - "And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me"

Photo by Rachael Pony Cassells

As time sweeps us all into the inevitable void, then maybe at least the music of Mary Lattimore can memorialize those moments which we lived for ages to come once we are gone. The Los Angeles-based experimental composer's music is rife with its own kind of mysticism to do so purely by way of what its sounds evokes. As her 2020 album, Silver Ladders, dipped its toes into existential oceans and the vast of the cosmos, "And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me" -- the first single from her forthcoming effort, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada -- provides a comforting sensation that in spite of the whelming nature of a never-ending timeline versus our own limited nature, those memories we create can be encapsulated in reveries like this. The listen hollows itself in tenderness where celestial strings, synths, and a voice from the possible other side of the light which she, alongside multi-instrumentalists Meg Baird and Walt McClements, breathe into being harness a warmth from within the conscious. Even if everything eventually changes and is gone, hopefully the moments Lattimore's wingspan reaches out keeps them safe beneath them.

Directed by: Rachael Pony Cassells

Mary Lattimore's Goodbye, Hotel Arkada will be released October 6th on Ghostly International.

Mary Lattimore — Goodbye Hotel Arkada (Ghostly)

Photo by Daniel Boczarski

The late poet Richard Hugo, in his slim essay collection The Triggering Town, presents a line — “That silo, filled with chorus girls and grain” — then asks us to “notice the word ‘that.’” With just this one word, we are on the scene with the poet, who is pointing at something; something palpable, something with a discernible, shape, setting, and surface. Not a silo, but that one. Even if you don’t know where precisely the poet has taken you, you know it is somewhere — and that, per Hugo, “is a source of stability” and earns the poet the authority to “indulge [their] flights” into the extraordinary. The harpist and composer Mary Lattimore’s latest album, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, performs a similar trick. The certainty in her playing and the narrative clarity of her voice as an instrumentalist, composer, and weaver of sound convey a comparable authority and evoke the same sense of that, of somewhere —  even if that somewhere lives only in the fragments of memories or the specters of dreams. Like Hugo’s poet, she points, dropping us into scenes that we believe and recognize, whether they’re real or imagined. Lattimore, like a great poet, opens a window in each song for the listener to take flights of their own.

Unlike the solitary poet that illustrates Hugo’s advice, though, Lattimore is an accomplished and frequent collaborator. She has found common cause with musicians across a wide sonic spectrum. In previous full lengths, she has mixed her harp’s erudition with artists as diverse as Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan, guitar explorer Paul Sukeena, and folk powerhouse Meg Baird,  also featured here, among many others. Her experience melding the talents of disparate performers with her own comes alive on Goodbye, Hotel Arkada. While none of the six featured artists are credited on more than one track, the album has the feel of an ensemble cast. Their contributions are not just backing but lend drama and tension. This is storytelling music, complete with varied perspectives and nuanced characters.

“Arrivederci,” track two, features ex-The Cure drummer and keyboardist, Lol Tolhurst. His synthesizer, wistful and a little chilly, and Lattimore’s harp are in conversation: positing, responding and giving way. This is a duet, a dramatic dialogue, and Tolhurst is a formidable interlocutor. He starts brightly, his chords flowing and pliant, until, after a long passage from Lattimore, which sees her begin to play with greater determination, he rejoins with scratchy, persistent bass pulses. Tolhurst’s character eventually resorts to volume over reasoning. But, rather than be crushed under the weight of the bass, Lattimore continues to play with sparkling emphasis, adding more flourish, and, apparently, getting her point across, perhaps, per the title, saying goodbye for now, as Tolhurst’s keyboard lines return to their bright, ethereal beginnings.

If “Arrivederci” was a dialogue, a plot’s catalytic disagreement, then the following track, “Blender in a Blender,” featuring the guitarist and composer Roy Montgomery, is a Greek chorus zooming out to describe a ravaged world in flux, filling in macro, expository details as the characters continue on below. The song swoops and builds for almost five minutes as ominous keyboards and somber strings bear witness to the landscape, eventually fading to a contemplative silence, until an epochal torrent of keys storms back in from some shadowcast mountain range. It is martial, a threatening, destructive surge of sound, but soon it too is gone. The echoing, driving style is pure Montgomery and immediately recalls, in pace and rhythm, the tense, controlled waves of guitar from his 1996 album, Temple IV, though without quite the extremity of those reeling provocations. On an album that so often and ably shows a nuanced darkness underneath beauty, “Blender in a Blender,” given Montgomery’s presence, feels like a missed opportunity to escalate towards something more visceral.

While most of Goodbye, Hotel Arkada’s 42 minutes are spent in the company of Lattimore and at least one other musician, for a two song stretch, starting with the appropriately named “Music for Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow” and the somehow even more appropriately named “Horses, Glossy on the Hill,” Lattimore is showcased alone. Both have their moments: “Music…” finds a calm, evocative fullness in the trio of twinkling harp, bright but enveloping synths, and Lattimore’s textural breath, but it’s ”Horses…” that’s the standout performance, perhaps the most theatrical piece on a very theatrical album. It starts with knocks that can be nothing but the hooves of the eponymous horses, soon joined by Lattimore’s stuttering harp, which plinks just out of step, struggling but steady, just able to keep pace with the cavalcade. The line finds its stride in a passage of bright picking and strumming that’s ukulele-like in its taut simplicity. The climax is a stream of consciousness: echos and reverb, a blossoming, articulate medley of sound that loses none of its heft or form in the rush. While Lattimore’s effects pedals are a hallmark of her work and present throughout the album, “Horses, Glossy on the Hill,” stands out on Goodbye, Hotel Arkada for the vigor and intricacy with which she applies them, and for the complete vision she’s capable of conjuring in a soliloquy.

Delightful and inventive as Lattimore is on her own, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada is still most remarkable for its collective efforts. In the opening track, “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me,” the accordionist Walt McClements’ nuanced drone and Baird’s articulate, wordless vocals, like Tolhurst’s keys, seem to inspire a greater tenacity in Lattimore’s playing, glissandi grow more insistent and her riffs more oratorial. In the closing track, “Yesterday’s Parties,” too, the presence of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell vocals and Samara Lubelski’s luminous violin create a lovely, highly reflective fog that Lattimore’s playing reflects from, vibrant and beautiful into a controlled squall at the end. A Bandcamp supporter of Lattimore’s wrote, about her work with the drone group GROWING, that the music “highlights each participant’s strengths while bringing forth something new and wondrous.” This is also an apt description of Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, an album that, without lyrics, tells its stories with many voices and in a poetry that feels tangible, even as it transforms in front of us, catching more light in its sound as it blooms.

Alex Johnson

Julie Byrne Album Review: The Greater Wings

(Ghostly International)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Albums billed as being shaped by grief often don't follow linear rules, or at least a perfect pipeline of death to grief to songwriting. Famously, when Jeff Tweedy sang, "Tall buildings shake / Voices escape singing sad sad songs," on "Jesus Etc.", released in 2002, many listeners thought the line to be about 9/11, even though Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was finished before the attacks. More recently, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Skeleton Tree hit shelves after his son Arthur tragically died from a fall; during its recording sessions, Cave amended many of the album's lyrics, which had been initially written by the time his son passed away, but to this day we don't know exactly what changed. On the title track to singer-songwriter Julie Byrne's new album The Greater Wings, she declares she will "name my grief to let it sing," rendering that grief a living, breathing entity, almost a character in the album. Halfway through the making of the record, Byrne's creative partner Eric Littmann suddenly passed away. After shelving it for six months, Byrne completed the album with producer Alex Somers, her first time in a conventional recording studio. The result is a stunning canvas of reflection on things that are no longer for this world, from people to relationships, filtered through Byrne's blue-colored glasses.

Really, a more apt timeline for comparison to The Greater Wings is Bell Witch's Mirror Reaper, an album that acts as a tribute to a former member while including documents of their physical presence, more living artifact than ghost. On Mirror Reaper, it was the late Adrian Guerra's voice; here, Littmann's synthesizers shine throughout the record, like his arpeggios harmonizing with Marilu Donovan's harp on "Summer Glass" and his wobbly instrumentation on "Conversation Is A Flowstate". To see how Byrne and Somers owned the material from there is breathtaking. It's hard to remember that before her previous record, Not Even Happiness, Byrne was a DIY folk singer. That album's glassy closing track "I Live Now As A Singer" not only informed The Greater Wings' expanded aesthetic, but it's proven to be a total turning point in Byrne's career. The production flourishes and additional instrumentation on The Greater Wings are sometimes subtle, but they move mountains. Synthesizers shimmer alongside acoustic guitar on the title track. Somers' backing vocals on "Portrait Of A Clear Day" nestle among Byrne's lead vocal turn, Donovan's harp, and Jake Falby's strings. "I get so nostalgic for you sometimes," Byrne sings, her hazy memories perfectly contrasting the crispness of the music.

In fact, contrast is a defining feature of The Greater Wings. On emotional centerpiece "Summer Glass", Byrne's words consist of recollections of specific moments in time ("You lit my joint with the end of your cigarette," "The tattoo you gave me lying in bed"), all-encompassing devotionals ("You are the family that I chose"), and broad therapeutic goals ("I want to be whole enough to risk again"). Even the instrumental "Summer's End" showcases the tactility of Donovan's harp against the atmospheric wash of the synthesizers and echoing bells. And Somers added textures to Littman's initial work on "Conversation Is A Flowstate", making it a harmonic, yet percussive and conversational push-pull as Byrne recites affirmations: "Permission to feel it, it's alright / Permission to grieve, it is alright / Healing can be heartbreaking, it's alright."

Making yourself "whole," or as close to it as possible, is not an easy or definite process, in life or in music. Even on a song like "Flare", Byrne goes through multiple so-called "stages of grief," including bargaining and acceptance, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's modular synth buoying her words. The Greater Wings, then, is as close to universal art as it gets, a treatise on the human penchant for imperfection, for being naturally unable to fully appreciate something while it's there. "I tell you now what for so long I did not say / That if I have no right to want you / I want you anyway," Byrne sings with smoky heartbreak on "Lightning Comes Up From The Ground", a title that makes literal what happens when an event in your life shakes you to your core: It turns your world upside-down.

Mary Lattimore’s Goodbye, Hotel Arkada

Dissolvi (2018)

GALCHER LUSTWERK // FATE [LUSTWERK II, JUN 2023]

Willits + Sakamoto ‎– Ancient Future. 2012 : Ghostly International.

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