Today, we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore.

Julianna is a composer, vocalist, and producer whose music is built almost entirely from layered, looped human voices. Mary is a harpist who has spent years pushing that instrument into a vast, exploratory realm.

In January 2025, the two flew to Paris just days after the LA wildfires tore through their community. There, they spent nine days recording with instruments pulled from a museum, including harps dating back to 1728 and vintage analog synthesizers. The result is Tragic Magic, out on InFiné, and it's one of the most talked-about records of the year so far.

Julianna and Mary just returned from Big Ears Festival and, in a few days, are heading back to Paris to perform these songs live with those same instruments. We caught them as they were preparing for the trip.

(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore's Tragic Magic)

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Dig Deeper

• Artist and Album:

Visit Julianna Barwick at juliannabarwick.com and follow her on Instagram and Facebook
Visit Mary Lattimore at marylattimore.net and follow her on Instagram and Facebook
Purchase Tragic Magic from InFiné, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice

• Recording Location:

Philharmonie de Paris — Musée de la Musique — the museum whose instrument collection made the album possible
Musée de la Musique collections database — searchable archive of the museum's historic instruments

• Collaborators:

Roger Eno — composer of "Temple of the Winds," written for voice and harp after a shared lunch with Barwick and Lattimore in Melbourne
Trevor Spencer — engineer, additional producer, and mixer on Tragic Magic; known for his work with Fleet Foxes and Beach House

• Instruments:

Jacob Hochbrücker — maker of the 1728 harp used for "Temple of the Winds"; one of the oldest instruments on the album
Érard harps — the French instrument maker whose 1799 and 1873 harps Mary Lattimore used throughout the sessions
Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 — the synthesizer Julianna Barwick chose; introduced in 1978 as the first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizer
Roland Jupiter-8 — the second synthesizer Barwick used; the "Jupiter" referenced throughout the episode
Korg VC-10 Vocoder — used by Barwick on "Stardust" and elsewhere on the album

• Visual Art — James Turrell:

James Turrell — the light artist whose work both Barwick and Lattimore cite as a significant influence
James Turrell: Into the Light at MASS MoCA — where Barwick and Lattimore opened Turrell's newest Skyspace, C.A.V.U.
Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima — permanent Turrell installations on the Japanese island Mary mentions visiting
James Turrell retrospective at the Guggenheim — the 2013 exhibition (Aten Reign) that first brought Mary to Turrell's work after reading a New Yorker review

• Previous InFiné / Musée de la Musique Collaborations:

InBach by Arandel (2020) — the first album in InFiné's Musée de la Musique series, featuring Baroque instruments
Saturn 63 by Seb Martel (2022) — the second album in the series; Tragic Magic is the third

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Dig into this episode's complete show notes at podcast.thetonearm.com

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