Julianna Barwick is a composer, vocalist, and producer whose music has been featured in publications including The New York Times, NPR, Pitchfork (Best New Music), Loud & Quiet, and The Guardian. She has performed with artists including Yoko Ono, The Flaming Lips, and Phillip Glass. Her latest record, made in collaboration with Mary Lattimore, Tragic Magic, is out now.
Julianna Barwick is a composer, vocalist, and producer based in Brooklyn; Mary Lattimore is a harpist based in Los Angeles. On Friday, Julianna and Mary’s collaborative record, Tragic Magic, came out on InFiné. Ahead of the release, the two got on a Zoom call to catch up about its creation, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Julianna Barwick: Hi, Mary!
Mary Lattimore: Hi! Long time no see!
Julianna: Do you recognize this place?
Mary: Yes. The stood’.
Julianna: I’m hard at work, baby. Not really. How’d you spend your Thanksgiving, Mary?
Mary: Well, I am here in Newquay in the UK, which is a rainy and cold place, but usually it’s like a surf town in Cornwall. I’m recording with my friend Neil [Halstead] and his lovely partner Ingrid, and I told them that it was Thanksgiving and they were like, “We want to make you a Thanksgiving dinner!” So I went to their house after the recording day. I had, for the first time, something called a “nut loaf.” Have you ever had this before? It’s like a meatloaf or something, but it’s made with nuts and vegetables like celery, carrots, onions.
Julianna: So it’s like a vegan person’s delight, essentially.
Mary: Yeah, I think it’s vegan. So we had the nut loaf, we had some butternut squash, we had some Brussels sprouts, we had some potatoes. And then at the end of the night, the kids went to bed and Ingrid brought out three pints of ice cream of different flavors, and we grabbed our spoons and were just digging in. It was so fun. How was your Thanksgiving?
Julianna: It was really good. I made this cranberry… relish? It’s not really a sauce. It’s whole cranberries, pecans, orange zest, fresh orange juice. And you cook it on the stove top until the cranberries kind of start to burst. So good. And I saw, just on Instagram or something, a link to a pumpkin sheet cake with pecan topping, so I made that. It was almost like a crackly, sugary frosting that you pour over the hot cake, and then you put the pecans on. It’s making my mouth water to think about it.
Mary: It sounds so good. I would love that recipe. Not that I’m a big cook or baker or anything, but I feel like I can handle something like that…
Are you excited about our record?
Julianna: Yes.
Mary: Good.
Julianna: I am very excited. I literally yesterday was like, February, March… I couldn’t believe it was 10 months ago. Before we know it, it will have been a year since we were there in Paris at the Philharmonie in the Museum of Instruments, making our long-desired duo record, Tragic Magic. Can you believe it?
Mary: Time is crazy after the pandemic. It’s very hard to get a grip on the passing of time at this point.
Julianna: But the album comes out January 16, and we have a lot of touring coming up next year.
Mary: It’s gonna be fun. I like that our touring is a mixture of different kinds of venues. There’s festivals. I just saw that it was announced that in Amsterdam, we’re playing at a minimalist festival. When we opened for Floating Points those couple times, it was just fun to see where our music fits in with different genres. We can get kind of stretchy with that, not pigeonholed, which is really cool.
Julianna: Totally. The music that we made together for this record… I mean, I’ll speak for myself. I used to position my station when playing live so that a curtain of hair fell between my face and the audience, and then my music kind of was the same thing — loops and layers and wordless and a fog of sound. And this record is definitely an exercise in feeling very exposed. Which, I think when we made the record, that was kind of wanting to give homage to the sanctity of the experience in a way. Especially after our experience the first night. It felt like the experience called for putting aside my own… I don’t know if “habits” is the right word, but my own—
Mary: Personal style?
Julianna: A bit. I mean, I did have moments of looping and layering and stuff. But you were playing these hundreds-year-old harps. And I think for me, it called for a little bit more reverence in my voice, or writing lyrics and it not just being stuff I come up with on the spot that sounds like I’m talking in my sleep. I felt like honoring the once-in-a-lifetime experience with a unique approach to music-making, and not just doing like I do it when it’s my own solo stuff.
Mary: Yeah, I know what you’re saying. Yeah. I think it was also like, “OK, we’re here. We need to showcase these instruments.”
Julianna: Exactly.
Mary: I think in my mind, and probably in your mind too, it was like, “OK, because these instruments are so old, we want to make something that sounds timeless.” You don’t want it to sound like a 2025, 2026 record. Not too modern, like, “Let’s mess around with the computer.” We didn’t really fuck around with the computer. We wanted to really showcase the of instruments and have the record stand out of time a little bit.
Julianna: Yes.
Mary: And also including a Blade Runner cover that’s kind of retro futuristic. But it’s not necessarily like, “Let’s show off the gadgetry of 2025.”
Julianna: Exactly. And I think we kind of accomplished that.
Mary: Yeah. And it feels like we can recreate these songs in a live setting, even if we don’t have the actual instruments that we played in the museum. It feels like these songs can be translated onto our instruments that we own. It’s going to be fun.
Julianna: I’m really excited for when it clicks in and I don’t need my cheat sheets anymore.
Mary: Same. Not flailing around like, Oh, my god, did I start it wrong? How does this go? Is it the right tempo? Because sometimes you start and it maintains the tempo for the rest of the song, so you’re locked into that tempo. So I think when we get to the point where it’s not like, Oh, my god, did I start too fast? I think that’s going to feel good.
Julianna: Yeah, because you’re looping a lot of harp things. Maybe when we get into the flow of everything, we can figure out how to not have that burden on you. [Laughs.]
Mary: Yeah, but I do that with my own stuff too. I’m like, OK, I gotta start the right tempo or else if I start too fast my fingers are going to have to fly in the middle. It’s like having the inner heartbeat of your song memorized.
Julianna: Or if you make that first loop recording go too long, then it’s going to lag. But, you know, that’s what makes life exciting. Because you have to nail it, baby. [Laughs.]
Mary: Mine is only 14 seconds, and if you play it too slow and it’s longer than 14 seconds and it restarts, that’s embarrassing. You have to say, “Sorry guys, I need to start this the song over again.”
Julianna: I’ve seen you play hundreds of times and I’ve never seen you have to start over. Not once.
Mary: It’s happened!
Julianna: I’ve had to start over. I used to beat myself up, but then I saw James Blake do it at Green Man one year, and I was like, You know what? If this guy — who, every time I’ve seen James Blake, he’s just so classy and so together, so tight. Up to that point, I would literally cry after shows if I felt like I was feeding back or if I messed something up. And I just always remember that moment, because there were thousands of people watching, and he was just like, “Oh, no, that wasn’t good enough. I’m gonna try that one again.” He was just laughing and easy, and I was like, I need to chill. I don’t think I’ve cried after shows since.
Mary: I love it. I feel like that makes the audience like James Blake better; they feel closer to him because he is fine to show his mistakes. It’s a camaraderie, because you’re all having that same memory of that little blooper. I went to go see My Bloody Valentine two weeks ago, and it was really killer. It was in Dublin, at the huge arena there. It was flawless in my mind. But a few days before, I guess they had announced a secret show that was at a thousand cap venue, and I talked to a woman who went to that show, and she was like, “Yeah, it was cool because they kept stopping and restarting the songs.” I was like, “Woah, respect.” She’s a musician, too, and she was like, “You kind of got to see the bones, how the parts went together.” It was kind of like a secret view of how the songs were made.
Julianna: Totally. And I see that as a sign of respect to your audience as well. You want to give your audience the best that you can give, instead of just being like, Oh, that wasn’t a great one. Who cares?
Mary: Yeah, I like that. “We can do better than this. Let’s try this again and get this really good so you get the goosebumps like you’re supposed to.” Sometimes, though, I feel like I make mistakes in the loops subconsciously just so I can see how I can figure out how to get out of the mistakes. Not like it’s longer than 14 seconds — the math isn’t wrong — but some of the notes are a little bit strange or not the way I usually play it. And then I’m like, How am I going to layer this to where it sounds really beautiful after I played this?
Julianna: I’ve seen you do that before. Because as a fellow looping musician, that’s kind of the beauty of it. The reason why looping clicked for me 20 years ago is because it satisfied that spontaneity, and that love of spontaneity, and it’s what makes performing the same song 250 times interesting. Because you can kind of mess around with the loops and you can stretch it. You can do a little something different every single night if you wanted to.
Mary: It’s like a little wink to yourself. You’re like, How are you going to get yourself out of this one, Mary? The little devil on your shoulder.
Julianna: Yes… What else do we want to talk about? Maybe we can just briefly say that we’re celebrating 12, almost 13 years of friendship.
Mary: Crazy.
Julianna: We’ve done so many things together over the years, and we finally got to make our duo record together, and it’s really exciting.
Mary: I think it turned out really well. I’m really excited for people to hear it and see what people think and see if it makes people feel good.
Julianna: Yeah, I wonder too. All those times that, before this project came along, we’d play shows together and improvise, we would have people say, “You guys should make a record together.” And we were like, “We want to someday!” I’m wondering if it hits the spot…
Mary: Do you think those people are going to be like, “This was my idea. I told them that they should do this, and they did what I said.”
Julianna: [Laughs.] That’s fine. We’ll go with it.
Mary: I mean, it kind of was their idea. It was all their ideas. And it was our idea, too.
