Album Review: New Rain Duets by Mary Lattimore/Mac McCaughan

Harpist Mary Lattimore's solo work stands in a class by itself, merging a patient approach to experimental ambient sounds with a mastery of her majestic instrument. When she moved away from regular work as a session player on records for friends like Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore, and Meg Baird to focus on making her own albums, a world of luminous and endlessly beautiful sounds started forming. At first glance, it may seem strange to pair Lattimore's gentle if tumultuous playing with Mac McCaughan, best known for his role in the long-running buzzy punk melodists Superchunk.

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In the Atacama Desert in Chile grows a flowering plant known as the llareta. Verdant and cresting, it is a plant that produces a beautiful unease — one rooted in the knowledge that a being as alien and singular as this one is growing, now, in the world we call ours.   New Rain Duets, the collaborative LP between Mary Lattimore and Mac McCaughan is, in many ways, quite like the llerta that its album art invokes: a wholly organic being streaked with shades of the magical.   At first glance, Mary Lattimore and Mac McCaughan might ….

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Photo by PJ Sykes New Rain Duets by Mary Lattimore & Mac McCaughan Four tracks, two players, one live performance. There's something elemental about this performance, but it doesn't end up as anything simple, predictable or mundane. Synthesizer and sampling by Mac McCaughan and harp and effects by Mary Lattimore could easily slip into new age tropes.

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