The only car that can even begin to fit Mary Lattimore’s 47-string Lyon and Healy harp is a vintage Volvo Station Wagon, with the the back seats folded all the way down. It’s a snug fit, the harp hogging all of the car’s square footage, leaving space for only one other passenger. Before she was collaborating with a legendary laundry list of artists (Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore, Jarvis Cocker, and Arcade Fire to name a few) she ferried the instrument to and from the odd gig, usually weddings, playing by herself, and leaving by herself. The experience of travelling, practicing, and performing with the harp is an undeniably solitary one. And intimate doesn't feel like it does a good enough job of describing this relationship. Lattimore’s harp is more than just the wellspring for her art and her livelihood, but a life companion.
In 2014 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship, so she and the harp decided to hitch up the station wagon and head out west. At the Dam is the travel journal of that meandering journey across the country, spread over 44 minutes and five songs. The album’s title was lifted from an essay in Joan Didion’s The White Album about the Hoover Dam. Lattimore tries her best to draw power from the staccato rhythms of Didion's sentences and the probing sensuality of her prose. While Lattimore never fully engenders that narcotic feeling of total surrender Didion felt on the 405, she comes close, rendering a landscape that is rich in memory and allusion.
The album was recorded mostly up and down the coast of Southern California from Santa Monica to Joshua Tree and also in Marfa, TX. All of the music was improvised, written in fragments, sculpted as the trip itself took shape. The opener, "Otis Walks Into the Woods" started in Marfa, after Lattimore learned that her family’s blind and elderly black labrador Otis wandered into the wilderness outside their home in North Carolina to pass away. His body was never recovered, and the song recreates the scene of Otis’s final walk through a daisy chain of slyly processed sounds.
"Otis" sets the table for the album’s first half, which is a meditation on mourning and lingering memories. With her harp as the sole interlocutor, it’s quite a feat that Lattimore draws out such specific and poignant themes. "Jimmy V," the track that follows "Otis" is dedicated to the late Jimmy Valvano, a charismatic basketball coach, famous for a life-affirming and courageous speech he gave at the 1993 ESPYs two months before his death. Somehow the tone of of these two songs is never wistful, the cloud of sizzles and pops that surround the harp are as familiar and therapeutic as an Alka-Seltzer pill being dropped into water. The grayness of mourning is colored in with the harp's dulcet sonic splatter.
At the Dam’s latter half is more concerned with explicit archiving—it’s obsessed with freezing transient or chance moments. "The Quiet at Night," "Jaxine Drive," and "Ferris Wheel, January" are environmental and diaristic, gentle accretions of sounds that bounce into each other, trail off into nooks and crannies, and bubble up towards unknown directions. Lattimore uses stray harp-string plucks to suggest the blips of a submarine’s radar throughout, a recurring touch that grounds the environment of these songs, giving shape to the world outside of the echo chamber Lattimore builds. Her sneaky ability to morph sounds and playfully off-kilter sensibility keeps the album from ever seeming fussy or needlessly ornate, always a risk with the harp.
The music plods at times, but that somehow doesn't feel like a problem. The slowness can feel like a blessing. As music critic Ben Ratliff has said, this kind of slowness "invites reciprocity: it makes the listener want to fill the spaces with his own content." The disjunctions and hiccups in the sound, a result of the dialogue between the harp and the digital effects, reminds me of converting old family VHS tapes to DVD, and how the degradation of analog technology coupled with the imperfection of digitization unexpectedly shifts how you remember those records. In some ways, Lattimore borrows from the same decaying spirit that defined William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops. On its face a seemingly modest project, At the Dam bursts with ambition and ideas, offering a meditation on the ever-evolving relationship Lattimore has to her instrument and the spaces she shares it with.
