Unless you’re a liner notes sleuth with a propensity for a certain strain of East Coast indie rock or abstruse folk exploration, the names Mary Lattimore and Jeff Zeigler may not be familiar. In the last five years, the Philadelphia instrumentalists have become indispensible facilitators for other people’s music—the multi-instrumentalist Ziegler as a producer and touring sound engineer for bands like the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile and the Violators, and Purling Hiss, the harpist Lattimore as accompanist for and improviser with a litany of rock musicians such as Thurston Moore, Sharon Van Etten, and Meg Baird. Their individual orbits have often overlapped, too: Lattimore, for instance, played on Smoke Ring for My Halo, the Vile album that Zeigler, in part, recorded. They’ve also led their own respective recording projects, with Zeigler even helming the sessions for Lattimore’s splendid 2013 solo debut, The Withdrawing Room.
Still, Lattimore and Zeigler have built their principal reputations as members of supporting casts—necessary, if not necessarily noticed—but Slant of Light represents the duo’s cautious move into their own distinct territory. Lattimore plucks, scrapes, and slaps her harp, running its sounds through a loop station that not only repeats her patterns but occasionally gives them a prismatic kind of echo, as though you’re watching a picture fade one color at the time. Zeigler routes an assortment of synthesizers, guitars, and melodicas through a small army of effect pedals. Inspired by their work on a live score for the 1968 French film Le Révélateur in Texas’ Marfa Ballroom, Slant of Light consists of four improvisations that are surprisingly broad in focus given the duo’s limited, idiosyncratic instrumentation. They shift between new age gloamings and atonal excursions, phosphorescent crescendos and needlepoint delicacy. “Echo Sounder”, the record’s moment of complete triumph, funnels all of those approaches into one beautiful climb. Zeigler shapes an enormous, swelling hum that still leaves room for Lattimore at the top; she plays patterns and pauses, allowing his electronic whirrs to slip through the rests like a warm breeze. It’s light but not thin, distant but not unfamiliar, engrossing but not all-consuming.
To that last end, Slant of Light benefits from Lattimore and Zeigler’s respective pasts, as their ancillary work seems to have fostered a degree of modesty in their step toward the spotlight. Slant of Light is a slight record, its four tracks just breaking the 30-minute mark; each piece suggests a single statement, meant to express one idea before moving on to the next one. Lattimore’s Lyon and Healy harp has 47 strings, but there's never the sense that she’s trying to show you that she knows what to do with them or the pedals they power. “The White Balloon” is a duet between Lattimore’s high-floating harp melody and Zeigler’s more mid-range guitar, which acts as a terrestrial tether to the bed of electric noise at the bottom of the track. For three minutes, they float with one another, dipping and diving through a ballet just above the din—and then they fade away, adding allure through brevity rather than overstaying their welcome.
Even the album's 12-minute finale, “Tomorrow is a Million”, feels brief. Together, Lattimore and Ziegler twist through beds of soft noise, with scraped and popped harp strings and splintered guitar notes clustering into alien whorls of anti-melodies. The pair’s playing is busy but not restless, moving more in mutual sympathy than selfishness. By track’s end, it’s hard not to wish it didn’t keep going, so you could see where all these quick runs and instant redirections might go if there were no limit. Slant of Light, then, succeeds on the level of the best improvisations. These pieces pry the audience’s eyes off the clock without taking advantage of that surrender, and perhaps that’s the valuable side effect of spending so much time learning how the music of others work—what’s too much, what’s too little, what’s just right. Slant of Light is a short, humble offering of the latter.
