I am listening to this album from what can only be described as a sea room on the furthest edge of Cape Cornwall in mid-December where it feels as if the horizon is tipping toward you. As the dawn begins to break, I press play while a beacon flashes in the distance like a small candle. It might be the sea air, but as the track ‘Perpetual Adoration’ glides into the room, Lattimore’s harp seems to pluck out the icy strokes of the waves and Julianna Barwick’s voice rises like a wraith from the deep. I am immediately stilled. Elemental forces collide on this album, raising each other up. I am listening from the last house on this cliffside. It rumbles with the force of the wind and waves in these stormy wintery days, creating a strange and apt accompaniment to this hypnotic album.
Tragic Magic is a confluence of currents. There is plenty of work out there that feels out of tune with the natural world, creating a synthetic parody of thinly composed parts. This album, however, feels like it traverses both the physical and metaphysical, space and time, resulting in fleeting spectrums of colour that were never meant to last, but to travel through.
A pendulum ticks between the skin of two worlds in ‘Melted Moon’. Like the peak of a coastal promontory, the track straddles two currents, two lives, twisting and winding. Each creative filament feels fully charged, dancing across tides of mercurial water.
Lattimore’s harp echoes and elevates a time that harks back to a more distant past and Barwick’s synths and siren-calls keeps us in the glass-edged moment. On ‘Stardust’, this back and forth is nuanced and keenly sophisticated. It engenders consideration of what lies between. This is what collaborative work can sound like when all the doors are open to call and response.
I come away feeling Tragic Magic embodies a puckish energy: the blurring of reality and dreams, the intrinsic nature of complexity and depth in relationships, and what resides in our coralline psyches. ‘Temple Of The Winds’ is both dreamlike and part trickster. The ear drifts between the artists interplay in a mesmeric dance, neither player dominating the other.
As the sun rises over the headland beckoning night to burn off its embers, the flickering of this album’s twin flames endure, speaking captivatingly of the in-between.
