Mary Lattimore and Mac McCaughan - New Rain Duets

March 22, 2019 - Three Lobed Recordings

Music is nature.

Before everyone gets hung up on that statement, and I get an influx of “I’m not naturally gifted at music,” “I can’t make anything musical,” “I’m tone deaf,” “I have no rhythm,” and “Does that make me an alien?”—hear me out, internet. Are you of the Earth? Do you feel attached to your collection of MP3 files? Do you have favorite streaming stations that make you feel hip when you put them on for your friends? Does listening bring you pleasure, even if only to accompany a morning jog, to get you through the workday, to keep you calm in times of crisis? Does music help you process emotions when a loved one passes away or breaks up with you? Then you might be nature too.

New Rain Duets is a new collaboration between Mary Lattimore and Mac McCaughan. It is unabashedly organic and as unpredictable as the sky. In case you had any doubts about its natural nature, the EP’s title gives it away, written like the New Age section of the chain record shops. But titles can be misleading, as can the organization of a department store. To move forward, we must drop the offensive stereotype about nature music invented by the music industry to understand customers in the New Age section—an old long skirt and a handmade quilted calico vest, some sort of weird cross between a hippie, a Halloween witch costume and a cat-lady. We must let go of the idea that nature and music about nature is only for a fringe in our population. 

The whole project reads like an entirely improvised live performance. Listening to Lattimore and McCaughan react to each other is fascinating. I feel like a fly on the wall of their practice space, watching a secret meet-cute where pure lyrical communication is occurring unadulterated by performative baggage. There are spontaneous moments of breathtaking beauty contrasted with moments of inharmony. 

I’ve been a fan of Mary Lattimore for some time now, and I continue to be astounded by the variety of sounds she can create with her harp. The harp in our collective imagination has the image of an indulgent instrument, something heavenly and soft for those who are cultured. Lattimore’s harp is a divergent story telling device with the diversity of a human voice and the drama of a caesura. McCaughan’s synthesizers are just as flexible—he uses them to the tone of each track, to build the space in which it exists, then he moves in and out of complementing and contrasting with Lattimore’s statements. Every once in a while, he throws a curveball into the room—an abrasive chime, a note that’s a half step off the melody, human voices, a scraping sound, a sample of a train screeching on the rails. The samples he uses to build texture are familiar and curated by someone who values the art of listening. But even with their familiarity, they are transformed by the context into something unrecognizable and undefined. Like a good abstract painting, I can’t quite place the shapes, which hooks me. I enter the vision with the desire to define and categorize my observation of it, and I find myself happily lost in the vision itself. 

Lattimore and McCaughan take a modern conceptual approach to describing the sublime of the natural world. Even though it’s not fair to compare composers across temporal space, The Planets and Water Music still inevitably come to my mind for comparison. New Rain Duets presents a fluid, more fleeting mystical landscape without the stodgy cultural baggage of Greek mythology and compositional perfection. I’m sure Holst and Handel would be jealous of the influential freedom afforded to the musicians of today, just as I’m sure Lattimore and McCaughan are grateful for their groundwork. ☔