Tag Archives: Julianna Barwick

New music – Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore: Melting Moon (InFiné)

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adapted from the press release by Ben Hogwood

Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have formed a formidable duo to release a new album, Tragic Magic, due out on 16 January 2026 via InFiné. Today they release the new single Melted Moon, one of “seven immersive, evocative songs” that make up the album. The press release details how, “together in freeform dialogue, voice and instrument, Barwick and Lattimore render a meditation on tragedy, wonder, and the restorative power of shared experience.”

The story continues: “Co-produced by Trevor Spencer (Fleet Foxes, Beach House), Tragic Magic came together in just nine days, a testament to the “musical telepathy,” as Barwick puts it, that has developed between the two artists over the years traveling the world as friends and tourmates. Sessions crossed improvisation with loose ideas they arrived in Paris with from Los Angeles, shortly after the January 2025 wildfires while still reeling for their community.

Barwick and Lattimore were given access to the extraordinary instrument collection of the Philharmonie de Paris’ Musée de la Musique in partnership with InFiné. The two artists embraced a divine setting, overwhelmed by the beauty and history at their fingertips. Lattimore selected three harps tracing the evolution of the instrument from 1728 to 1873, and Barwick chose several analog synthesizers that have shaped decades of exploratory music, including the Roland JUPITER and Sequential Circuits PROPHET-5, among other treasures.

“We were so lucky to have access to this experience. There was a lot of reverence, working with people with such warmth and enthusiasm, bringing these instruments into a modern context, literally taken off the shelves of the museum,” says Lattimore. “We wanted to honor the past while making music that we feel is a true expression of ourselves,” Barwick adds.

Today’s release of Melted Moon is accompanied by a video of Barwick and Lattimore performing the song live. Directed and edited by Joel Kazuo Knoernschild, the performance was filmed at Lou Lou’s Jungle Room at the Lafayette Hotel in San Diego this past April.”

The first single, Perpetual Adoration, is followed by the album’s closing track Melted Moon, a direct response to the Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025. The bold strokes of Lattimore’s harp soften as a calming chord progression asserts itself, before Barwick’s seraphic vocal adds a beautiful counter melody.

Barwick recalls “packing up her life under the dark ash clouds, “What do I need for these trips, but also, what do we need if we can’t come back to this house?” Lattimore lends a harp refrain that loops and echoes in the eventide, a measure in which she plays above as Barwick, uncharacteristically free of effects, offers her lyrics in poignant clarity, both haunting and hopeful (“Under the melted moon / The lights are all out / A strange taste in my mouth / You may never go home again / At least not the home you know”).

The notion embodies Tragic Magic as a whole: two artists and friends processing life through music, observing moments and working through emotions, contributing what they can to the world, within a lineage of creative expression and visionary invention represented by the very tools they used to realize this project.

Published post no.2,688 – Wednesday 15 October 2025

Switched On – Julianna Barwick: Healing Is A Miracle (Ninja Tune)

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reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

Julianna Barwick has enjoyed a near-constant stream of productivity in the last decade, but for many reasons Healing Is A Miracle feels like a defining moment. Apart from being her first album for the Ninja Tune family it marks the point where, after 16 years, she moves from East Coast to West, from New York to Los Angeles.

The title is a reference to the ability of the human body to recover itself after sustaining damage, Barwick marvelling at the way cuts and bruises heal themselves – and it appears to be a metaphor for the next stage of her life too. The recording methodology was also different, using monitors instead of headphones for the first time, which proved a revelation.

Healing Is A Miracle includes three collaborations, each with a close friend.

What’s the music like?

Barwick makes some of the most emotive ambient music you can imagine. While some producers opt for the distanced approach, allowing their music all the room it needs to operate away from human contact, Healing Is A Miracle offers further evidence of a rare ability to make ambient music right from the heart.

Despite the intimacy she achieves with the vocal material in particular, her studies in reverberation have resulted in enormous, cathedral-like textures. Inspirit, the first track on the album, is a softly recurring chant but with a big, surrounding echo, and when Barwick adds the bass sounds to the mix the music stops you in your tracks with its heart stopping beauty.

The collaborations are really nicely judged. Jónsi’s voice works in close harmony with Barwick on In Light, the Sigur Rós vocalist just below the melody but closely matched, before the big beats open the music outwards, seemingly toward the stars. Oh, Memory has a greater delicacy in the company of Mary Lattimore, its weightless vocals hanging on the wind, while Nod, with Nosaj Thing, builds layers on a breathy loop before adding beats, after which it pans out again to a consoling coda.

The title track has long, sustained keyboard sounds that hang on just a bit longer than the vocals, giving an even greater feeling of space. Flowers has striking sonorities, scaling mountainous heights but with an earthbound bass presence too, which grows to take over the track completely.

Does it all work?

Yes. With Julianna Barwick the listener really does inhabit a whole new world, and if escapism or mental clarity is what you are searching for then you have definitely come to the right place.

Is it recommended?

Wholeheartedly. Even within the output of one of the most consistent ambient artists, Healing Is A Miracle is a touchstone, an album where everything falls into its natural place. For an emotive out of body experience, you would really struggle to do better.

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