*Edition of 100* Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore’s Tragic Magic materialized over nine intensely resonant days at the Philharmonie de Paris, in the hallowed spaces of the Musée de la Musique, just as the psychic aftershocks of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires continued to ripple through their lives. Their collaboration, co-produced with Trevor Spencer, finds its tone not in dramatic crescendo, but in the fragile drift between beauty and desolation, where the boundaries between voice, harp, and synthesizer dissolve into a freely woven fabric of improvisation and subtle design.​ The duo’s access to the museum’s historic instrument collection became both anchor and catalyst—Lattimore selecting harps that trace centuries of expressive tradition, Barwick gravitating towards analog synths like the Roland JUPITER-8 and Sequential Circuits PROPHET-5. In these contrasts, they sought not nostalgia but resonance: the temporal echoes of old woods and wires singing into the modern day, each tone carrying a sense of reverence and honest vulnerability. Sessions were unhurried yet immediate, the music emerging in parallel with Paris’s gentle winter, while the residue of disaster in Los Angeles found its voice in spectral melodies and limpid textures. “We wanted to honour the past while making music that we feel is a true expression of ourselves,” Barwick reflects—a sentiment both artists embody in each gesture and refrain.​

Tragic Magic unfolds as a meditation on collective memory and the endlessly mutating shape of grief and hope. Album opener “Perpetual Adoration” lays the foundation for a sequence where improvisational risk and emotional clarity converge. The centerpiece, “Melted Moon,” written in direct response to the wildfires, finds Barwick’s vocals stripped of effects, startlingly plain and tender, as Lattimore’s looping harp tallies each moment of loss and fleeting solace. Lyrically sparse yet affecting, the track hums with the knowledge that the places once called home may never remain unchanged, but within ruin, there is still the chance to assemble new meaning.​ Throughout the record’s span—whether in the radiance of “The Four Sleeping Princesses,” the hushed pulse of “Temple of the Winds,” or the sharply drawn cover of “Rachel’s Song”—Barwick and Lattimore map a territory between ambient transcendence and chamber intimacy. Their work gently insists that, while tragedy might disrupt, it doesn’t sever the threads that connect past and present, memory and invention. The result is not a static monument, but a living articulation of survival, humility, and creative kinship—a conversation improvisational yet timeless, welcoming listeners into its restorative grace as it prepares to echo across concert halls and new landscapes in the months ahead.​