Asheville native Mary Lattimore brings the harp to experimental music

Outside of classical and Celtic music, the harp isn’t widely heard. But in the hands of Asheville native Mary Lattimore, the massive, stringed acoustic instrument has become the centerpiece of a body of work that moves beyond those styles and into indie-experimental regions. Lattimore will make a holiday season Asheville homecoming with a Friday, Dec. 27, performance at the AyurPrana Listening Room.

Lattimore is carrying on a family tradition. Her mother, Lelia Lattimore, spent decades as a harpist with the Asheville Symphony and is the founding director of the esteemed Blue Ridge Harp Ensemble. “I grew up playing with my mom at the Biltmore Estate and the Grove Park Inn,” Lattimore recalls.

She studied with Charlotte Symphony harpist Elizabeth Ross and received conservatory training at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. Lattimore’s early education on the harp immersed her in the world of classical music, but her ambitions took her well beyond that idiom. “I moved to Philly in 2005 and got to know a lot of people in bands,” she explains. Some of those people were and remain key figures in the indie and underground rock communities: Kurt Vile and Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs among them.

“They encouraged me to write for bands and to include the harp into the psych-folk music that was happening around Philadelphia,” she says. “And that led me to playing with Thurston Moore.” Lattimore played on the Sonic Youth guitarist’s third solo release, 2011’s critically lauded Demolished Thoughts.

Art of improvisation

Working with Moore helped push Lattimore even further from the rigid world of tightly composed classical music. “Thurston really encouraged me to improvise,” she says.

Her introduction to Moore and other experimental musicians encouraged her to pursue more of her own ideas. “It built up my confidence about writing my own parts, improvising and leaning less on reading music,” she says.

Lattimore released her solo debut, The Withdrawing Room, in 2013. She would follow that with four more albums under her own name, plus three collaborative releases with other indie artists. Most of those projects can be loosely categorized as experimental, but while Lattimore herself has sometimes been pigeonholed as an “experimental musician,” she doesn’t think that label quite gets at what she does. “I don’t know if [my music] is experimental as much as it’s ‘doing whatever I want,’” she says.

That mindset helps explain how an instrument like the Theremin found its way onto her 2018 album, Hundreds of Days, and its 2020 follow-up, New Rain Duets; the latter was named in more than a dozen of that year’s best-of lists in major media outlets, including The New Yorker and NPR Music.

Though she has lived and/or worked extensively in Philadelphia, New York City and — most recently — Los Angeles, Lattimore still points to her Asheville upbringing as an influencing factor in her music. “The natural beauty, the creativity and the bohemian nature of our special town allowed me to dream about things that weren’t obvious or conventional,” she says.

She adds that being exposed to so much music as a child led her to live a life in which music is central to both her personal and professional worlds. “Going to hear the orchestra and having students in our house all the time, the harp felt like a normal part of my childhood,” she says.

Her professional life has included soundtrack work; the evocative quality of Lattimore’s instrumental music makes it ideally suited for use in film. In fact, one of her earliest professional endeavors was a major role in The Valerie Project, a Philadelphia-based psychedelic folk band that in 2007 created an alternate soundtrack to a 1970 Czech surreal horror film, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.

More recently, she provided music for a 2021 episode of the Atlas Obscura podcast. “It’s really good for my brain to have someone else’s vision in mind,” she says. “On my own stuff, I get to express how I feel — ‘blah blah blah,’” she says with a laugh. “But with scoring, you’re in service to someone else’s vision, and it’s humbling.”

Ethereal and engaging

Lattimore laughs again as she points out that the process often involves some healthy give-and-take. “Someone’s dying [on screen], so you write the perfect thing in your mind for that,” she explains. “Then the director’s like, ‘No, this sounds like a very cheerful music box!’ So you have to rethink it, turn it over and polish it. That’s really fun.”

Sync licensing — the business practice of having one’s music chosen for film, television, advertising and even video games — is often held up as one of the few ways today’s musicians can generate a revenue stream. Lattimore has licensed some of her songs in that manner, placed some of her songs, and says she’d love to get more sync opportunities to help make up for the minuscule revenue that streaming provides.

“As a 44-year-old woman, I’m picturing myself 20 years from now, touring with an 85-pound harp,” she says with a wan smile. “It would be nice to have different avenues [for income].”

In the meantime, Lattimore’s music earns widespread critical acclaim and finds popularity on those minimally remunerative streaming sites: “Oh I Miss Her So,” a 2020 collaboration with Brooklyn chillwave-meets-folk group Holy Hive, has received over 9 million plays on Spotify. Her latest release, 2023’s dark and moody Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, has been well received, too. And in keeping with Lattimore’s penchant for creative collaboration, the album features The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst as one of several featured guest artists.

Another tag that’s sometimes applied to the music of Mary Lattimore is “ambient.” And while there’s an ethereal character to much of her music, it’s more engaging than that label suggests. Her upcoming Asheville gig at the laid-back AyurPrana Listening Room might further that preconception, but Lattimore says that she hasn’t even decided what she’ll play at that date.

One thing she will do is talk between songs, helping the audience understand what her instrumental pieces are about. “[I do that] so that it doesn’t just seem like ‘spa music,’” she says, laughing again. “Because it’s not just for when you’re doing yoga.”

WHO: Mary Lattimore with Tashi Dorji and Min Xiao-Fen
WHERE: Ayurprana Listening Room, 312 Haywood Road, avl.mx/eby
WHEN: Friday, Dec. 27, 7 p.m. $29.21