"What happens when someone 'disappears'?" That question drives Naomi Yang's (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi) beautifully shot video for "The White Balloon," a slowly enveloping track by harpist Mary Lattimore and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Zeigler (guitars and synths, mostly). Yang writes:
Mary and Jeff wrote "The White Balloon" after learning of the tragic death of a friend. Though she and Jeff did not want the video to literally represent that person or that event, we decided the video should explore the idea of what happens when someone "disappears" — the traces that people leave after they are gone.
The location was like a dream: a cabin in the countryside in North Carolina that has been in Mary's family for generations. Built in the Civil War and full of family legend, the cabin has been lovingly tended "with layers of legacy," as Mary described it to me — a place where there are the remnants of what has been lost and what remains.
Slant Of Light is the first collaboration from Lattimore and Ziegler. Both are studio wizards — Lattimore appears on records from Thurston Moore, Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn, while Zeigler has been a recording engineer for Nothing, Purling Hiss and The War On Drugs — but these four improvisations sound as if they've been intuiting each other's movements, moods and notes for years.
Slant Of Light is out now on Thrill Jockey Records.
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