An electroacoustic soundscape

Julianna Barwich and Mary Lattimore are longtime friends, tourmates, and two of contemporary ambient and experimental music's most celebrated composers. Synthesizing their respective crafts within the walls of Philharmonie de Paris after being given access to the extraordinary instrument collection of the Musée de la Musique in partnership with the French label InFiné, their new single, “Perpetual Adoration,” blends historical harps, celestial synths, and Barwick’s singular voice into an immersive electroacoustic soundscape of memory, spirituality, and timeless resonance. It is the first piece of new music from the duo since “Canyon Lights,” a single released as part of 2021’s Adult Swim compilation, Digitalis.

Together in improvised dialogue, voice and instrument — Lattimore selecting an Érard double movement harp (France, 1873) and Barwick behind a Sequential Circuits PROPHET-5 analog synthesizer (USA, circa 1975) — the duo channels an immense volume of emotion drawn from a visit to Basilica of Sacré Cœur de Montmartre. On a rainy night, they saw a sign outside the cathedral labeled "ADORATION PERPÉTUELLE" and entered the reverberant space where a nun was singing above organ drones during Sunday Mass. They carried the powerful scene with them into a session. The resulting performance honors both the moment and the history within their instruments: the gilded, ornate Érard harp, the first modern pedal harp, remains open for innovation, still carrying the simplest, universally beautiful tone of human fingers on strings. The PROPHET-5 has shaped several decades of exploratory music, and Barwick continues this legacy. Her skyward synth and vocal lines ascend alongside Lattimore's tender harp strums, creating a meditation on the restorative power of shared experience.