I didn’t gravitate toward translating my feelings on the harp during the pandemic like I usually do. “He was nervous about leaving his synthesizers behind and asked me to babysit them. For the initial recordings, Lattimore primarily played synth, only later adding her distinctive harp as an additional layer of sound.Ī wonderful friend of mine was out of town for the summer and didn’t have air-conditioning in his apartment,” she explained.
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Over the summer they embarked on a series of improvisations that became West Kensington.
Those experiences led to the pair’s first single, “Dreaming of the Kelly Pool” (another paean to their Philly roots), released last May. They were also enlisted to help score a reading of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach that director Taika Waititi organized with celebrities including Meryl Streep and Camilla Parker Bowles. Following the shutdown, Lattimore and Sukeena began a weekly livestream for the now-remote workers. Prior to the pandemic, she had performed live harp for the designers while a teacher demonstrated ikebana, the Japanese art of flower design. They soon found an outlet for their newfound collaboration through a creative enrichment program for Nike shoe designers in Portland. Paul and I could also commiserate that our entire livelihood had been taken away.” I had very close friends that I could play music with but also had that Philly connection, too. “I live alone, so we became a real family. “I was so fortunate to have those guys right next door during the pandemic,” said Lattimore from Italy, where she was on tour in mid-May. Neither expected to be spending much time there, after all Sukeena was gearing up for an extensive spring and summer tour with Angel Olsen, while Lattimore was preparing to release her new album, Silver Ladders. At the time, it was just a way to ensure a compatible neighbor would move in.
When the adjoining apartment opened up in November 2019, Sukeena and his wife urged Lattimore to take it over. It felt like we couldn’t leave it, in a way - like it was this current that was always going to follow us.” So it was pretty wild that when my wife and I moved to L.A., one of the first places we looked at was on West Kensington Road. There were a million bands and a bunch of creative people living there amid all of this activity. “It was where all the cool stuff was happening. “During a certain era in Philadelphia it seemed like everyone that I was friends with was trying to migrate to Kensington,” Sukeena recalled from his new home in Santa Cruz. West Kensington was released May 20 on Three Lobed Recordings and features an evocative, immersive, and richly textured set of synth, harp, and guitar drones that may not directly pay homage to the old neighborhood, but certainly is an echo of the musical freedom and camaraderie that the pair discovered there. So when the two struck up a quarantine collaboration, there was really only one title that made sense for the resultant album.