Summer Critics

Release Date: 17/05/2024

Following the release of her 2016 album On The Never, Never, Martin knew that she wanted to take a break from writing and recording music. She moved back to Liverpool, from London, and began an apprenticeship with world renowned flute maker Willy Simmons.

“I was now looking at an instrument I’d been playing all my life at a molecular level. The discipline and repetitiveness of learning a craft freed my mind from thinking about songs for a bit and made me focus instead on some of the toxic chemicals and blow torches used to make the flutes,” she says. “I’ve never been a particularly mindful person; I’m usually zipping from one thing to the next and this work had a pace of its own which I had to submit to. As well as making flutes, I was also repairing them, and this was the part I most enjoyed – the process of renewal. In a corny way, I experienced this renewal myself.”

Following this period, Martin felt inspired to make music again and began setting up her own home studio. “Around this time, I’d started to listen to Joanna Brouk and the I am the Center compilation of early New Age music on Numero Group. This music was nothing like my own but seemed to extend from the Harmonia records I love and exist outside of the album, gig, tour regime. It was so inspiring and freeing, and I tentatively began to experiment in the studio, with the textures of Brouk’s song ‘Maggi’s Flute’ in mind.”

Working closely with co-producer Iwan Morgan (Euros Childs, Cate Le Bon, Gruff Rhys, Georgia Ruth), the pair found themselves drawn to drum machines that wouldn’t stay in time, and a piano with a tuning mind of its own. “I rediscovered the sense of play which brought me into music in the first place,” says Martin. “The palette was infinite and without boundaries. Where my previous records had always operated within the instinct / lack of budget axis, I now had the possibility to sculpt sound, to remake, blend and remodel it for the first time.”

Living next to the main 86 bus route into Liverpool City Centre prompted the idea behind ‘Outside at Night’, of parallel lives on different journeys. ’Three Days’ mines a similar theme but focuses on the hidden lives we share with others, the shift workers paradox. “It asks, do we really know what happens to our closest people when they leave the house?” explains Martin.

Album opener ‘Prepared’ is a hymn to self-reliance but not to perfection, to working your own routes and abandoning the tape measure.  In part it’s about looking back at ways you judged yourself in past encounters and not recognising yourself: “I turned away again, was I even there?”.  Tied in counterpoint to this, closing track ‘Open Door’ works as a prism through which to view the album (copious drum machines, swelling synths).  It’s also as an answer of sorts to Martin’s search - new possibilities rage from cascading melodic and atmospheric structures, reaching some kind of midway between Harmonia’s ‘Deluxe’ and the polyrhythms of Francis Bebey’s Psychedelic Sanza.

Across the record there are vocal and sonic contributions from co-producer Iwan Morgan. “Iwan maintains he’s not a musician but kept singing in the studio and eventually I managed to persuade him to put it on record,” says Martin.  ’Living on the Wall’ is the clearest example of this, exuberant monster truck beats, insistent pianos and vocals delivered without irony, think Wrong Way Up era John Cale and Brian Eno meets YMOs ‘Firecracker’.

Collaborative sojourns to Marco Rea's The Barne studio in Clydebank and Mike Lindsay (Tunng, LUMP) in Margate allowed Martin to coax standout contributions from both, shaping the album as both artist and co-producer. The result is a unique fusion of folk, electronic, and experimental pop music that defies expectations and challenges the boundaries of contemporary music.

“In a twisting but circuitous way, Prepared is my composted scrapbook of the last couple of years. I was prepared to follow where the sounds took me, the sonic train left the station and led me on its merry way,” she says. “It’s not an album about flute repairing but it wouldn’t have happened without learning the discipline of preparedness, the small movement, the tweak and the renewal from Willy Simmons.”

About Laura J Martin

Laura J Martin has so far released three solo albums. Her latest, On The Never Never, was recorded in Nashville with members of Lambchop, Silver Jews and Jesus Lizard. A mercurial and bewitching live performer who interweaves layers of vocals, flute, mandolin and electronics; Laura and her band have toured regularly across the UK and Europe and supported acts such as PJ Harvey, Teenage Fanclub, Cate Le Bon and performed and collaborated extensively with Euros Childs. Consistently played and supported by BBC Radio 6 Music DJs such as Marc Riley, Cerys Matthews, Lauren Laverne, Gideon Coe and Stuart Maconie; Laura's most recent release was a collaborative project 'Wyndow' written with Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells and released in 2021.

“An understated marvel” Uncut

“Beautiful and intelligent stuff” The Quietus

"An extremely unique sound, I love the combinations of textures she puts together"
BBC Radio 6 Music, Lauren Laverne

Tracklisting:
1. Prepared
2. Counting Time
3. Living on the Wall (feat. Iwan Morgan)
4. A Better Story
5. Three Days
6. Outside at Night
7. The Dials
8. Magic Mornings (feat. Iwan Morgan)
9. Open Door