Last month, Laura J Martin announced that she is set to make her return on May 17th with the release of her new album, Prepared, via the sharing of the album’s captivating title-track.
The album follows the release of her 2021 critically acclaimed collaborative album Wyndow, and is Martin’s first solo material since 2016. To celebrate Prepared’s announcement, Laura played tracks from the album live on BBC Radio 6 Music on the Riley & Coe show.
Today, Martin is sharing new single ‘Living On The Wall’, a duet with the album’s co-producer Iwan Morgan (Euros Childs, Cate Le Bon, Gruff Rhys, Georgia Ruth). “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’.
Of the track and it’s accompanying video, Martin says: “This is an upbeat song about the perils of momentum and the push and pull of ‘The Muse’. I liked the idea of writing a song about songwriting, how you can spend all day working on one and not come up with anything then all of sudden something appears. I also liked the idea of tackling another classic song writing task - “The Duet” and managed to persuade my co-producer Iwan to sing with me on this song. The video, which I co-directed by Jess Swainson, takes inspiration from the corrupted patterns of old Ceefax imagery, and early VHS editing techniques.”
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.”
Tracklist
1.Prepared
2.Counting Time
3.Living on the Wall (ft. Iwan Morgan)
4.A Better Story
5.Three Days
6.Outside At Night
7.The Dials
8.Magic Mornings (ft. Iwan Morgan)
9.Open Door
Working closely with co-producer Iwan Morgan, 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.”
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.”
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