Following the release of her single Counting Time, a rebellion against the HH:MM:SS hour-archy, Laura J Martin returns today with her new single and video ‘Prepared‘ the title track of her new album and first solo album since 2016. The album follows the release of her 2020 critically acclaimed collaborative album Wyndow with Lavinia Blackwall – what KLOF Magazine called “an experimental time capsule of beautiful melodies, ethereal vocal layers, and powerful lyrics”.
For her new video, directed again by Laura Swinson, Laura continues the theme of enjoying the outdoors and heads out for a spot of bird watching at Martin Mere Wetland Centre in Lancashire.
“‘Prepared’ is a hymn to self-reliance but not to perfection, it’s to working your own routes and abandoning the tape measure,” says Martin of the new single. “In part, it’s looking back at ways you judged yourself in past encounters and not recognising yourself: ‘I turned away again, was I even there?’”
The single is released alongside an accompanying music video, shot at Martin Mere in Lancashire and directed by Jess Swainson. “It’s my tribute to binocular days, the ever-changing silence of quiet obsessions and the joy of camo,” says Martin. “I was guided by pro twitchers at WWT Martin Mere, and the video investigates the post wellness invigoration of being in the wild marshy wetlands of Lancashire.”
Following Laura’s last solo album, On The Never, Never (2016), she took a break from writing and recording music and moved back to Liverpool from London to begin 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.”
After 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.”
Prepared is also our Song of the Day.
Pre-Order Prepared: https://lnk.to/UmGmqf
Prepared Tracklisting
- Prepared
- Counting Time
- Living on the Wall (feat. Iwan Morgan)
- A Better Story
- Three Days
- Outside at Night
- The Dials
- Magic Mornings (feat. Iwan Morgan)
- Open Door
Upcoming Tour Dates
12.04.24 Manchester, Gorilla w/ China Crisis
19.04.24 St Helens, The Citadel w/ China Crisis
04.05.24 New Brighton, Floral Pavillion
05.05.24 Salford, Sounds from the Other City
11.05.24 Wrexham, Focus Wales Festival
18.05.24 Leeds, Jumbo Records live in store
07.06.24 London, The Old Library
05.10.24 Chester Live Rooms w/ China Crisis
07.11.24 Runcorn, The Brindley Theatre w/ China Crisis
Website: https://www.laurajmartin.net/