Laura J Martin

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.”