Laura J Martin - Prepared (2024) [Hi-Res]

When the ideas first started to unfurl for Prepared it felt like a wide-open landscape. I’d moved back to Liverpool after being in London for a long time, (so far so predictable?). I moved as I’d had the opportunity to apprentice with Willy Simmons, world renowned flute maker, fixer of pretty much anything and an expert with a lathe. I knew I wanted a break after finishing touring for my last album “On the Never Never” and wanted some time to reconsider what I was doing. Was I still enjoying making music? I wasn’t quite sure.

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 on some of the toxic chemicals and blow torches used to make the flutes. 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. So, I would walk over to Willy’s house daily, put the kettle on and watch the MVP at work. At first, I was just observing and occasionally he’d let me do something. I would call this the “sussing out” phase – did I have what it takes? I think that question is still up in the air but what I learned was a new way of thinking and in a way focusing on the small details allowed the big picture to emerge. As well as making flutes, I was also repairing them, and this was the part I most enjoyed – the process of renewal. Taking apart my old tour worn Miyazawa and making it good as new.

In a corny way, I experienced this renewal myself. I’d grown weary and through taking my focus away from Laura J Martin (the artist), I guess things began to percolate without me even realising. I started to put a home studio together, I had no purpose but was intrigued by what could happen If I turned the room with the boiler into a room of my own. 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 with the textures of Brouk’s song “Maggi’s Flute” in mind. At this stage there was no plan for an album, but I rediscovered the sense of play which brought me into music in the first place. I was just making ideas, enjoying the process, and then putting them to one side. The palette was infinite and without boundaries. Whereas 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.

After a few weeks I played these to my co-producer Iwan, and he told me to carry on and go further. We started talking about things that were around us and what we had access to (piano, drum machines), and things I’d see on the way to work and how I could work this into songs. This turned into “Outside at Night”.

In a twisting but circuitous way “Prepared” is my composted scrapbook of the last couple of years, the whittled down then added to, the tempo and key changed cousins of the original ideas and sometimes the looped back to the beginning version after a few misjudged extrapolations in a different direction. I was prepared to follow where the sounds took me, the sonic train left the station and led me on its merry way. 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.