hello,
Just to give a quick update on where we’re at…

Just adding finishing touches and tweaks to album number 2! Extremely excited to let everyone hear it…Will probably be released in it’s entirety in a few months with a few single tunes out before that!

In the meantime we have a special, double EP type thing coming out soon. We recently signed to independent label Just Music www.justmusic.co.uk and with them have put together a small collection of our favourite recordings to date. Teaming up with Just Music and new manager Harry Farmer is like a fresh start – finally getting to put our heads above the parapet and say ‘hello’ to a wider audience…

Also, gigs! We’ll be playing at the beginning of October – looking like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham & London – details to follow – can’t wait!

We’ll be in touch…

Laura x

laki mera

I’m moving house soon so I decided to have a clear-out and put some stuff on eBay, including a couple of old samplers from before the time when it seemed ok to take laptops onto a beery stage. Before boxing them up I turned them on for the first time in years and played through the samples – stuff from my old band The Miggs, and bits from Ed Harcourt’s records that I used to fly in during his gigs. It felt like the audio equivalent of seeing an old photograph – the way just one image can set off a flood of memories.

The way I used to feel in The Miggs – like I didn’t really belong in my own band, and certainly not in some strange pub off the M1 in clothes that were too tight. It all came to a head when I got asked to go to LA for 2 months to do Oceans 12. The singer gave me an ulitmatum and I knew which side my bread was buttered. We’re still friends though. Or the time I accidentally set off a massively loud sample in the middle of a pin-drop quiet section of and Ed gig, prompting one audience member to say sarcastically, “oh, THANKS”. Ed left the stage in an icy fury and I thought I’d really, really screwed up. But he returned moments later having raided the props room of the theatre we were in, carrying two fencing swords. We did battle at the front of the stage, I let him kill me, the crowd cheered and all was forgiven.

I’m producing a record for Astrid Williamson at the moment, a lovely songwriter and singer on One Little Indian. Here’s my ‘to-do’ list for one of the songs:

blurry fax machine in V2

reverse rabbit in big sect

low mid out of minky?
rubber guitar only on the one
bounce downstairs breathing

For a limited time you can get the full version of ‘The Storm’ (Kraddy Requiem Mix) right here….just click!

CLICK HERE TO TO DOWNLOAD

When I started this blog about 5 and a half years ago, it was with the vague intention of shedding some light on what it is like to do the job that I do. I wanted to avoid the kind of willfully starry-eyed and oblique accounts that I imagined other people might be guilty of writing; it’s a lazy way to define oneself – conjuring up something to be against.

Although I have always been very grateful for the kind comments of my modest readership, I must admit that maintaining the diary became somewhat self-serving – more a way to keep track of my scattered life than a contribution to anyone else’s understanding. A trail of breadcrumbs for those dark nights of the soul when I feel lost and need a way of tracing my journey. And a good way to keep my parents up to date with what I’ve been doing without actually having to tell them.

But last week I ran into a bit of bother. I wrote here that a new Brian Eno record was coming out on Warp – and I shouldn’t have done because the label hadn’t announced it yet. By tomorrow all this will be yesterday’s news, but unfortunately today’s news included a large feature in the Guardian quoting extensively from this blog – including information that, whilst not secret, I nevertheless feel very embarrassed about having been made so public. They even included bits that I’d hastily deleted (and the fact that I’d hastily deleted them).

Various words spring to mind re-reading that last paragraph, such as ‘naivete’, ‘confusion’, and ‘bugger’.

Warp have taken it all in very good humor, but I would like to apologise to them and to Brian’s managers for being careless, and for blithely underestimating the widely-known potential of the internet to disseminate information.

One of the consequences is that from now on, this diary is going to change a bit. No longer will it be a blow-by-blow account of what I’ve been doing each month. I hope that in the future it will be more reflective and honest, more open and revealing – but not in the wrong way.

I came back to England after the Carl Barat mix a bit of an emotional wreck, and the fun didn’t stop there. Last-minute string overdubs, trans-atlantic phone calls in the middle of the night, frantic tweaking and interpersonal soul-searching were just some of the highlights. The last of the mixes popped into my inbox an hour before I left for mastering (which had to be done 3 times). Now it’s off into the world, fending for itself like a cocky teenager that will never call home.

I returned to Marianne Faithfull’s welcoming bosom (figuratively speaking) for a show in Dublin, before throwing myself back into Brett Anderson’s record. We ended up recording most of the lead vocals over just a few sessions, which was in keeping with the spontaneous spirit of the whole project. But there were no compromises, and it sounds amazing.

There were a few guitar sessions interspersed, various things I said I’d do but never got around to. But really over the last month I’ve hardly played. So when a couple of days ago I found myself in a massive studio doing the guitars on the new Jack Black film, I realised with a sense of forboding that I wasn’t exactly match-fit. I think I got away with it, but felt like a bit of a flabby jogger. The highlight was playing a version of Sweet Child O Mine, which was the first song I ever played live, at the age of 14, surrounded by mysterious girls who were older than me and might as well have been from a different planet.

I went to Ireland to curate the opening concert at the Festival Of World Culture. This involved overseeing collaborations between Iarla O’Lionaird, the Norwegian group Adjagas, and the Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. The artists only met the day before the show, but there were warm feelings everywhere and somehow we managed to put together an hour and a half of extraordinary music with a very generous spirit, with seemingly no effort whatsoever. What had seemed obscure and risky turned out to be an unalloyed joy.

Ever since it’s original release as a download only album, we have had requests for a CD version so we are pleased to announce that a fully remastered version is now available on CD and can be purchased from Just Music, Amazon and Play.

Be Still My Bleeping Heart is a remastered collection of older, rare Digitonal material. It forms a retrospective view of the last 10 years of our output, and makes some tracks from the early releases which have been unavailable for some time accessible to a new audience.

The album consists of material from 23 Things Fall Apart (originally released by Toytronic Records in 2002) and The Centre Cannot Hold EP (released by Seed Records in 2004) – both of which have been very difficult to find for many years, plus some unreleased bits and pieces. All the tracks have been remastered from the original studio mixes, and a few are appearing here for the first time in new studio mixes. The album is available to buy on CD and Digital formats, links below.

Tracklisting:

1. Come and Play
2. Snowflake Vectors
3. Overline
4. Seraphim (Angel mix)
5. Cantus V
6. Antares (Yuri’s mix)
7. Cuetips
8. Vearth
9. Maris Stella
10. Drencrom
11. Amberkreiss

Buy CD from Just Music

Buy CD from Play.com

Buy Digital from iTunes

Buy Digital from eMusic

Buy Digital from 7Digital

Buy Digital from Sky Songs

tantalising hybrid of book smarts and street cred – The Skinny

an ideal soundtrack for ‘Life On Other Planets’ – CMU Daily

I’m in New York, at the mix of the Carl Barat record which has been recorded over the last month. The recording process was wonderful, cycling in to work every day, recording drums with Seb Rochford, writing new sections to songs spontaneously, doing strings and woodwind on 6 songs in 6 hours, and enjoying Carl’s scattershot but passionate approach to making music. I think that with this record, people are going to see what a truly fine writer and performer he is.

The mix, being done by Andrew Wyatt with input from myself, is involving a lot of dismantling and distorting of the material. I’m surprised and rather gratified at the ease with which I can let go of much of the work that has been painstakingly created over the last month. The only thing that matters is that the music sounds good. In a Brooklyn bookstore I happened upon the Collected Writings Of Morton Feldman (one of my favourite composers) and in a strange synchronicity, which I take to be an omen, many of his polemical observations are curiously apposite:

“Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in music we must pursue it”; “Everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it”; “Step aside in order to be in control… controls can be thought of as nothing more than accepted practise”; “For art to succeed, its creator must fail.”; “The great mistake lies in looking for experience in the object rather than in ourselves”

Earlier this month I dipped into modern classical music for real, playing a piece at Kammer Klang before doing an improvised set. It was rather terrifying and much more challenging that the Gavin Bryars stuff I did last year. The other musicians were very kind to me but I still felt like a dumb rock kid hanging out with professors. Then the following day I was playing guitar on the new Trevor Horn-produced Estelle single, trying to get my pop/R&B chops together. Trevor reminds me of a kind of benevolent monarch. He has a sort of effortlessly regal quality and yet is very fun-loving. I always look forward to seeing him.

Lastly, there was the Pure Scenius concert in Brighton with Brian Eno, Karl Hyde, Jon Hopkins and The Necks. As with the Australian concert, there were 3 90-minute improvised concerts in the course of the day. Most of the Necks had flown in from Australia, Jon had come from LA, and I had tonsilitis and was on a load of painkillers, so everyone was floating around a bit. But sometimes I find it’s better to be in a slightly distracted mood because it helps take the edge off the nerves. In the end it was a wonderfully fulfilling and relaxing day, less fraught than the Sydney shows and perhaps the better for it. The audience seemed subdued at first, but were on their feet 6 hours later.

Now back to work…

http://twitter.com/danarborise

see you there!

http://www.justmusic.co.uk/

Two weeks away now from our return to the live arena. I will be joined by Samy Bishai (violin) and Joshu Doherty (electronics) for this brand new live set.

Just are also doing a cracking deal on a ticket/cd bundle here. Or you can buy them directly from the Roundhouse.