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Jun 17, 2026
Laura Misch: Of Microphones, Stones & Saxophones
Laura Misch is desperate to get outside. When we connect ahead of the release of her new album Lithic, the London-based songwriter and producer is fresh from re-painting and rearranging her studio. She modestly refers to it as "a little cupboard under the stairs" in an arts space in South London, which she has reconfigured to stop her computer being the focal point.
"More and more, it's like the studio is my laboratory of distillation, but, really, I want to be outside," she explains, "because there's no natural light or air. I'm thinking, 'How can I minimize the time I'm in this room to have very focused experimentation, isolated recording and arrangement, and most of the time be off somewhere else?'"
Misch's sound, cultivated over the past 10 years through live shows, self-released tapes and 2023's Sample The Sky LP, is rooted in her saxophone playing and the adventurous ways she embellishes it through spatial processing. It's never easy taking any kind of electro-acoustic rig out into the field, away from sources of electricity, but while recording Lithic Misch journeyed ever further into the environment and the role it plays within her music.
Laura Misch - “Soften”
"I just came back from three days of field recording in France for a sound installation," she says. "I have a hiking backpack, and in there I have a laptop, a small interface and a Novation controller so I can do sax effects chains with a rack set up in Ableton. I also brought a few specific microphones: a hydrophone, a stereo, a pair of omni-directionals and a contact as well. My dream is that I'm able to have this really modular practice, and the two key things are weight and power limitations. The whole battery situation can be quite difficult out in the field."
Electronic music production is a fundamental part of Misch's creative process, from outboard pedals to synthesizers and in-the-box effects processing, but she places greater emphasis on physicality and her interaction with the space around her. "I'm interested in the box and the software, but I'm equally interested in this body I'm in as an expressive, living being, and this environment I'm part of," she points out. "If I'm recording saxophone somewhere I can look out the window and it's windy, I can see the cloud formations moving past and use them almost as a graphic score inspiration for improvisation."
“Shell” from Laura Misch’s Lithic album
Recording Lithic has taken Misch to a variety of intriguing locations in search of inspiration. In particular, the rugged coastline of Cornwall in South West England created a thematic foundation of the album's reflection on deep time, marked in geology that tells a story reaching back millions of years. Misch has put together a sample pack for the Ableton community to download captured from the disused Lanterdan slate quarry.
Download Laura Misch’s free sample pack
"The sample pack is a mixture of field recordings. It's got hits from different pieces of slate, different moments walking around. It's got Louise, who owns the quarry, moving around. I recorded everything, but then I worked with Charles Van Kirk on the sound design. I just thought people could use it as a gateway to having some more textures and sounds to put in their work."
Accessing Lanterdan required descending on ropes, visible in the music video for Lithic's lead single 'Shell'. For this session, Misch had to work with a compact setup of microphones and a variety of metal, wood and rubber beaters to experiment with different timbres for percussive sounds. Her exploration and surrounding research led her to lithophones — an ancient form of instrument made up of naturally resonant stones arranged to create a musical scale. As well as attempting to construct one on site at the quarry, she also travelled to the Lake District in northern England to record on The Skiddaw Stones, a lithophone held in a museum that was built by stonemason Joseph Richardson in the mid-19th Century [available as a software instrument].
Laura Misch - “Scrolls”
"There's a lot of stone percussion in 'Scrolls'," Misch reveals. "It's all layered, but I was really inspired by being in those spaces and hearing the bounce back, or even in some of the delays, created by the stone around me. If I did it again, I think I'd work with an engineer who was able to capture it properly. For example, I also climbed to the Kudhva quarry and there was this magnificent bounce back, but my Zoom recorder didn't capture it in a way that felt like it honored the reality of the sound. So I then used effects chains to exaggerate what was actually there."
Recording the environmental sounds of Cornwall’s caves
As well as quarries, Cornwall's abundance of caves was another rich source of sonic material for Misch's initial work on Lithic. Rather than being drawn to the technical potential of capturing impulse responses for customised reverbs, she was more interested in the environmental sounds of the caves themselves, from water drips to birds nesting. She took inspiration from David Haskell's book on the origins of sound and communication, Sounds Wild and Broken, which traces sound on Earth back to a time before animal species had even been established.
“I'm interested in the box and the software, but I'm equally interested in this body I'm in as an expressive, living being, and this environment I'm part of.”
"Haskell wrote the first sounds on Earth were of air, water and stone," Misch explains, "and that really stopped me in my tracks. The world can feel very existential at the moment, and so I've been thinking about deep time. Bone flutes, the first instruments we ever found, were in caves. I have this pull back to a Neo-Paleolithic experience of music. I also read about resonance, and the way, as a saxophone player, your skull acts like a cave of sound."
Laura Misch - “Echoes”
Having created a bedrock of percussive and rhythmic field recordings in Cornwall, Misch decided to focus her attention on the melodic aspect of her sound palette. She spent some time in a studio on the Greek island of Hydra, when some unseasonably windy weather gave her an opportunity to take a different approach to the saxophone.
"I knew that I wanted to record pure ambient saxophone clouds," she recalls, "but I didn't have all my gear, so I just used the Ableton rack I have called Sax Cloud. It has all these different ways of stretching time on the saxophone, through delays or layering or looping or granulating. You can extend beyond the breath when you play initial notes or phrases, and have these interlocking encounters of different melodies, which you can translate to piano later. It can create really interesting chordal structures."
For Misch, this ability to create elaborate chains of effects allows her to "paint messily" with her acoustic sound sources, creating behaviours and reactions with the devices so she can relax into her playing. "The thing that I love the most about Ableton, from a live perspective, is the the possibilities for automation to create these gridded playgrounds, where I can let rip and almost forget I've got, like, three loopers running and end up with these really interesting generative bounce-back layers."
Laura Misch - “Kairos”
When the songs on Lithic were starting to take shape, Misch realised she wanted a percussive counterpoint to the distinctive stone sounds she had been building the rhythms with. In keeping with the ancient roots of the project, she gravitated towards the goat skin drum and enlisted accomplished percussionist Matt Davies to record parts across the album that added a human element, not to mention ample sub bass frequencies.
“As a saxophone player, your skull acts like a cave of sound.”
But as the sound of the album came into focus as an ambient, relatively abstract affair, she realised she wanted to bring lyricism into the songs. In keeping with the elemental, organic approaches that defined other aspects of the music, she struck upon a novel idea to bring nature even further into her studio. "I did some teaching at a summer camp at the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark," Misch reveals, "and I noticed they had loads of moss on the school walls. It's like a dampener, and it's used quite commonly in architecture. I thought, 'This would be such a cool vocal shield instead of foam,' so I made my own. It's like petrified lichen, so it doesn't need light or water."
"Being in London, I can't afford a studio space where there's loads of light. I want to bring the environment in as much as possible, and have the least amount of foam and plastic, so now I've got this moss vocal shield. It smells amazing, so you go in and you close your eyes to track your vocals, and it just smells like you're in a forest."