Geological master plan: High-concept jazztronica made of granite, slate and gravel.
Laura Misch is known as an artist who captures nature and its elements in sound worlds in which the lightness of air or the scent of moss take on musical form. These field recordings may be her brand core, but reducing them to that wouldn’t do her justice: Misch is also an excellent singer/songwriter, an innovative saxophonist and also adept at dealing with fiddly electronica. She already combined all of this excellently on her gravity-free debut SAMPLE THE SKY, but for the successor she becomes a geologist: slate, granite and gravel provide the master plan for the album.
LITHIC means “of the nature of stone”, the album was created in quarries and caves, on cliffs and pebble beaches. It’s logical that LITHIC is weightier and more sustained than the fluffy, airy SAMPLE THE SKY, LITHIC has lost a lot of the lightness of the debut: stones form the rhythmic patterns of the album, in “Echoes” a goatskin drum even provides percussive elements, caves serve as natural reverberations.
This may give the impression of singing bowl twilight, but fortunately the highly gifted Misch has nothing to do with esotericism. If you could charge notes with stones, then that would probably lead to the ecosystem of saxophone, voice, electronics and percussion that Misch created.