Laura Kampman - Coming into daily life - CD

Photographer and composer Laura Kampman hooks up four phones to a mixing desk and turns voice notes and location recordings into a beautiful weave of found sound, flute, new age/concrète and impromptu songs that conjure a shimmering, cathartic soundworld. Gorgeous material - especially highly recommended if you’re into work by Virginia Astley or Joanna Brouk.

The recording of ‘Coming into daily life’ provided a way for Kampman to process the grief she felt when she lost her father. Retreating from the outside world, she found safety behind her phone's dazzling screen and instead of listening to music, became ever more drawn to in-the-moment voice and location recordings, acting like a kind of surrogate memory bank. A while later, when she was asked to provide music for a radio show, she put together that rudimentary setup using her phone and those of friends around her, using snatched moments of their private lives in order to assemble a new kind of quiet, suggestive narrative.

Her approach is most evident on the title track, as voices overlap watery drips and improvisations - on guitar, piano and glockenspiel - allowing us to peer into her shared surroundings. Her feather-light touch is unabashedly vulnerable and charming, even a skeletal, harmonium-led cover of Robbie Williams' 'Angels' is surprisingly poignant, a reminder of the time she and her partner would sing each other to sleep over voice message.

'Waves Piece' is different, but just as affecting. Beginning with frothy tidal woooshes, this one centres her electronic flute, neatly harmonising with Joanna Brouk's enchanting 'Healing Music'. Again, Kampman juxtaposes her instrumental sounds with nuanced external recordings, but it's far more subtle here - everything's buried and indistinct, like muffled chatter from a nearby room. She overlays the flute into rippling vortexes, leaving the environmental noise - footsteps, gushing waters - to wisp and bellow in the background. It's a startling, effortlessly enjoyable composition, that contrasts its predecessor's naked intimacy with levitational peacefulness. 

Listen: https://laurakampman.bandcamp.com/album/coming-into-daily-life