Words by Emma Warren

Laura Misch has been posting videos of herself, playing her saxophone in sunset fields and in a river. It’s a collaboration with filmmaker Greg Barnes in which she’s made it possible to move away from the constraints of the studio through the medium of a wearable rig where a preamp, looper, and modular FX are built into a belt. 

The pair go for a walk together, somewhere countryside-ish and close to south London, creating what Misch calls ‘containers’. “It’s very spontaneous. I'll be playing and responding to the environment. He'll be moving around and recording and viewing through different lenses. He'll collage something together and send it to me. I'll have all the stems and I'll make something in response to that, adding some effects that felt in tune with the rawness, but with a slightly mystical, magical sonic edge as well.”

The music side of the audio-visual collaboration was recorded using her wearable rig. “The concept started with wanting a pedalboard, but on a belt,” says the saxophonist, producer, and singer-songwriter who taught herself to play sax by playing along to pop songs on the radio and who has collaborated with a range of London’s current wave of jazz-not-jazz artists including Alfa Mist, Lucinda Chua and her brother Tom.

"I was working a lot with electronics and FX and I wanted to have the electronics closer to me. It also stems from feeling a bit blocked sitting at a laptop, in a room. I wanted to move around a lot more and I wanted to record outside.”

Misch trained as a biomedical scientist before dropping out, but not before absorbing some useful ideas about systems and signal flow. “The language of biomedical science teaches you a lot about learning big and grappling with big information systems. It served me from being able to think about things from multiple angles and to be able to approach things quite analytically.”

The question of portability quickly came into play, because the gear is mostly built for the studio. Then followed the question of power: how do you charge everything without millions of batteries? The answer came in the form of an introduction to engineer and drummer Andrea Adriano, who builds his own gear from scratch, down to the PCB boards. 

“I sent him a text: I’ve got this slightly strange idea to build this pedal belt and I’ve been looking specifically for preamps that will help me convert the XLR into a jack, boost the signal, and also supply phantom power and that’s also really small,” she explains. “I’d seen a big version that was really expensive, and he was like, ‘oh, well, we could build one’.”

They began exchanging drawings on Whatsapp, designing the schematics for what would become a preamp, and soldered everything together, from scratch. Misch wanted it round, not angular, so they built it within a spray-painted make-up tin. “The initial input source is the clip-on saxophone mic, which is a condenser that runs into this preamp that we've built, and it's converted into a jack, which goes into a little Ditto looper. It’s tiny and works really, really well for what I want it to do.”

“It goes into a Zoom recorder, which is shaped like a hip, so it fits perfectly on my side. You’ve got that signal input, which is running through the loop and directly through the saxophone. But it also has another mic input on the side so you can get an ambience as well. Then I have another jack which goes out and back into a tiny speaker on the back. That’s the full system.”

Pandemic life generally drew her to working in a more low-resource style. “I wanted to be mobile and I started thinking about minimalism – what you actually need.” It also stemmed from a ‘performance head’ of wanting to be in a flow state with her electronics, where the space between the player and the rig could be closed down. “Less like there's you and there's the rig. More like you are the rig.”

Her 2019 album Lonely City was a different matter. “There was so much automation wrapped up in that album,” she says, “it was like being inside a Sonic game.” She was using a combination of Logic and Ableton – Ableton in Live for performance and Logic for recording, along with a Novation Bass Station monosynth because of its grounding, earth-tremor capacities. Additionally, she’d reach for a Critter and Guitari pocket piano (‘I love it because it’s like a toy, really twinkly’) or samples she’d recorded on regular trips on the Northern Line on London Underground. 

“I started to find the desk, four walls, and a studio set up really stifling,” she says. “I wanted to be a lot more responsive to the actual environment that I'm in. I want to be sensing things and responding to them, and having a lot fewer options as well.”

The belt has brought a new layer to her music-making. “We recorded in a field and at some points, I was sitting down in the grass, and I don't have headphones on, I just have this tiny speaker that's on the back of the belt,” she says. “So any kind of looping that’s being done, you're just monitoring it in a very live way. The movement side takes me out of my intellectual, engineering, analytical brain and it brings me into an intuitive, rhythmic feeling, bodily space. It's easier to let phrases flow.”

At the moment, the wearable rig is powered by 9V recharchargable batteries, but the intention is to make it even more sustainable. They’ve been using mini wind turbines made out of fan motors stuck on a drum stick, although this is more of a totem – a hope for the future – than a fully-fledged power source. “When I said to people that I was going to record remotely, they were like, ‘yeah, but what about the wind?’ There is a lot of interference from the atmosphere, but I wanted to find ways to harness it.”

At the moment, she’s releasing the sound and visuals generated on her rig-wearing adventures online, in the spirit of sharing without a fixed idea of what they’ll lead to. “I’m a completely independent artist and we’re creating and sharing as we go along. It’s not a traditional release, it’s more spontaneous.” 

Fans of her gorgeous music will be glad to hear she’s also working on her next album – and that she’s also been composing on the piano. “I love the sustain and the clouds of sound you can create with piano. It comes back to finding so much peace in reverb, being obsessed with things sustaining past the moment of contact… I’m making a space for people to pause in. That's what music is for me right now: taking me out of the present and bringing people into a space where everything is a bit more distilled and mist-like.”