Rocketman is the debut album by Lizzy Laurance, a body of work written and recorded on a decaying dredging boat in Copenhagen.
Weaving distressed field-recordings and found music with a sultry vocal style, Rocketman is languorous, foreboding and genre-defying. With influences like David Lynch, Lana Del Rey and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Lizzy Laurance creates an atmosphere that’s sombre, dreamlike and ecstatic as she pulls at the fabric of the pop song, tearing and restitching it into something glamorous and terrible.
In this interview spotlight, I chat with Lizzy about her cool new project, technology, adapting during a pandemic and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Where are you from and how do You describe your style of music?
I’m from Norfolk but currently living in London. The music I make is site-specific, which means that I develop, write and record the work in and around a particular location. Often, I’ll go to stay there for a period and really immerse myself in the place. I guess my approach might be called psychogeographic as I’m interested in weaving in the history of the site through narrative song writing, intersected by my present-day experiences of being there.
I record my work on-site; singing songs, recording the ambience of the space, using instruments that I find there or making instruments out of found objects. Because I’m often working with “found sound” and recordings of music that drifts into the space, the style of my work can differ quite a lot from project to project. I supposed the thing that’s constant is this psychogeographic approach and a fuzzy kind of haunted feel; the past and the present woven together, at times harmonizing and at times rupturing.
How did you get here? As in, what inspired or motivated you to take on this journey through music?
When I was 19 I had this long illness where I pretty much house bound. I didn’t have anything to do so I started to make music. I taught myself guitar and started writing songs. They were mainly strange, off-kilter folk songs about novels. I’ve always been really into literature and exploring ideas through story telling.
I wanted to be a writer when I was younger but as I got more and more into music, I felt like it offered a more immediate path to the kind of world-building I was interested in. You can create such an atmosphere in music and there’s so many different elements and possibilities. It’s like each musical element tells a different part of the story.
How does your latest project compare/contrast with your previous release(s)? Were you setting out to accomplish anything specific, follow a specific theme, or explore different styles of creation?
I released one EP prior to this album which was about YouTube. It used clips from loads of YouTube videos; make-up tutorials, video diaries, families arguing, religious conversion stories, ASMR etc. I was interested in the way people use this platform to show such intimate things, possibly more personal things than they would reveal to the people in their lives. Modern music making can be the same; it’s something you create at home, in your bedroom, with your computer which then gets shared with the whole world. It’s like the public and the private world have become weirdly merged and I wanted to show some of the beauty and the uncanniness of that.
When I look back on that work now, I can see that I was becoming interested in site and location, it’s just that the “site” was an online platform. Rocketman, my new album, uses a physical location; I made it on a derelict dredging boat in Copenhagen. I went to stay there for a month in Summer 2019. I didn’t really know what the work was going to be or what it was going to sound like when I got there, I just started making recordings of the boat which was cavernous, rusted and yielded such a cacophony of unfamiliar noises that I was never quite sure if there were people on board or not.
The boat was home to an Arts & Technology institute called Illutron, so there were various workshops on board and a lot of junk; it was like a scrap yard. There were closets teaming with wires and cables, shelves of broken audio equipment, guitar pedals, monitors with their insides all exposed, shelves overflowing with metal work, cabins full of power tools. Members of the institute could come on board whenever they wanted and build stuff so there’d be these half-finished or abandoned art projects lying around; a massive LED board like from a sports stadium, a robotic puppet, fire canons, rockets.
When I first arrived, there were storms. The boat was moored but it still heaved back and forth, making these huge moaning sounds. It was like a depressed whale! The power went out, water seeped in and everything shifted about in the hull. I was alone on the boat, apart from occasional visits from men coming to use the power tools, and I felt scared. There was a strange energy about the place.
I wrote songs about workmen, tyrants, ship wrecks, sirens and widows, imagining and fleshing out stories about the site which I read and sensed. I recorded them all in and around the clanging, heaving metal hull of the boat, making instruments out of the electrical detritus that surrounded me.
At the end of my stay it was revealed to me that the boat had been closely connected with the infamous “submarine murder” of 2018, only a year before. I was horrified but, as I listened back to the songs I’d written and the recordings I made, I could suddenly hear it through these pieces. It was like I had known all along.
The album is formed of 10 tracks of songs, sound-scapes and collage compositions made from recordings from the site and tracks my own voyage into the depths of the place, physical and psychological, and back out the other side. It’s a bit like a journey through the underworld.
Name the biggest challenge you faced as a creative during these unprecedented? How did you adapt? How have you kept the creative fires burning during all this?
It’s been an interesting time and also very informative to my work. I’ve been suffering from long covid so I haven’t been able to do very much. I’ve been thinking a lot about sickness though and its relationship to spirituality and solitude. I feels slightly complicated to say but I really loved the lockdown. It was like I suddenly had to live this quite, kind of monastic life and discovered that it was really good for me!
I’m currently recovering and working on another site-specific project at an old medieval hospital in Norwich which is giving me the chance to draw on some of these ideas and to create parallels between ancient and modern sickness and treatment. It’s been a very inspiring time for me, despite its difficulties.
What was the last song you listened to?
“Gracias a la Vida”. It’s an old Hispanic protest song originally by Violetta Parra but there’s so many incredible versions by modern artists as well.
Which do you prefer? Vinyl? 8-tracks? Cassettes? CDs? MP3s? Streaming platforms?
I love Vinyl but sadly don’t have enough space for a record collection in my tiny London flat! I mostly listen to music on bandcamp.
Where is the best place to connect with you and follow your journey?
I really appreciate Your time. Anything else before we sign off?
Thanks for having me!
Just one shameless plug – my debut album, Rocketman, is out now!
