Laura Misch – Echoes
London saxophonist, singer-songwriter, and electronic producer Laura Misch announces her second album Lithic, out June 5, 2026 on One Little Independent Records. Lead single “Echoes” is out now, and it sets the tone for where the record is going: downward, inward, elderly.
“Echoes” started life as a score for BBC Radio 4’s A Lemur’s Song, built around research into the rhythmic calls of female lemurs. “Scientists found patterns similar to the drumbeat of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You'”, Misch explains. “I recreated the rhythm using saxophone keys as percussion before adding the goat skin drum, played by Matt Davies. I was drawn to the connections between ancestral rhythms and those shared across species”. From there, the track grew into something wider. Saxophone and voice are pitched and echoed through electronics, the reverbs shaped by Misch improvising in caves and quarries in Cornwall, then run through tape machines to age the sound further. The goat skin drum gives it a pulse that feels less like a beat and more like something biological.
Lyrically, “Echoes” moves between deep time and the immediate present. “It calls back to ancient ancestors and forward to future generations, communing with both”, she says. “The lyrics were inspired by looking at the oldest known female Venus figurines and feeling awe for these Palaeolithic early earth dwellers, and then watching a friend’s baby crawl on the floor — experiencing the same sense of wonder at how sensorily alive she is”. That contrast — Palaeolithic figurine to crawling infant — is where the song lives.
Lithic follows Misch’s debut Sample of Sky (2023) and its acoustic companion Sample of Earth (2024), completing a trilogy that has moved from air to soil to stone. The album draws on deep listening practitioners Pauline Oliveros and Annea Lockwood, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, eco-psychotherapist Ruth Allen, and David Haskell’s writing on the origins of sound. Shortly after the album drops, Misch plays her biggest headline show to date at London’s Barbican on July 3, 2026.
Tracklist:
- Breathing
- Kairos
- Echoes
- Siren
- Scrolls
- Soften
- Circle
- Fo(r)est
- Jealousea
- Mythic
- Shell
- Spiral
Tour Dates Europe:
- July 3, 2026 — London, UK — Barbican Centre
