Laura

Laura's David Gagliardi has never played in Adelaide before - a fact which perhaps explains his excitement. "I'm looking forward to this tour to think we're back in a band again and not just running some business."

Playing in a band can get that way sometimes, especially when you have a tight budget with which to produce an album as complex, layered and downright intense as the newly-released 'Radio Swan Is Down.'

"I don't think we really had a clear vision from the beginning," Gagliardi explains of the length of the recording process. "It was not clear to us exactly what we were doing at the start and we didn't decide and then set out on a path to do that. We just kind of go with what feels right at the time and, for this album, that was a broad spectrum of music. By the end of it, we had, I think, we had two and a half album's worth of music sitting there to choose from, as a final tracklisting."

The album was recorded at three separate intervals during the first half of the year. "Doing it in segments was kind of, I guess we did it out of necessity, we didn't have the entire album written and prepared and then went in to record it, we just recorded where we were at, at the time. I enjoyed doing it in the segments, it just kinda gave me a break to step back and look at everything. Sometimes when you record everything at one slab of a session, you don't get to sit back and look at it and gauge exactly where you're at. It was nice to get to phase three and realise, 'hang on, that song from phase one that we really, really like - we played it too slow. It's not the way we want it to be'; and redo that."

Being a guitar-laden instrumental band, I posit that where emotions cannot be expressed in words, they will become the pervasive influence on the instrumentation. Gagliardi agrees. "I suppose it's wholly from the experience of the six of our emotions, I guess that's what we're doing. We don't have a plan or a real single voice, or a belief in anything we're trying to put forward or a strive to achieve anything other than creating music that we really enjoy and it comes from the emotions, very much so. You can see that live on stage sometimes, you can be in a section of a song a month ago and we got to the end of this piece, we were in the middle of a piece and Ben, the guitarist, just lost it in a frenzy for a minute and it was obviously an emotional point, something happened and it triggered him and that actually in turn sort of triggered me. And I think that's an example of the live thing, in the writing process you've got six people coming together in a room, once or twice or three times a week, sometimes four or five times a week with this album, that it depends very much on how everyone's feeling."

Once emotions are expressed in words, there can be a sense of method acting in the performance, delivering pre-packaged emotion at a different time in a different space. With Laura, however, each night's sensations can manifest themselves free of any preconceptions - the way the band feels on any one night can enormously impact on the show and the audience.

"We do that with the songs we play and the moods we set up and with the performance from all the individuals and us collectively, that can have a really amazing effect on what we set up. [Also] the live visuals that we play to, we play with a big live visual screen behind us. We have a projectionist that tours with us and does all those different series of imagery that we've worked on and talked about over the last year, couple of years, with all the shows. I guess every show is completely different to me, anyway...Primarily, [we play] pieces of music, they're not songs. I think that happens on its own without us talking about it and really even considering it, [the nightly variations] would be a part of it that we let grow on its own."

Live visuals, versatile dispositions and an album charting the intense landscape between polite bewilderment and anxious noise. Theirs is an Adelaide debut I'm rather looking forward to.

Ben Revi

Laura play at the Enigma Bar on Sat 14 October. 'Radio Swan Is Down' is out now through MGM.