During the New England Festy in September, a little known band by the name of Lau was on the bill for Sunday’s line-up. Many attendees scratched their heads wondering who this mysterious act was, and once they began their set, people poured to the stage area to catch their unknown sounds. This musically brilliant trio is comprised of Kris Drever on vocals and guitar, Martin Green on accordion, wurlitzer, keys, and various electronics, and Aidan O’Rourke on fiddle.
Hailing from Scotland, and formed in 2004, they introduced their hauntingly addicting melodies to audiences across the pond this summer for the first time. Live For Live Music caught up with them following their set to learn more.
L4LM: What brought you stateside? So many music fans have never heard of you until recently. Tell us more.
Lau: We’ve played in the UK and Europe for quite a long time, and we haven’t done quite a lot of shows in the U.S., for one reason or another. We started a new relationship with some people over here recently so we had the chance to put together a couple of weeks tour. This is our first U.S. tour. We’re here to play and let everybody know we exist and do our thing. And to promote our new record, The Bell That Never Rang.
L4LM: How many records do you have out there?
Lau: This is our fourth studio album. Plus, we have a live album and a couple of collaborative EP’s. We have quite a lot of music out there. We’ve dipped in and out of North America over the last eight years or so for festivals and the like. This is the first tour with a team behind us, a new record to promote, and lots of nice gigs and festivals to do. It seems this bluegrass Americana scene has embraced us, which is lovely.
L4LM: What do you think of the reception your band has received from fans here in the U.S. so far?
Lau: We were always told, years ago, that our music would fit into this sort of jam band scene. We just haven’t really had an opportunity, until now, but people just seem to really get it, which is cool. We’re not a typical Scottish folk band. We kind of wander off, in certain ways, and the fans here are familiar with those wanderings. This was only our second festival, but we feel the love. We’d love to come back.
L4LM: There’s one particular instrument that fans are curious about. Tell us more about this unique piece you incorporate into the music.
Lau: We have an instrument that we built which is called ‘moorag.’ We just like finding noises really, so we spent a lot of years finding noises on our own instruments. Then we started looking around to other places to make noises with, so eventually building something made sense. We’ve had a few contraptions in the past, and a mild understanding of electronics, and some disregard for personal safety. 
Most of the noises are actually generated by us, just not necessarily at that moment in time. So what ‘moorag’ does is manipulate samples, as there also is a computer involved. All of our samples we do make. We like the idea of things that we’ve made in the past, but the idea of playing to backing track doesn’t seem appealing. It seems kind of stifling, and it would also mean that we would have to play everything exactly the same every time. It’s good to build stuff. We like making things. When we’re at home we have slightly more stuff. Can’t bring it all on the plane.
Over the last ten years, each of our sound palettes have been expanding. Martin has just taken it a little bit further than the rest of us. There’s something nice about us all gathering around it [the moorag]. It’s a nice way to start the show. We like the physical proximity to each other. It’s quite unifying.
When we started, there was none of that stuff. We were an acoustic band, more or less. Occasionally, we revisit some bits of that material. It’s quite interesting going from this thing where there’s so many different sensors happening at the same time, down to just the acoustic trio. We try to make it feel like it’s all part of the same band and, because of all the extra stuff that has grown up with us over the last ten years, both of those line-ups do sound like the same band, despite having wildly different sonic palettes. I don’t think, unless we’ve kind of grown from the acoustic trio to the supplemented thing, we could get away with that.
L4LM: Your unique incorporation of expanded sound brings a huge energy to the stage that gets thrown out into the crowd. Take us deeper into this concept.
Lau: Tim Matthew, our sound engineer, has spent a lot of time getting our instruments to sound better, and bigger. That has made a big difference to what we can do. We don’t really ever truly play acoustic. It doesn’t really work. I think that once you’ve decided there’s going to be a speaker and a microphone in the chain, then you’re paying a lot of attention to the noise that comes out of the speaker, because that’s what people hear. It’s been useful to us because it’s a sort of artificial noise that comes out of the PA, not necessarily through the use of effects, but how close things are miked and trying to get as much body as possible.
It’s a good journey. We keep finding new things. Spending time to make sure we get all of the sonic elements to work right so it’s not too far outside of what the band’s sound is anyway. It’s reassuring to know that we can sit down, without any of the extra things that we’ve added, like the electronics and the pedals, and still make high quality music that sounds like us. When you take everything away, it’s not a huge difference.
We’re having a really great time. Very well organized festivals, very friendly. A lot of musicians from a festival in Scotland, called Celtic Connections, brings in a lot of Americans. We’ve become friends with a lot of musicians from over here, so it’s nice to see them. We did a guest spot with Alison Brown and Garry West at Fresh Grass Fest. They did a tribute concert to The Band, so we went up and did a song for them. There were people we knew there from Scotland. The more we play music, and the more we travel, the more we bump into people all over the place. It’s a nice family. It’s nice to see those American musicians in America. We normally see them in Scotland in January, which is not their natural habitat.
For more information on Lau, please visit their official website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjESfI3VREA
Words by Sarah Bourque.