Laura Kampman - Coming Into Daily Life
Credit: Laura Kampman
Art acts as a vessel for the whole spectrum of human emotions and experience; however, it has a particularly uncanny ability to deliver us from anguish. Through its consumption and creation it offers us a conduit for our suffering. Laura Kampman’s new EP Coming Into Daily Life is the product of her journey through the upending assault of grief and a timely, intimate portrayal of what it means to be human.
The story behind the artist’s new project is one that is underscored by tragedy. Two years ago, Laura lost her father, an event that proved to be a definitive inflection point in her life. In the wake of these events, still processing her grief, she found herself retreating from the physical world. Solace, somewhat surprisingly, was to be found in the soft glow of digital spaces, “I went back to my phone when I was grieving, it really drew me back into a digital world which for me was more healing than toxic”.
Credit: Laura Kampman
Laura Kampman’s experience speaks to an uncomfortable truth of the modern age. The eyes no longer seem to represent the windows to the soul, instead they reflect the backlight of the thing that does. Today, our most intimate secrets, depraved thoughts and precious memories are all encased within a few centimetres of glass and metal that is held in our hands, sat in our pockets and resting on our nightstands, never more than a few feet away from us. It is in the contents of these devices, within the annals of our camera rolls, voice notes and text messages that we can find the last vestiges of our loved ones and, if only for the briefest of moments, the impression of distance rather than loss.
For Laura, comfort was to be found within a collection of audio recordings archived through the years, documenting fragments of conversation, snippets of the natural world and other intimate flashes of her life behind closed doors, “I had never experienced grief and I couldn’t listen to music because the songs stirred up a lot of feelings in me. It wasn’t calming for me to listen to songs anymore but I still loved listening to sounds''.
The soothing nature of these recordings soon turned to inspiration and before long, Laura was beginning to piece together her vast array of samples, “I got asked to do a radio show for an hour and I asked my friend ‘What should I do, I’m not really listening to music’ and he said ‘Just do phone recordings for an hour’ so then I started to make compositions using them”. After presenting these to an audience over the airwaves, she decided there was enough substance within these early demos to take the idea further, “I started to play these compositions live, using four phones and a mixer and after around a year, I thought it was time to put something out”.
Credit: Laura Kampman
Following its extensive development, Coming Into Daily Life represents a snapshot of Laura’s craft today. The project is an amalgamation of telephone calls, birdsong, voice notes, singing, scraps of instrumentation and much more, all stitched together to create a calming, ethereal soundscape set across two parts and enjoyed over eighteen serene minutes.
What makes this project stand out from the myriad other examples of ambient music is its beautiful, unfiltered transparency. With all the samples taken directly and exclusively from the artist’s phone, we are given a glimpse into her most intimate moments in a way that feels, at times, almost voyeuristic. At one junction during the title track, we hear Laura’s soft vocals as she performs a delicate rendition of the Robbie Williams single ‘Angels’, a moment that strikes with significance on multiple levels, “Every recording has its own memory and me singing this is from around four years ago when I had started dating a boy, we were both musicians and we would sing each other to sleep over voice messages''.
This, of course, is just one fragment of this epic tapestry and a small glimpse into the totality of self that had to be turned over to this project. Here stands Laura Kampman, naked and exposed however, this is exactly where she wants to be, “I recently played this live to around fifty people and it was incredibly vulnerable for me but I love that feeling of being naked in a way, then I feel like I am doing something right”.
Credit: Laura Kampman
Cathartic by its very nature, art allows us to channel our pain and through the process of putting together this EP, Laura has slowly reemerged back into the throes of daily life. Awaiting her on the other side of this journey was a new version of herself, fortified by the strength of her experiences and a newfound appreciation for the world around her. “Hearing these sounds and making this work really made me slowly fall in love with everything that surrounds me again” she continued to explain that “through grief and this whole process I became so much more aware of the things that are close to me, that give me so much support and comfort and are so beautiful. For me, this is what the EP presents, the beauty that surrounds me everyday”.
Grief is a personal journey, nevertheless, it is one of the unifying afflictions of our human experience. In a time increasingly defined by division, these small reminders of our universal commonality are vital. On Coming Into Daily Life Laura Kampman chronicles the duality of pain and beauty ever-present within the banality of our everyday lives. Put simply, it is a thought provoking triumph.
Coming Into Daily Life by Laura Kampman is set for release on 4th March.
