Laura Misch Announces 'Lithic (Live at the Barbican)' Album
(Sacks & Co) With her ambitious second album, Lithic, composer, songwriter, and saxophonist Laura Misch crafted an immersive world from stone. Recorded across caves, quarries, and coastlines, it invited listeners into a place where the natural world became both collaborator and instrument in an exploration of humanity's relationship with deep geological time.
On Lithic (Live at the Barbican), set for release September 4, that imagined world comes to life: a shared act of listening unfolding within the Barbican's own cavernous hall. Watch the live video for track "Soften" today.
Recorded during Laura's largest headline performance to date, Lithic (Live at the Barbican) captures the moment the album stepped beyond the studio. More than recreating the record, the live ensemble transforms Lithic's rich electronic textures and saxophone clouds into a shared physical experience where architecture, theatre, and nature become part of one extraordinary performance.
Under the musical direction of Eliza Oakes, Laura is joined by Marysia Osu (harp and piano), Kat Newlon (cello), Tim Gardner (violin) and Matt Davies (drums), whose sensitive performances bring new depth to the music, allowing every breath, gesture, and improvisation to remain palpable.
"I wanted the live performance to feel very ritualistic," Laura says. "We really thought about the Barbican like it was this kind of cave. We'd built this whole visual world and then it became this question of: how do we bring those elements into the Barbican? It became about all coming together."
The Barbican's grand stage becomes a contemporary cave: a place of gathering, storytelling, and deep listening. Throughout the performance, nature is recreated through handcrafted sound. Water drips into microphones. Waves are conjured by an ocean drum. Ancient stone resonates through an 180-year-old lithophone, while the pulse of a handmade goatskin drum becomes the heartbeat of the performance.
Where the studio album embraced vast atmospherics, the live recording brings listeners closer to the people making the music. "We were trying to be inspired by nature, rather than relying on the electronics, pulling it into something human." Laura reflects. "The voice is really raw. Sometimes the recorded album goes into a soundscape space. With the live album, I feel like you can feel the presence of the musicians at all times. It's very human, even though it's inspired by the elements."
The live album also brings another side of Laura's work into sharper focus. While Lithic explored geological time, its songs remained rooted in human experience - care, belonging, and connection. Performed live, they emerge with renewed intimacy. The tenderness of "Soften," the communal call of 'Scrolls', and the cyclical hope of "Spiral" reveal an artist whose writing is as grounded in human connection as it is in elemental sound. "Be tender with yourself." "Gather your kin, strangers too." "Where do we go from here?" These are existential songs, but they are also invitations: to slow down, to listen, and to imagine new ways of being together.
That desire for connection feels especially urgent now. "In this time of AI and separation, it's really about being in the room together. It's about the collective live experience."
Beginning with the intimate vulnerability of "Breathing," moving through the communal energy of "Scrolls," before culminating in the expansive closing arc of "Spiral," the live album forms a gradual invitation into Laura's forthcoming European tour, where the same immersive live performance continues across concert halls, theatres and churches - from Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and Berlin's Heimathafen Theatre to Zurich's Kirche Neumunster - each space subtly reshaping the work through its own architecture.
For Laura, Lithic (Live at the Barbican) is not simply the documentation of a concert, but the culmination of years spent building a world that only comes fully to life through collaboration. Shared by musicians, filmmakers, lighting designers, movement directors, and audiences alike, it is an invitation to step inside that world and, for a moment, inhabit it together.
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