Louise Latham
For every waking hour while recording her debut album, Reclaimed, Louise Latham was consumed by the project. In fact, even in her sleep there was no letting go.
"I slept next to the Telefunken analogue machine in the studio for the entire two-month period," she recalls.
"It was quite a magical time, feeling surrounded day and night by the recording process, which for me is a creative process as involved and fulfilling as writing."
Which would explain why the songs exert an intimate pull on the senses, why they resonate with such an elemental force. That and the empathic production of Arno Guveau, whose cinematic arrangements accentuate rather than overstate the dark romantic heart of Latham's writing.
"The record has a haunting, dramatic and magical atmosphere complementing the songs themselves beautifully," she says.
And then there's Latham's voice – pure, ethereal, intense, profoundly moving. When she talks about touchstones, she mentions the simplicity and economy of Tracy Chapman's compositions, the big quiet of Tori Amos's Boys For Pele album, and the ambitious scope of Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. Yet it was Cara Dillon's eponymously-titled debut that led to an epiphany of sorts for Latham.
"It awoke something so fundamental within my musical heart, like all good folk music can. I realised my creative impulses were so essential to who I was and what I wanted to be, that it was the most natural thing to follow these feelings rather than channel them in a different direction."
Latham, a Cardiff native, was directing theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival when she first heard Dillon. Shortly afterwards, she began working on her own folk songs with saxophonist Lee Goodall. One of these songs was 'Fatuma', championed by award-winning songwriter Tommy Sands on his Northern Irish radio show.
If Latham found an ally in Sands, she found a sonic architect in Guveau, who has worked with Manfred Mann and former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Bob Weston. He built a studio in his Dutch flat specifically to record Reclaimed, creating "an atmosphere with lamps and rugs, an artistic bohemian feel". Throughout the sessions Latham evoked the mood of each composition by conveying to her collaborators the imaginary scenes that informed them.
"We concentrated on the album for that entire period. Arno and I were incredibly focused and passionate about creating the album, so every waking moment was spent recording, editing and talking about arrangements. We would sit in his kitchen talking over the day's recording and forming ideas for the next."
Latham credits Guveau with shaping the sound of her music.
"He has a gift for creating folk pop arrangements, especially his use of the drums and percussion. Some of the parts for the album sound like film scores. He knew that I collaborated closely with a cellist and knew that strings would complement the earthy, folky sensibility of the writing. The strings became a fundamental part of Reclaimed."
If the strings are a core feature of the album, so too are the harmonies, an affinity for which was fostered during Latham's formative years in Wales.
"There is a strong emphasis on singing in Wales, and growing up there meant that I was encouraged to become a member of numerous choirs – a youth choir, a school choir and a church choir. I also formed duets at school. The material we sang varied, but there were traditional Welsh folk songs included in some of the choirs, and my love of vocal harmonies definitely came out of these experiences. As someone who has always appreciated big open space, I guess the lush Welsh mountains influenced my musical sensibility in that music can have a cinematic, epic landscape."
It's an aural landscape made visible by Latham on Reclaimed, an alluring collection whose warmth and humanity is a balm in austere times.
