Ladytron
Mira Aroyo, the most Bulgarian member of electropop masters Ladytron, talks ahead of their Luminous gig.
By Andrew P Street
How did you write this new album, Velocifero? Weren't you touring more or less up until a week before you went into the studio? It wasn't even a week! We came back from LA into London, then flew to
Paris the next day and were really, really jetlagged – for the first
week we were absolutely no use at all. We weren't even functioning well
enough to find a decent hotel. So it was pretty much straight away, but
it had been written and produced up to a point. I mean, we had breaks
here and there [while touring] – like at the moment we play festivals
on weekends, but the weeks we have free so we're working on music at
home. We all have our setups at home, so we were all working on ideas
for the previous two years before we went into the studio.Some of the
songs were over a year old, and others were written the month before we
went into the studio.
It sounds an album to play live. Well, we
hope so – the songs are fun to play. Actually, when we recorded the
video for ‘Runaway', we had to listen to the song for a day while we
were filming, and what you hear on stage is so far removed from what
the song actually sounds like. So it was so refreshing to hear it as it
was meant to be. We'd forgotten! We were all very relieved: "Oh, wow!
It actually sounds OK – it doesn't sound weird!"
Velocifero seems to follow on from 2005's Witching Hour, more so than the previous two albums do. [2002's] Light And Magic seemed far more sprawling and experimental and [2001 debut] 604 was very much a retro-synth record... Yeah, that was because when we started out as a band we didn't really
know what we were doing – we probably still don't know what we're doing – but Light And Magic was quite different to 604 because
we'd learned more about production. We started playing live a lot more
and that had a huge influence – it made us grow as a band a lot and
discover things about dynamics, and that manifested itself on Witching Hour,
which I think was a big jump up for us in terms of the quality of the
sounds and the instrumentation, and the songwriting as well.
So do you feel that Velocifero is Witching Hour Part 2? No, but we felt like with Witching Hour we'd found what we were happy
with and that was the first album that fulfilled our expectations, and
that formed a basis from which we could fly off. We didn't want to
replicate it, and there were some things we could work on and improve,
like more interesting synth sounds, better drum programs, more bass:
these are all things that we were thinking when we were writing
Velocifero. Witching Hour gave us a bit of freedom because it was so
well received, but at the same time we toured it for over two years and
were dying to write new songs.
Now, is it true that you basically have an entire new album ready to go? Yeah, we do have a lot of other material that didn't make it onto Velocifero. It's kinda of a slightly different mood and we wanted to make Velocifero quite
a concentrated record: still very diverse, but quite punchy and
fast-paced. We had had other material that was quite atmospheric that
we thought could go onto a companion album, but we're gonna see what we
do about that. It might get used for other things.
Ladytron play at the Opera House as part of Vivid's Luminous season, presented by the Sydney Opera House.
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