hello,
Just to give a quick update on where we're at...

Just adding finishing touches and tweaks to album number 2! Extremely excited to let everyone hear it...Will probably be released in it's entirety in a few months with a few single tunes out before that!

In the meantime we have a special, double EP type thing coming out soon. We recently signed to independent label Just Music www.justmusic.co.uk and with them have put together a small collection of our favourite recordings to date. Teaming up with Just Music and new manager Harry Farmer is like a fresh start - finally getting to put our heads above the parapet and say ‘hello’ to a wider audience…

Also, gigs! We’ll be playing at the beginning of October – looking like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham & London – details to follow – can’t wait!

We’ll be in touch…

Laura x

laki mera

arts editor keith bruce's article on laki mera album download

Yesterday, I'm prepared to speculate, tickets for Radiohead's return to Glasgow Green on June 27 next year will have sold out in less time than it takes to cross Argyle Street on a busy Saturday afternoon. The band's return to the city's iconic Clydeside parkland, where they played a fondly remembered gig at the end of September 2000, when Kid A was still young, comes at a time when the band are once again in the news for being at the cutting edge. By the end of June, their band's latest album, In Rainbows, will have been available in conventional compact disc and retro vinyl format for six months (it's out on Hogmanay), but most fans will already have the music by way of the pay-what-you-think-it's-worth download which was made available in October.

When Glasgow band Laki Mera completed their debut album Clutter at their studio in the former Templeton's carpet factory which overlooks Glasgow Green, multi-instrumentalist Andrea Gobbi suggested to his somewhat incredulous bandmates that they simply give the music away. 'Nobody does that,' was the reaction. Today, however, that's what they are doing and every Herald reader can help themselves to a copy of Clutter simply by visiting http://www. rolinc.co.uk/lakimera.html .

I'd encourage you all to do so and then hurry along to their gig at Glasgow¹s excellent new Stereo venue in Renfield Lane on Thursday (or Po Na Na in Edinburgh's Frederick Street a week today). Laki Mera are a very sophisticated band, built around the songwriting talent and exquisite vocals of Laura Donnelly, and featuring a quartet of highly accomplished
musicians: Gobbi, pianist Keir Long, cellist Trevor Helliwell and percussionist Tim Harbinson. Their skill in mixing live playing with electronic wizardry not only marks them out as ideal signings to Paul Haig¹s ROL inc label, but also as significant followers of Radiohead's lead.

Donnelly is a big fan of Thom Yorke and his colleagues but points out that her band's motives in giving away their music are rather different.

'Radiohead had nothing to lose and wanted everyone to be able to get the album at the same time,' she says. 'Our priority is to get people to hear the music. If people hear it, maybe half of them will like it and we'll be able to get bigger and better gigs. We'd all love to leave our day jobs and get the second album recorded ­ we already have new songs in our set.'Donnelly is a Glasgow School of Art graduate and is employed for her design skills making blinds for a company in Clydebank. Her music-making, however, goes back to her school days and songwriter, record producer and Pearlfisher Davey Scott remembers her impressing him as a 14-year-old at East Kilbride Arts Centre. She was subsequently a member of God's Boyfriend while still in her teens, releasing singles on the trendy Fierce Panda and Rough Trade labels.

That nascent career fizzled out, but for the past four or five years Laki Mera has been taking shape after she met Gobbi when she was working in a bar. He is from Rome and, like Long, a trained sound engineer. Together Gobbi and Long run a recording business, Carrier Waves, which is the basis of the band's self-sufficient recording set-up.

Harbinson is from Belfast and a former sideman of Juliet Turner and Duke Special. Donnelly wrote the band's ROL single How Dare You, but she says the band are trying to write more collectively as well as simplifying their approach, both live and in the studio. The result is music of great elegance ­ log on and check it out.