Lau return: On their new record, mini-festival, and the past, present and future of folk music.

The band are currently celebrating 10 years together with the release of their first compilation. The record, Decade (2007-2017), is out to signal the time past and the weight of the music they have recorded. Many miles have been travelled, many chords played and many gigs played, but, Green says, working on a new record is a fillip for the group.

Lau have a busy month ahead: at Celtic Connections they present An Evening with Lau at the City Halls on January 25, which will be followed by their own mini-festival, Lau-Land, on February 3. There are concerts in Ireland, too, with dates in Letterkenny, Dublin and Belfast in January.

Their mini-festival, which takes place at the CCA in Glasgow, will be intriguing. The band will lead fiddle workshops, guitar workshops, talks and group chats, besides a (fun-sounding) build-your-own-synth workshop. There will also be a public discussion on a subject close to the band’s heart. Titled How Does a Traditional Form Evolve?, it addresses a subject one can almost feel straining at the core of the band’s sound and vision.

Each member of the band comes from a traditional music or folk background, but the music of Lau does not always sound rooted in the past. The three members are from different places – Drever is from Orkney, Green from Cambridgeshire, O’Rourke from Oban – and although their music is rooted in the traditional, the tangents taken are sometimes radical. Take, for example, the 17-minute title track of The Bell That Never Rang, or the resonant insistence of Tiger Hill (Armoured Man) from the same record.

Green says working on a new album is “good, psychologically”. They are not looking back. “The 10-year thing – there is no desire to live retrospectively,” he said. “There was a desire to put in a chapter mark [with the compilation], but definitely I think it would be a sad state of affairs if you just look backward. So it’s good to have started on this new record, and have some things that we can be playing in sound checks when we are away.”

He adds: “We have quite a short attention span, so it needs to keep moving. And because we tend to go off and do other things, when we are not together, all that feeds back. We try to steal some ideas from other musicians and bring them back to our lab. I think that’s quite healthy.

“I don’t think the band is settled, as a sound. I hope it never is, to be honest.”

Of the Lau-Land activities, Green says it is a kind of mini-festival which offers workshops that other festivals should consider. Green says the band have noticed that events of this kind are often found at folk and electronic music gatherings, but not so much at rock festivals. He doesn’t know why.

“We put together people who we think might make interesting experimental stuff but don’t know each other,” he says. “And because it is all based at the CCA, there is also a visual aspect. We will create a beautiful film and soundtrack in real time at a lab.”

Thinking about the planned discussion of folk music and its history and future at the event, Green says it is still the band’s primary language, which is then translated and redefined as they work together.

“I think because we grew up in a folky world, and all of our parents in one way or another played folk music, it is almost like a default state. I sometimes think that the three of us – who have a similar kind of social and political and musical interests outside music – might have been in a completely different band with the same people, if we happened to have grown up playing rock music first, for example. But because it was traditional music that was around us, that is our primary language. And the scene that goes around that is strong, and fun, and you end up meeting all kinds of people.”

With the renaissance in folk and traditionally-inspired music in the last 20 years, Green says he has often thought about the role tradition plays in the making of the music today. It seems a particularly interesting question with Lau, whose music seems to look backwards and forwards at the same time. On tracks like Far from Portland, which can be found on the Decade album, a frazzled and scratchy loop forms a modernist pulse beneath a

fiddle tune as yearning and bleak

as any folk elegy.

Green says: “In the 1960s and 70s, especially in England, people were looking back to folk music with almost an academic interest – ‘we want to know what this stuff was’. That was my parents’ generation. But I am the generation after that, and almost taking it as read. That music was just something that was around us, and it is strong enough for us to dip in and out of, if we choose to.”

He says Lau, as a band, have never been drawn to doing “traditional things”, but conversely, as individuals, they have. “There’s a fine line between preservation and conservation, and setting stuff in stone, as it was hundreds of years ago, for a slightly arbitrary reason. But I think there is something we all feel that is quite special about traditional music that needs to be nurtured. But it does not come out in Lau’s music, directly, very much.”

I ask Green if, when they are writing, whether a folk tune is a starting point, or a tone or melody which provides a root for growth in another direction. “It definitely comes out in Aiden, and how he writes, and it’s almost like it is part of him. You can hear West Highland fiddle in everything he writes, even in the kind of classical music that he writes. And I think that’s stronger in him.” Green himself has always “floated around in the traditions” and doesn’t have, he says, a strong accent musically.

But old music’s lingering influence is always there. “I do think it plays a part in harmony. And a lot of folk bands have broadened out their harmonic choices in recent years. If you grew up with Debussy, that would seem like stepping outside of that. But if you grow up in this diatonic world, it’s different.”

As for the new studio album, listeners should not expect a repeat of its predecessor. “For me, I associate that last record so strongly with Joan Wasser, who produced it, and The Elysian Quartet, who played on it. It was like a moment with those people – it doesn’t seem quite like a basis for the next one, because we will be working with different people. I associate it with those actual weeks we spent in the studio. I think sonically we learned a lot of things. Joan has an amazing ear for sound, and every time you work with someone like that, you learn.”

Touring has come, and will come, before the record, however.

“Playing is the good bit of the job, so there are a lot of hours in the van, but there are also a lot of hours onstage, so that is what you look forward to. We are a well-worn pair of slippers as a social outfit now when we get in the van. If it was socially difficult, it would seem like a long time to spend in a tin box.”

Green says that, perhaps because of their various projects and collaborations outside Lau “we are still delighted when we get to make noise together”. Even if, on occasion, they expected other people to join in.

“There’s been a couple of times this festival season that we have gone: ‘Great, we’ve done the gig, let’s go to the bar and have a session,’ and there’s only been us there,” he says, smiling. “Which is slightly strange, but it’s been lovely. Other people turned up eventually, thank goodness. And because we don’t play traditional music in the gig, we do still sit and play folk tunes with each other, which is great. It is still a bit of a hobby, which keeps it fresh.”

An Evening with Lau, City Halls, Glasgow, January 25. Welcome to Lau-Land, CCA, Glasgow, February 3