WHEN Ela Orleans was at primary school in early 1980s Poland, she did a shift in a factory after school. Whereas children elsewhere would perhaps help with the chores for extra pocket money, the Oswiecim-born Orleans would handle a metal polisher and lathe for the good of the People’s Republic.

“It was part of growing up in a communist country,” she recalls. “We would be picked up after school around 3pm and we would work for a few hours – for free.”

Orleans says the repetitive sounds and motions of the factory relaxed her, just as “doing things in a certain way” is linked to the OCD she’s lived with for years as an adult.

“If I wasn’t doing music, I would be a very good factory worker, or doing paper work, something that is simple and mundane,” she says. “But that’s why I can go over my musical pieces with quite a lot of detail. It definitely helps me to be persistent and to be at it for hours and hours.”

Repetition is key to Orleans’s sample-driven compositions; reverb-heavy music which often evokes the sounds of sweet 1960s pop refracted through cracked glass. Her vocals display such emotional clarity that just a slight tone change transforms songs based around a repetitive, looping figure.

Two years ago she released Circles Of Upper And Lower Hell, an astonishing record inspired by Dante’s Inferno and her own descent into nervous breakdown.

Compelling and beautiful, when it was short-listed in the final selection of 2017’s Scottish Album Of The Year Awards, it seemed at last the composer was attracting deserved recognition in her adopted home.

New release Movies For Ears shows the poppier side of the work of Orleans, who first moved to Glasgow in 1997. A retrospective collection remastered by renowned US metallist James Plotkin, it features tracks from Tumult In Clouds, an album which won 2013’s Dead Albatross Music Prize.

Movies For Ears also features Walking Man, her first recording on the four-track she took with her when she moved to Warsaw in 2000. The new album features a photograph (left) of Orleans at the time, taken as she was deciding to leave her old band Hassle Hound and start making music on her own.

Since her first vinyl release, 2009’s Lost LP on French label La Station Radar, Orleans has released 12 further albums on a number of labels, including Glasgow’s Night School Records, which released Circles Of Upper And Lower Hell in 2017 and Movies For Ears earlier this year.

Night School’s founder Michael Kasparis will support Orleans at tonight’s Movies For Ears launch in his solo electronic guise Apostille. The label is a perfect fit for Orleans, who features in a roster dominated by similarly independent-minded women musicians such as Helena Celle, Molly Nilsson, Cucina Povera and LA’s Patience aka Roxanne Clifford.

Kasparis was an early champion of Orleans, writing her first big online review when he worked for London’s Rough Trade Records shop.

The CCA gig may be her last live show for a while as she focuses more on film-related projects, she says. Over a year ago, the venue was the site of the world premiere of her score for Cowards Bend The Knee, a film by Canadian artist Guy Maddin.

Her Lunar Odyssey project, an “audio-visual time capsule” developed in Aberdeenshire, is expected to be unveiled later this year.

Orleans is also currently working her way through 20,000 hours of archival material from the Nasa Moon landings for a project with Sonica, the sonic arts festival run by Glasgow-based arthouse Cryptic.

The research work and the retrospective release have given her perspective, she says.

“Now I feel I am allowing myself to go back to that naivete, that innocence of that photograph in Warsaw, and not judge myself so much,” Orleans says. “To care less that things have to sound this way or that way. I think doing this record really helped me to step back and enjoy what I’ve done without being big-headed. I’ve done actually quite a lot and it’s not bad, you know?”