From the Archives #19
Lawrence English / ROOM40
Here’s a long archival post for you all on this off week.
Lawrence English’s ROOM40 label is celebrating their 25th anniversary this year and so this post collects various posts from the blog featuring work from the man himself. Bandcamp recently featured Amby Downs’ kinjarling studies: soundtracks (five years on) as part of The Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp, February 2025, just the latest reminder that ROOM40 continues to be one of our favorite labels out there. They’re released so many great records I could fill this post just with a list of names. I’d point to Airport Symphony as the start of my own interest in the label, a 2007 compilation that includes tracks from Fennesz, Toshiya Tsunoda, Richard Chartier, Tim Hecker, and so many others.
But again, in honor of a quarter century of ROOM40, this post is dedicated to founder Lawrence English. I’ve included here our feature when ROOM40 was named our favorite label of the year, many reviews and blurbs of English’s records (including many collaborations), and my own feature and interview with English for Sound Propositions, an interview which took place around the release of Cruel Optimism. Happy Listening.
ACL 2021 ~ The Year’s Best Labels
Lawrence English’s Room40 has landed an amazing five releases on our year-end charts, spread across three genres. The Australian imprint is our Label of the Year, followed by Temporary Residence and PAN, who each land three. All three labels are new to this year-end feature!
By any barometer, Room40 has had a stellar year, releasing dozens of albums in the midst of a global pandemic. Now well into its third decade, the label (which is also home to Something Good and A Guide to Saints) continues to be a leader in forward-thinking music, willing to take risks in order to expand musical horizons. Ambient, drone, electronic, experimental and field recordings all feature strongly on the site, represented well by English himself, who somehow still finds the time to record his own productions. We reviewed over half a dozen Room40 releases in 2021, but it didn’t feel like enough; there was always another fantastic release right around the corner. We introduced a dozen in our Fall Music Preview, and more kept coming; in fact, the label has already announced a slew of releases for 2022, proving that it is on top of its game.
On a personal note, I can attest to the fact that orders often arrive before release date, even if ordered from the other side of the world. The first Room40 album I can recall purchasing was English’s own Transit, the latest the new meditation from Ian Wellman. As for favorites, the compilation On Isolation stands out as prescient, arriving eight years before the pandemic; Thembi Sodell’s Love Songs is a standout, as well as (no spoilers!) some of 2021’s releases. The label has a soft spot not only for winter music, but for music that recognizes the seasons with gentle grace. Nature is a continuing theme. And while much of the music is on the quiet side, some new releases veer all the way to distortion, proving that there’s no predicting the Room40 sound. Congratulations to the entire 2021 roster and to Lawrence English for running the finest record label around!
Mini-Interview
Congratulations on being named ACL’s Label of the Year! My first question is simple: somehow in the middle of a pandemic, you kicked your label into high gear, with more releases in a short period of time than we can ever recall. At the same time, you continued to release recordings of your own. How in the world did you do this?
Honestly, the very simple answer is not touring.
I like to say almost everything is a gift, I talk about that a bit in the Young Person’s Guide To Hustling In Music And The arts, and what this pandemic has given me is one location to be in, and time to really dedicate to the work of others. As much as I have enjoyed performance and travelling over the past decade, that approach to life isn’t exactly conducive to getting a lot done.
For a while there, in the earlier days of touring, I would try to bring work along to do – music or something else that would be a gesture towards ‘productivity’. The thing I realised about that was it always felt stilted and was at time frustrating. More importantly it also took away from being somewhere, in the moment. It was as if I was existing some other place to where I was, trying to service something from there and not actually be attentive to what was around me. At some point I had to be honest with myself and say that touring is a process of being present to the moments as they present themselves, and to being flexible and open to whatever might unfold.
It’s also a time where I see my friends and the social aspect of travel has been so very important for me. So many of my dearest friends are not in Australia and I have missed them a great deal this past couple of years. If you’re reading this dear friends, know I think of you often.
Is there a 2021 release of which you are most proud, and why? Is there one in the entire Room40 discography of which you are most proud to have released?
That’s an impossibly brutal question haha! I think the simple answer is probably no, but in saying that so many of the releases have very personal and deep connections for me. Aki Onda’s cassette from this year was uncovered when I was looking for old interviews I had done in the late 1990s with Blues folks like R.L. Burnside, in the process of searching for them I found that recording, and a number of others.
Working with Hyunhye Seo on her debut was another very personal project, I think there’s a huge responsibility to people’s vision when you sign on to assist them in realising work. That role a producer plays can really operate in two directions and my preference is to empower artists to reach the ideas they have in their mind’s ear and for them to be fearless in that pursuit. Being able to support artists like Tim Barnes through his duet editions with Jeph Jerman was also something I felt strongly about during the year. That kind of communal energy that comes to the fore when people need each other is something I really try to champion.
On a personal note the two CD/Book editions I realised – A Mirror Holds and Sky and Breathing Spirit Forms with Akio Suzuki and David Toop were completely satisfying projects. Both of them needed time to be realised and this period of the pandemic really helped to unlock them and firm them into something that I felt spoke to the experiences of how, and where, the pieces were realised. The book that David and Akio contributed too I know will be something I treasure going forward in my life. Memories of a time and a place realised through someone else’s sensing of shared moments. It’s rare and generous gift I suppose.
Microsound, nature and the seasons have always featured strongly in Room40 releases. What other themes are you attracted to, and what makes a release stand out to you to the extent that you publish a composer’s work?
When I started Room40, part of the reason I settled on that name was recognising what that facility at Bletchley Park represented in some way. Room40 was a code breaking facility, but what made it remarkable is who it brought together to break those codes. It didn’t just have scientists or linguists, but it also involved bakers, crossword puzzlers and other esoteric folks. It asked each of them to meditate on the same questions and problems and through doing that created this wonderful mesh of perspectives that ultimately unlocked the enigma code.
As a label curator, what attracts me to people’s work is an over-riding sense of their voice interrogating a relationship with sound and music. I hope that as we keep working together, the label and the artists, that I can provide a space for them where they can deepen those approaches and further develop the questions they want to ask of the work they do.
What were your hopes and dreams when you founded the label? Did you ever expect to achieve such success and longevity?
When Room40 started in 2000, it rose out of the ashes of another label I had been working on and its arrival spoke to some shifts that were going on with me at that time. The label originally set out to support work from artists I felt were not necessarily finding ways in which they could have their music made available. People like Zane Trow, to whom I am forever grateful for getting me started as a curator and organiser more generally, were part of that early waves of artists and in recent years he has had an amazing return to form.
The label was also about making connections between communities. Back then, as hard as it might be to imagine now, Australia and especially Brisbane felt a long way away. But through reaching out to folks like Scanner, David Shea, DJ Olive and David Toop in the early years, their support and encouragement really galvanised my determination to work on Room40 and to make it meaningful to other people. There support was instrumental and without it I do wonder what might have come of this undertaking.
In terms of the success and longevity, I appreciate you think of the label as successful. Strangely from the inside looking out I don’t necessarily see that, or at least that’s not how I think about the label an an entity. If I am honest the label has been and continues to be a labour of love and I think the day to day actions and requirements keep me from dwelling too much on success or failure. I still do almost everything for the label, if you order an LP from us, I’ll have packed that for you, I create the production masters for the LPs and CDs, and I do all of the back end tasks that need doing. I’d like to think my relationship to the label is functional and driven by the needs of the folks we are working with. It’s a friends and family label and I am very dedicated to those people we have the opportunity to support.
What is your favorite instrumental release of 2021 that is not on your label?
Yikes….that’s also a tough one….this past month I have really enjoyed these gems:
Giuseppe Ielasi ~ its appearance, reflected by three copies (901 Editions)
Hiro Kone ~ Silvercoat the Throng (Dais)
loscil ~ LUX Refractions (Hemlock Printers)
Annea Lockwood ~ Becoming Air (Black Truffle)
jim o’rourke ~ steamroom 57 (Steamroom)
amby downs ~ liminal (Self-Released)
Tell us a bit about your plans for 2022 ~ we see you already have a wide array of releases up for pre-order!
Yes, I am excited for 2022. I don’t think I’ll be touring for a while yet, partly because I need to finish off a new record that picks up where Cruel Optimism left off. I am a bit overdue for that and I am thinking I might have to make some time to work on that and perhaps slow the schedule of releases just a bit.
There’s a lot of amazing projects that are brewing away. I had the pleasure to work with the Saint Abdullah folks this year and that work they have created is just so utterly beautiful. I have also been working with Lydian Dunbar from Tralala Blip, helping him to realise some amazing new abstract work he’s been toying around with. There’s some really massive projects resolving just now too, with new works from Zimoun, a colossal archival project from Phauss, a publication from Jace Clayton (aka DJ/rupture), the re-issue project of Steve Roden’s in-between noise works and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The year is already super dense and exciting.
Once again, thanks and congratulations!
Thanks to you for the interest and support! If I can take this moment to just thank all the amazing folks who are part of this label…I owe so much to people like John Chantler and Steve Alexander who were so important when this project started out. In recent years nothing would have been possible without the amazing work of Traianos Pakioufakis who does so much design for the label and Ed at Dense who is such a treasure. Also I wanted to thank all the folks who support us and listen to the work. Without them this past few years would have been so utterly testing, I feel lucky to have been in touch with some many people who have found solace in the music we champion. Thanks all, the generosity and interest is deeply appreciated.
Lawrence English ~ A Colour for Autumn
(Room40; originally released on 12k, 2009)
The initial concept: “to take Vivaldi head-on.” Originally a sequel to Varying Degrees of Winter, A Colour for Autumn honors the incremental changes above and below the surface of the earth with corresponding shifts in timbre. On-site field recordings add a feeling of authenticity. Recently remastered and reissued in an anniversary edition, the album offers a textured experience: perhaps more than one colour for autumn, but a reflection of them all. (Richard Allen)
Alberto Boccardi / Lawrence English ~ Split (2013)
When does modern composition become drone? When the original elements are sunk into a sea of strings, brass and electronics, as they are on this evocative split release. Each of the artists composes, but in a modern fashion, either by manipulating source elements or by rearranging them to make a different sort of sense. Both pieces are based on recordings of the Antonio Lomatto choir, conducted by Davide Mainetti. The phantoms of these recordings remain, spectral yet insistent, marking their territories with smudges and streaks.
Alberto Boccardi‘s “Drops, Salt, Ask Me Next Life” begins with a breath, a human sound before the tumble into the morass. French horn and cello provide the underpinning: three foghorn notes rest atop an extended chord, referencing the work of Johann Johannsson. Midway through the third minute, the breath returns. As the sound begins to loop, the listener grows disconcerted, realizing that it is not a breath, or at least not a live intake. Louder and louder it grows, mocking the initial assumption. A winch is dragged as electronics join the fray. And that’s only the first movement.
The second movement continues to toy with expectations. A hollow pipe resonance is eventually revealed to be an extended sample of a choral note. The note will later blossom into four, a motif that will continue elsewhere on the album. Double bass and distorted guitar become prime players. At 11:49, it seems as if someone has tripped over the wires. The entire orchestra sinks into silence, giving way to a feedback hum. And for the third and final time, theories are shattered. The hum becomes a tone, the tone leads to a melody, and the melody brings the piece to a satisfying close.
Lawrence English‘s “The Rocks that Tear the Ocean” takes a more recognizable shape, starting and closing with the same choral sample, unadorned. The two halves are titled “Thrones and Domains” and “Seraphim”. While this piece might also be considered one of movements, it’s more accurately described as a single work with mirroring brackets. Between them lies a passage of thick, undulating waves (“Coronach Adrift”) and another of sea-sprung melancholy (“Weathered Hymnary”). The first selection imitates the sound of distant buoys, the second the pinging of a lonely sonar machine.
Boccardi gave English free reign to adjust and re-present the source material. In response, English composed something entirely different yet complementary. By preserving the key thread, English makes the two sides seem like a single work. Congratulations to both for their success in crossing genres by re-positioning sounds. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English ~ Wilderness of Mirrors (2014)
It’s been three years since Lawrence English‘s last album (longer than our site has been around!), but the artist has remained in the public eye through his Room40 label and his live appearances. During this time, he’s grown interested in “the physicality of live music”, and Wilderness of Mirrors attempts to bring the experience to a home crowd. The music is meant not only to be heard, but to be felt, which can only happen if the volume is turned up; listeners, don’t be shy!
The title and cover are references to T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion, not an easy poem by any stretch of the imagination, nor a happy one. An old man “in a draughty house” looks back on his life, having lost all sense but imagination. He writes of history, religion, and the difficulty of forgiveness. “These with a thousand small deliberations … multiply variety in a wilderness of mirrors.” English is not old, but he’s old enough to have accumulated some wisdom, which he applies here like an understudy of Ecclesiastes. Wilderness of Mirrors is his question shouted into the abyss, which keeps looking back but seldom says anything. This abyss is the black hole of knowledge: the place that swallows facts, theories and opinions, yet never allows them to coalesce.
In contrast, Wilderness of Mirrors does coalesce, as vast layers and waves accumulate like logs at a bottleneck. The drones bundle into groups and battle for dominance, proclaiming their presence by increasing density and volume until they are noticed. One might hear these voices as cacophony – sound and fury, signifying nothing – or one might strain to hear a message writhing within. The pessimist may interpret this message as a confluence of signals, each drowning the other out like inflated politicians. The optimist may hear the voice of reason struggling to break through. Graceful harmonics and miniature melodies are present, parables in their own right. Those who listen only to listen may miss the intended subtleties while picking up nuances of their own. The sleight-of-hand: if one can glean messages in instrumental music, one may grow equipped to glean messages in sound: voices, oceans, trees, tones. Otherwise, the entire world becomes a rush of static. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English ~ Wilderness of Mirrors (Room40)
Lawrence English’s welcome return this year has yielded various amazing works of art, one of which is Wilderness of Mirrors, a gem of an album that reminds me of why drone matters so much, of why it’s still one of the best ways to truly explore unknown musical territory. Paired, as it is, with a literary sensibility and a knack for subtle metaphors and references, Wilderness of Mirrors proves to be a complex, challenging work, one that will possibly remain with us for the coming years as a beacon of drone done right. (David Murrieta)
Lawrence English ~ Wilderness of Mirrors (Room40)
Like his excellent 2011 album The Peregrine, Wilderness of Mirrors draws its conceptual framing from literature, in this case a fragmentary poem by T.S Eliot reflecting on memory and imagination. The entirety of the record is rich in texture and easy to become lost in, each potential event an iteration of something already gone or yet to come. There’s no revelation waiting, no resolution to come, no linear narrative to grasp hold of, just a spiral of refracted signals competing to be heard. More aggressive than expected, the density encourages high volume and an attentive listener. One might continue flipping the LP (or listening on shuffle) and easily lose track of time, lost in its wild environs. Multiple listens feel like visiting the same setting, but never from the same perspective. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Lawrence English ~ Viento (2015)
Lawrence English’s follow-up to Shadow of the Monolith continues his exploration of Antarctic sounds, but is a much more visceral and immediate work than its predecessor. On this LP, English presents two side-long recordings of winter fury. Given such conditions, most reasonable people would stay inside; not so English, who soldiered into the surging white.
As I write, we’ve just survived another blizzard: white-out conditions, 60 mph/95 kph winds, temperatures of 0F/-18C and wind chills of -30F/-34C. And yet, this relatively brief blast is nothing compared to the circumstances faced by English on two frigid expeditions. Stuck in Patagonia during a wind storm, English “recorded abandoned buildings, lone trees bent over in fields of tundra-like grasses, quivering road signs, wailing fences and other objects brought into relief with the wind” while the scientists waited inside, likely wondering at the crazy man with the field recording equipment. In Antarctica, English ventured out twice in -40F/C temperatures to make recordings in blizzards. Seldom do we encounter sound artists risking their lives in this way; the violence of these recordings underlines the danger.
Both recordings are excellent, filled with multiple nuances and a host of more obvious sounds, most prominently the wind-spanked metal of “Patagonia”. If wind can do this to metal, what can it do to the human body? The frenzy of these seemingly unending forces makes one think of the films in which people are trapped in a building when the generator goes out, and must send a member of their crew into the elements. In such films, there’s usually a murderer outside as well, who clocks them on the head with a wrench. Viento doesn’t need such drama to make its point; nature is terrifying enough.
“Antarctica” is more snow and less metal. Although the creaks are still present, the track is dominated by the sound of weather. The piece even contains a musical element: a type of drone created by wind shear. As such, it comes across as more of a soundscape, despite the fact that it is presented without adulteration. At times a bell tone sounds, perhaps a frozen chain against a flagpole or a stray wind chime. The piece will appeal to drone fans as well as field recording aficionados, underscoring the link between music and nature, a fine line that English knows well. Viento is the natural culmination of the artist’s lifelong fascination with winter sounds, which first surfaced in 2007 with For Varying Degrees of Winter. Now English has the raw material to match the music. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English ~ Viento (Taiga)
Viento includes some of the coldest, sharpest recordings that have ever been captured and presented to a larger audience. Wind whips metal into a frenzy; snow whirls and sighs. English endured these conditions himself; now we can hear what we went through, and be glad for our relative safety. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English + Stephen Vitiello ~ Fable (2014)
We last encountered Lawrence English on the immersive Wilderness of Mirrors, released earlier this year; we last encountered Stephen Vitiello at the New York exhibition “In the Garden of Sonic Delights”. On Fable, the artists join forces for the second time, following 2011’s Acute Inbetweens (Crónica). Each album shares a three year gestation period and a general timbre that mixes acoustic and electronic instrumentation with field recordings. But while the first album was incredibly subdued, with floating passages and a sense of suspension, the second is as immediate and tactile as the cover art implies.
The gnarled wood seems to indicate fall, although it’s springtime in Australia. One can imagine how these pieces of driftwood might feel beneath the fingers. In like fashion, one can imagine the passage of time while listening to the chimes, bells and clocklike atmospheres of these seven tracks. This has been a good year for time-related recordings (including MUFI.RE’s Mechanics of Suspended Time, Lech Nienartowicz & Michel Wolski’s split cassette, and Kineskop’s Kontékst). A season is always changing somewhere, which keeps these recordings timely (pun intended). The chimes of twinned tracks “A Chime for the Fable” and “A Fable for the Chime” make the biggest impact, but the foggy drone of “That Caress, Inverted” is like the surf rolling in, or the clouds, or the cold. If we’ve made our preparations, we have little to fear; if not, the sounds are a reminder to learn from the squirrel, gathering nuts before the leaves have fallen. The stark nature of the closing track implies that the transition is imminent. The activity of the opening track – children, rivers, migrating birds – has ended. Instruments fall like leaves; an inanimate object knocks against wood; crickets chirp their final goodbyes. The volume fades like color in the cold. The fable is now complete. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English + Stephen Vitiello ~ Fable (Dragon’s Eye Recordings)
The follow-up to Acute Inbetweens (Crónica, 2011) is a different beast, a tactile reflection of fall in all of its permutations. The textures are as crisp as leaves beneath the feet, while the chimes ring like calls to prayer. The title reflects the overall timbre, reminiscent of a fairy tale, as time is suspended and children play between the ticks of a clock. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English + Stephen Vitiello ~ Fable (Dragon’s Eye Recordings)
Fable springs to life with a refreshing immediacy and energy. The work of these two composers is just as likely to be subdued and subtle as loud and dense. Fable is something else entirely, cunning in its juxtaposition of timbres and rhythms, allowing for space and silence rather than manipulating sustained tones and dense layers of sound. No less a cohesive work than one has come to expect from artists of this caliber, each individual track stands on its own, feeling complete whether or not heard in the context of the complete album. One may not be able to perceive the traces of each artist’s distinct contributions, yet Fable is animated by the tension of collaboration. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Lawrence English + Werner Dafeldecker ~ Shadow of the Monolith (2014)
I recently heard an Australian speaker commenting on tourists. “I love when people come to Australia and say that they’re just passing through. Passing through to where? The South Pole?” In this case, the answer is yes, as this collaborative record was recorded at the Marambio and Esperanza bases in the Antarctic and mixed in Brisbane. It’s about as cold as cold music gets. While Lawrence English‘s recent collaboration with Stephen Vitiello (Fable) was about the transition from summer to fall, his work with Austrian artist Werner Dafedecker is locked in the heart of winter.
An excerpt from a twin projection video (seen below) sets the stage. Antarctica may be frozen, but its howling winds are a source of constant activity: whirling flakes, growing drifts, churning vortices of sound. The singing sands of famous deserts are mocked by the friction of tempests over snow. Travelers search for hints of landscape or light. If nature is revealed, it is only for a short time, soon to be buried again. Frigid water melts, moves, freezes again.
While a picture may be worth a thousand words, sound can say even more. The most active tracks provide the crackling of ice, the opening and closing of doors, and finally the tolling of a bell. The passive tracks rest in stasis, reflecting the glint of sunlight on snow, the slow mist of fine powder, the lost bodies locked in place. Last year satellite readings confirmed what most already knew: that the region’s temperatures are the coldest on earth (-93.2 °C / -135.8 °F). Shadow of the Monolith presents what is difficult to appreciate in person: a richness of timbres, amplified and crisp, as crucial to the ear as survival. Back in Brisbane, one can imagine these artists sipping hot chocolate, remembering the risks, breathing sighs of relief, gazing in wonder at the steam. By reconstituting these raw recordings, they have produced a work of succinct and subtle beauty, an invitation to imagine danger through the lens of safety. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English + Werner Dafeldecker ~ Shadow of the Monolith (Holotype)
Recorded in the Antarctic and packed with snow and ice, Shadow of the Monolith is one of the coldest recordings of the year, and one of the best. The sounds of boots crunching, wind whipping and frost forming are crisp and evocative. Most listeners will never experience white-out conditions up close, but this recording operates as a sonic reflection. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English ~ Approaching Nothing (2016)
It’s almost impossible to comprehend the initial reactions to Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien n° 1, the piece that inspires Lawrence English‘s Approaching Nothing. A 2013 article in Brainwashed explains that Ferrari’s edited/juxtaposed field recording was once considered controversial, managing to offend the musique concrète community while confounding critics. Today we consider field recording and soundscape to be a valid musical category, but in 1967 this was far from the case. Now English returns to the scene of the “crime”: Croatia’s Vela Luka, which was in Yugoslavia at the time of the initial recording. Like Ferrari, English chooses for the most part to leave the source material alone, emphasizing its musical qualities. While he edits the sounds, he does not substantially manipulate them.
On the new recording, we may find the descendants of the original town folks, crickets and avian guard. There’s even an outside chance that some of the vehicles or machinery may be the same. The recording begins with a bell sounding out the hour: 6 a.m. But less than a minute later, it begins to ring uncontrollably, as if seized by a manic child. So much for ambience! But soon the birds begin to challenge the bells for sonic dominance, bringing to mind the question, “Does the loudest sound win, or the most intricate?” The local sonic ecology has changed over the decades, as have human-based boundary lines, but it’s also apparent that recording technology has changed as well, particularly when it comes to depth. The geese seem to attack from the speakers, while the construction stays in the back, a reversal of normal expectations. Conversation dominates the midsection, along with the sound of heels on pavement and what one might perceive to be a cellphone. But then nature fights back: flies and birds occupy a peaceful place, whose reverie is temporarily shattered (15:15, 17:00) by passing motors.
While human intrusion is a typical theme in field recording, English raises other questions as well, most importantly, “who owns the sonic field?” Nature carves out its own niches, a process imitated by humanity, especially in industrial areas civilized enough to allow noise complaints. For the most part, nature adapts to man, while man ignores nature. English implies that something has been lost in the last fifty years: a low rumble replaced by occasional cacophony. A motorbike and its ensuing honks (21:21+) are especially disturbing. What has happened to this place? Is it possible that the pounding of modern noise has killed the spirit of the community? Even the children sound angry as they play a game. One begins to wonder what Vela Luka will sound like in another fifty years: complete silence, eternal drone or something in-between? Are we really approaching nothing? In the closing minutes, English re-installs the missing peace (homonym intended): a quiet choir over the sound of soft water. A sliver of hope still exists. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English ~ Cruel Optimism (2017)
High density music is easy to make ~ just add more layers until all the levels are in the red. But quality denseness is far more difficult to achieve. Lawrence English excels in such ventures because he honors the nuances within and between sounds. His latest album delves into noise and micro-noise while interweaving subtle, nearly subliminal passages of melody and harmony, including contributions from numerous friends.
The title strikes what has become a common chord in recent months. Ever since the Brexit vote and the U.S. election, we’ve been hearing a unified chorus of dissent from musicians across the board. Of the hundreds of comments we’ve read from artists and labels, not one has been pro-Brexit or pro-Trump. In a diverse industry, this unanimity is remarkable. English describes “clouds of unease” that were gathering at the time of Wilderness of Mirrors, one that broke over the past year in news stories ranging from Aleppo to Black Lives Matter. We live in a dark world that continues to test our faith in humanity; English underscores the mood in his music, inspired by the writings of Lauren Berlant on suffering and power.
The message behind the music highlights the difficulty of reflecting politics in a non-verbal field. Not that we want lyrics; we simply question the extent to which English’s pleas will get across in an era when people may simply download or stream the music. So what do we hear in these sounds? We hear darkness, and oppression, and claustrophobia; we hear fear and punishment and perseverance. This last nuance, apparent in the plodding yet persistent tempos and the scattered yet salient bright chords, provides the key. Every listener knows the sadness of the world; most will be able to detect a tiny bit of hope in the midst of this maelstrom. Zero in on the compositional technique, and we find English working alongside friends ~ Mats Gustafson, Chris Abrahams and Norman Westberg, among others ~ changing his typical approach. The artist combats his pessimism about others by inviting others in. The approach may seem counter-intuitive, but serves as a metaphor. We can rail or we can cooperate. English chooses the latter path. Cruel Optimism refers to optimism dashed, but this need not mean optimism discarded; the presence of others need not be a double bind.
As the album ends, the clouds continue to gather. No answers, and little comfort, are offered. Yet there remains a sense that the listener has survived a storm. The next steps are to venture outside, pick up the pieces, and rebuild. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English ~ Cruel Optimism (Room40)
The Cruel Optimism musicalized by this album is dense, brash, multi-layered and perhaps most importantly, cooperatively built. English slid collaborations into his usually massive sounds, introducing uniquely interesting passages into the thickness of drones, the dark torrent of clouds of the cover underpinned by the distant shine of sunrays. It might not be about an optimism as self-inflicted harm; it might want to field the torrent as a weapon, its cruelty a consciousness of the grand desires that shine around it and the willingness to fight for their realization, for the unifying potency of the idea of a better, more just, more equal world for everyone. (David Murrieta)
Lawrence English ~ A Mirror Holds the Sky (2021)
Lawrence English‘s Room40 label is about to go on an absolute tear, with eight multi-genre albums already announced for fall. The artist’s own A Mirror Holds the Sky is the first of these, and the first of two in an eight-day stretch, the second being Observation of Breath on Hallow Ground. One’s immediate reaction is to surmise that the artist had an incredibly busy summer; then one remembers that English lives in Australia, where winter is drawing to a close.
Like Camus, English lives in winter while recalling summer and vaster things: in this case the Amazon, where he traveled in 2008 as part of a residency sponsored by Francisco Lopez. Revisiting fifty hours of recordings a decade removed, he creates a sonic short story, a “compression” of 36 minutes, a seven part narrative that creates an overview without being exhaustive. If anything, one wants to hear more. A 48-page photo book sweetens the deal for those purchasing the physical edition.
By switching locations ~ jungle, river, island, shore ~ English operates as an aural camera, catching different angles, diffusions of sound. Even in single locations, the sonography is always changing. Stay rooted long enough and one can hear the arrivals and exits of characters from the multiple fiefdoms. An avian species may hold claim over one territory, a hydroponic creature another. In some spots, species calmly coexist, while in others they squabble.
Most of us live in environments less sonically lush, stuffed to the brim with artificial sound. Sadly, the rainforest itself is suffering. The Amazon heard in 2008 is no longer there. Nine nations claim “ownership” of the region, and each year nearly 10,000 kilometers of biodiversity are lost through deforestation so that people can have their burgers and coffee. Shortsighted gains will eventually lead to long-term loss. In this light, English’s recordings become sonic treasure: the 50 hours now seem like a reservoir.
While listening, one admires the sheer beauty of the soundscape, from frogs to flies (two of the ten plagues visited upon Egypt). In many nations, such wild spaces are found primarily on preserves. These sounds should not seem as foreign as they do. During the pandemic, many people across the globe began to reconnect with the natural world as it temporarily recovered from centuries of human disturbance. Ironically, the lull of the pandemic was also a lull in the planet’s recovery: the return of smog, the retreat of wildlife. A Mirror Holds the Sky is the vision of natural outgrowth, a reminder that when we have less, we often have more. When a storm visits at the end of the set, much of the other sound is washed away. What awaits on the other side of our human storm? (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English ~ A Mirror Holds the Sky (Room40)
Returning to the tapes of an Amazon residency in 2008 (no, not that Amazon), Lawrence English lovingly reconstructs a soundscape that no longer exists. Every segment of the rain forest gets its due: jungle, river, island, shore. The lushness of the soundscape is a reminder that wonders exist beyond our limited aural reach. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci ~ Chthonic (2023)
In 2021, Lawrence English‘s Room40 was our Label of the Year and Lea Bertucci‘s A Visible Length of Light was our #1 album. This year they’ve joined forces on American Dreams. Chthonic is a deep, dark, immersive album, its cover photo perfectly chosen to represent its tectonic theme. The music is densely layered to reflect subterranean pressure, while the largesse of the tone speaks to geologic time and perspective.
Bertucci plays a surprising array of instruments here: cello, viola, flute, lap steel guitar. English contributes field recordings, electronics and tape. Yet even the music imitates field recordings, in the opening piece subterranean rumble joined by stringed creaks and grinds, like a world compressing under enormous pressure and heat. One might posit that the world is indeed experiencing this very phenomenon, both physically and socially, resting on the very lip of chaos. But the beauty of the set is that is served as a tabula rasa for the listener. In the liner notes, Jordan Reyes hears analogies to the crushing emotion of a cancer battle. The opening minutes of “Dust Storm” may stand for any crisis, from the personal to the political, in which the storm has already hit, all markers obscured. The low end of the music deserves efficient sub-woofers; for safety’s sake, this is not a headphone album. By the end, the density has grown oppressive, a sky filled with locusts and bombers, danger above and danger below.
And yet, there is another way to hear the album, despite its darkness. Geologic time is impassive, impervious to the vagaries of human existence. Even the most generous estimates indicate that 99.8% of earth’s existence took place without us, more so if one separates Ardipithecus primates from Homo sapiens. Our time is but a sliver of a sliver. In light of this fact, how might one regard human time, or human problems, more specifically, any individual problem or any sub-par day? When encountering such scales, the experience of awe may lead us in two directions at once: a realization of our own insignificance, coupled with an offsetting gratitude that we exist at all. We view the “Strata” of our lives in years, rather than in eras or eons. The earth operates differently.
English and Bertucci operate within time, yet save for the spaces between tracks, produce a sense of timelessness. The changes within these tracks are incremental, yet great distance is traversed from beginning to end. “Strata” lacks resolution because geology lacks resolution; a human looks at geology and concludes, “this happened, and then that happened.” But tectonic shifts are still – and always – in motion. There are always more strata.
In light of such information and the intensity of the music, will one be comforted or cowed? The response will vary from listener to listener. Reminded that they are not the center of the universe, some listeners may be shaken to the core. Others may find it a religious experience. Either way, English and Bertucci have produced a recording that is larger than life. (Richard Allen)
Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci ~ Chthonic (American Dreams)
Chthonic opens with a sense of foreboding: growling, pounding drones and scraping strings are in dialogue before fading into silence on album opener “Amorphic Foothills.” The sonic palette changes on “dust storm,” the scraping and growling traded for the delicate hissing of wind and squiggling of frequencies, the volume growing as the track progresses into a fury of hazy, grating timbres that coalesce into a wall of sound that is as loud as it is quiet. And so goes the album, each track exploring a different environmental event and introducing new sounds— twitchy, suggestive synths in one place, nothing more than the sound of the air at others. The album explores “the movement of the earth” and its title comes from the Greek word for the underworld. It is certainly a dark album, one that takes listener’s on a journey through environmental wonder and collapse. It’s also thought a fascinating study in sonic contrast, as Bertucci’s acoustic instruments are transformed by their duet with English’s field recordings and tape manipulations. The resulting album is an exciting listen to two of the experimental music world’s most fascinating artists one in which their collaboration brings out another dimension to each other’s sound. (Jennifer Smart)
Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci ~ Chthonic (American Dreams)
Probably the heaviest album on [our year end] list, Chthonic carries some serious heft. Listening to it can be quite the experience – even on inexpensive headphones, you can feel the physical power of the music pounding through your ears. Never mind cranking up the vinyl on a decent stereo, bringing up entirely fresh vistas in the sound. This impact is a deliberate choice by the duo of Bertucci and English: they are responding to large-scale meteorological and seismological events that occurred before humans started wrecking the planet and will continue long after we’ve disappeared from the Earth. Collaborations can often fire wide of the mark for any number of reasons but the immense Chthonic hits because the two musicians’ contributions complement each other. Lea Bertucci’s instruments respond to Lawrence English’s field recordings, channelling the sound seamlessly. If only humankind could show as much sympathy and understanding with each other as this duo does. (Jeremy Bye)
Lawrence English ~ ‘Oseni (2022)
On the heels of Lawrence English‘s Viento reissue comes a new work one might consider a companion. ‘Oseni is a benefit album for the Kingdom of Tonga, which was devastated two weeks ago by the eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai and the subsequent tsunami, followed by a crop-killing fall of ash.
English notes how closely the islands and nations of the Pacific Ocean are tied together, as the eruption’s effects were felt across thousands of miles. His hope is that we might realize just how connected we are, and that this realization might spark a connection of caring as well.
‘Oseni (Ocean) is comprised of recordings of the Pacific Ocean, collaged to produce an impression of flow. These sounds had been collected over a decade and a half of travel, perhaps waiting for this moment. In normal weather times ~ placid skies, occasional precipitation ~ one might receive the album as a pristine treatment of water sounds, a peaceful tribute to the elements. After all, many people in first world countries use processed sounds of waves, streams and rain in order to sleep. But in light of the subject matter, one cannot help but hear the composition differently. The large waves of the opening minutes may attract surfers, but they may also grow larger, too large, and become a source of destruction. One must listen to the recording all the way through to trust that this will not occur within the boundaries of the soundscape. One can imagine the people of Tonga staring at the sea with trepidation: the source of food and recreation, the waves upon which they travel, coiling rather than curving, threatening to strike again. (The post-tsunami scene in Soul Surfer is an excellent representation of such fear.)
The sea may at times seem benevolent and at times malevolent, yet in reality it is impassive. We are at all times in the grip of forces beyond our control ~ “natural disasters” or (perhaps unfairly) “acts of God.” Tsunamis are not the only forces that remind us our our fragility; wildfires have the same effect, as do pandemics. The enemy is not nature, neither is it each other; the enemy is the tendency to be overwhelmed to the point of compassion fatigue. Yes, Tonga is far from many of our readers. But most of our readers ~ because this is true of most people ~ are near water.
Halfway through the recording, the waves subside, giving way to the sounds of lapping and gulls. The water rolls up the shore instead of crashing. A boat’s hull knocks gently in its mooring. This crisis has passed; we are free to wade out, to paddle, to sail. We remember the shores that English has visited, his attraction to the sea, our own desire to bathe in the sights and sounds and textures. Soon the intermediate waves begin to visit, the waves of vacations and strolls. As Pablo Neruda writes, the sea says yes / then no / and no again / and no / says yes. A delicate balance is, for now, restored. (Richard Allen)
Sound Propositions 015: Lawrence English
Originally published at A CLOSER LISTEN in September 2018
Sound Propositions is an ongoing, semi-regular series of conversations with artists exploring their creative practices and individual aesthetics, conceived of as a counter-narrative to a dominant trend in music journalism which fetishizes equipment and new technologies. Rather than writing copy that can just as easily have come from a press release or a consumer electronics catalog, this series tries to take the emphasis away from the ‘what’ and shine light on the ‘how’ and ‘why.’ You can find the previous fourteen conversations, as well as additional articles and features, here.
“…the feeling tones of the affective soundscape produce attachments to and investments in a sense of political and social mutuality that is performed in the moments of collective audition. This process involves taking on listening together as itself an object/scene of desire. The attainment of that attunement produces a sense of shared worldness, apart from whatever aim or claim the listening public might later bring to a particular political world because of what they have heard.”
Artist, composer, musician, field-recordist, sound diffuser, label founder, theorist of listening: Lawrence English is all these things and more, yet any term we choose will inevitably be reductive, ill-suited to contain the many facets of his activities, let alone the complex ways in which they overlap. October 12 sees the release of Selva Oscura (Temporary Residence Ltd), English’s new LP in collaboration with William Basinski. Dedicated to the late experimental filmmaker Paul Clipson, Selva Oscura is the debut recording from this duo, years in the making. The title comes directly from the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, the “dark wood” in which the poem’s narrator finds himself, lost and disoriented at the midpoint of his life. Recall that the Inferno is just the opening third of a larger work, Dante’s Commedia, his Divine Comedy (the “divine” adjective was added to the title later by Boccaccio). What begins as a disoriented descent into Hell ends in Paradise, with a deep but ineffable understanding of the power of love to transform and transcend the mire of the mundane. To be lost in the dark is just the first step to returning to the light. While the second side-long track bears the eponymous title, the first side is called “Mono No Aware,” a Japanese concept which speaks to an awareness of the essential transience of life and the necessity of approaching the world with sensitivity and empathy.
Coming on the heels of 2017’s Cruel Optimism, and for that matter upon decades of intensifying global crisis, one might easily read more into both of these titles. We, as a collective culture, are disoriented and lost, and with the right guide orienting us we may find our way out, but first must descend further into the abyss and work through our confusion. The intervening months since the release of that superb record seem to have only compounded the timeliness of this sonic meditation on growing global unease, making both “Mono No Aware” and “Selva Oscura” fitting sentiments.
Cruel Optimism takes its title, as well as its conceptual point of departure, from Laurent Berlant‘s 2011 book Cruel Optimism. Berlant, a Professor of English at the University of Chicago, is best known for [their] work on Queer Theory and Affect Theory, two fields of critical analysis that have had an enormous impact on the broader culture in the last decade but which are seldom read outside the seminar room. If I may oversimplify [their] thesis a bit, Berlant argues that we become invested in things that are bad for us, and that this attachment itself is painful. This isn’t so straightforward as it seems at first blush. For Berlant, optimism is a belief in the possibility of the good (life), and Cruel Optimism attempts to demonstrate the way this optimism is, in fact, cruel, in so far as it keeps us stagnant, unable to make changes because of an affective investment in an object of attachment, the very thing which is in reality making us unhappy, from fantasies of romantic love to junk food and cigarettes. Berlant is not critiquing any particular ideology, but instead deploys the concept of affect to explain why an attachment to seemingly ineffective (and destructive and dangerous) ideologies persists.
As English draws greatly from this concept as inspiration for his latest solo album, I hope my readers will indulge me if I detour into a theoretical discussion slightly more than usual. It is important that we should understand what is meant by this term affect, not because these theoretical citations are somehow necessary to “understand” the album, but rather because affect helps us understand more clearly our own investment in music and sound, and the power that music and sound have over us. Sara Ahmed, another prominent scholar and theorist of affect, gives us a good account of what is meant by affect and how it is used. [Berlant] writes that “a feeling becomes an instrument or technique,” and that we must pay attention to the deployment of such techniques to understand what is happening around us, how affect is instrumentalized to manipulate us. Attunements to such affects are not side-effects but help determine the mood and constitution of the larger social body through our mutual relationality. Ahmed describes bodies in tune as a vibration, and our ability to feel in harmony with others depends upon our leanings. It is when these attunements, or non-attunements, are manipulated for ill-ends that we should be especially concerned. (The growing xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment amidst the tragedy of so many refugee crises is just one example of how such attunements are exploited.) It seems to me [Berlant] accounts for the way our particular leanings cause us to resonate with some people and environments more than others.
Is the use of so many sonic metaphors—attunement, harmony, resonance, vibration—in the discourse surrounding affect merely a poetic indulgence, or does it gesture towards a deeper and more significant relationship? As English translates the lessons of Cruel Optimism into a sonic work encourages us to think this through further. To be attuned is to be in harmony, in accord with a plurality of voices. Attunement shares a common origin with atonement, which has come to mean a reconciliation but in its archaic usage refers to the “condition of being at one (with others).” Perhaps we can find atonement through becoming more attuned to each other as well.
Given this possibility, it is fitting that Cruel Optimism finds English recovering a collaborative approach to his solo work after a decade of working strictly alone. Like English’s previous solo albums, Cruel Optimism operates in the realm of hazy ambience and crushing drone, a dynamic fog of processed recordings amidst a shifting matrix of sonic space. Cruel Optimism features contributions from musicians including free jazz saxophone titan Mats Gustafsson (The Thing), cellist and double bassist Mary Rapp, and percussionist Tony Buck. Additional contributions come from, among many others, Chris Abrahams, Werner Dafeldecker, Thor Harris and Norman Westberg (both of the recent incarnation of Swans, and the latter of whom has released records on Room40, the label founded by English).
Lawrence English was born in 1976, and is based in Brisbane, Australia. He founded the imprint Room40 in 2000, which has released a great many classic records since, with no signs of slowing down. The last year alone has witnessed outstanding work from Yan Jun, Olivia Block, Pinkcourtesyphone, Nicola Ratti, and Rafael Toral. To mention just one older release, I feel compelled to point to the 2007 Airport Symphony compilation, which includes music by Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Toshiya Tsunoda, Francisco López , and many others, a veritable who’s-who which was downright ahead of the curve in so many ways. In addition to releases on Room40, English has also worked with such venerable labels as Touch, Digitalis, 12k, Crónica, Important and others. A prolific and enthusiastic collaborator, he has worked with diverse talents including Philip Samartzis, Janek Schaefer, Akio Suzuki, Grouper (as Slow Walkers), Ben Frost, Tujiko Noriko, and Tenniscoats. English has also explored his interest in the politics of perception through the production of auditory and kinetic art works, a form of artistic exhibition that can engage with the environment and aspects of site-specificity in ways that his recorded works cannot.
In 2017, English earned the title of Doctor, having successfully defended his dissertation, “The Listener’s Listening,” on the practice of field-recording, listening, and the politics of perception. This thoughtfulness is brought to bear on all his activities, and as one might expect, his writing in particular is characteristically serious and erudite. Earlier this year, English analyzed the past and future of “Ambient” in celebration of the coining of the term by Brian Eno 40 years ago, excavating its pre-history and concluding with the provocative “12 notes towards a future ambient.”
In a 2014 essay entitled “A Beginner’s Guide to… Field Recording,” English provides a synopsis of the diverse approaches to listening and field-recording, and also relates his own formative experiences with listening and the practice of field-recording.
…the reasons of how I became interested in field recording, took root not from recording, but rather, listening. When I was a young boy, I would go to an abandoned part of the Port of Brisbane, which has since turned into a string of lifeless condos. Back in the early 1980s, though this area was a wasteland of sorts, a refuge for animals and birds, and a favourite haunt of my father who would take my brother and I there for all kinds of adventuring. In this area was a particular species of bird, the Reed Warbler. It sounded incredible, like a modular synthesizer on steroids. Easy to listen for, but due to the bird’s size, colour and penchant for hiding in the reeds, it was very difficult to see.
All the hallmarks of English’s artistic work seem to be contained in this anecdote, an experience which would germinate into a lifelong practice: listening, sound, space, perception, environment, politics. While the use of field-recording within his compositional practice has been put aside somewhat in recent years, it has long been central to his approach to composition.
Consider Kiri No Oto (2008), his first solo album after rededicating himself to working alone after an extended period of deep collaboration. Meaning “listening in fog,” Kiri No Oto mines the liminal state in which field-recordings and instrumental passages blur; what sounds like an organ may actually be the sound of the ocean, while a recording of an actual organ contains such detail that it is perceived to be a field-recording instead. The joint digital releases Songs Of The Living / And The Lived In (2012) present a similar phenomenon, an edited selection of evocative recordings made over the prior fifteen years of traveling around the globe. These include miniature sonic portraits of an Australian carnival, bird calls in Brazil, scraping cemetery gates, an air conditioner in Tokyo, and noise on a New York subway platform. Each title simply telling the listener the “what” and “where.” They seem to be ostensibly divided into nature recordings and environmental recordings, respectively, but like the work of his collaborator Francisco López, it is not always so easy to draw such firm distinctions. This is driven home by the fact that, as digital releases, they lend themselves to listening on shuffle, a mixture that in no way detracts from the work. English compares these vignettes to Polaroids, for their ability to capture “an essence and unique quality of a given moment.” Here English’s field-recordings may often seem to be manipulated or combined with instrumentation, when instead he is working in the tradition pioneered by the great Luc Ferrari, what English describes as “a kind of open listening to environment, in which the events of any given space can reveal meaning should the listener be open to it.” Like a Polaroid which can transcend its seemingly cheap and disposable status through careful composition and framing, English’s recordings present mundane sounds in ways that elevate them to the level of music.
English paid homage to Luc Ferrari directly with 2016’s Approaching Nothing. Working under the blessing of the late composer’s widow, English returned in 2013 to Vela Luka, the island village on the Dalmatian Coast in what is now Croatia, where, in 1967, Ferrari recorded Presque rien n° 1 [Almost Nothing #1], the founding document in phonography. English draws upon his own concept of “relational listening,” a creative process “intended to make one’s listening audible to an audience.” Using creative editing, mixing, and juxtapositions inspired by Ferrari, Approaching Nothing pays tribute to this Ur-Work while looking ahead, not trapped by tradition but driven on by it. Unprocessed field-recordings feature very prominently in other work not for their mundanity but rather their extraordinary remove from the quotidian. Each side of the LP Viento (2015) is dedicated to the sound of the wind captured in the frozen tundra of Antarctica and vast plains of Patagonia.
I suspect many of our readers might rank the trilogy of The Peregrine (2011), Wilderness of Mirrors (2014), and Cruel Optimism as English’s crowning achievements. Interestingly enough, field-recording takes a diminished role across these solo full-lengths. The field-recordings which distinguish so much of English’s practice are mostly lacking within the hazy, dense, and dynamically evolving layers. Still, English does not discard the lessons learned from years of listening via the practice of field-recording. Listening is a practice, a way of perceiving physical space and relationships between bodies that goes beyond the limits of vision, and on a more metaphysical level which can relate the listener with phenomena in unique ways. This approach to perception carries through English’s work, regardless of the origin of his raw material.
English’s well-documented interest in theory and his nuanced attention to detail is perhaps nowhere more explicit than on Cruel Optimism. While the sense of global unease was already channeled on earlier records, the events of the preceding years have lent English’s work an increased sense of urgency. The photograph of poor little Alan Kurdi, drowned in Mediterranean as his family fled violence in Syria, struck English particularly hard, his own child a similar age. If Wilderness was seen as a protest record (NOISE IS POLITICS IS NOISE IS…), then Cruel Optimism only ups the ante. The three records each take inspiration from texts (J.A. Baker’s unclassifiable nature writing, a T.S. Eliot poem, Berlant’s critical theory) which influence the compositional processes which give each form. Baker’s The Peregrine was mined for details that informed the direction the music took, as computational guides. “Wilderness of Mirrors” refers to both the concept of the album and the process behind it, as English began with a layer to react against, which would later be deleted, living on as an echo or absence. When field-recordings are employed on Wilderness, they’re not heard but exist as a kind of spectre, sidechained to control a processing parameter or part of the scaffolding which was later removed. Cruel Optimism takes English’s desire to make meaningful work to the next level, translating theoretical insights into an aesthetic practice.
While English’s output has remained rather steady over the years, he is not the kind of artist who constantly releases new music. Rather than be prolific for its own sake, he has been happy to step back and let the work come when it comes. This has also meant touring less, however his interest in touring also began to shift somewhat between the release of The Peregrine and Wilderness, as he became increasingly interested in the physicality of sound, particularly in live contexts. In a 2014 interview with with John Twells for FACT, English recalls a tour of Italy the previous year with Alberto Boccardi. Over the years I’ve heard from a number of ambient and experimental musicians that touring Italy is great for the food and the people, but can be very frustrating on a technical level. In the interview, English describes the performances on that tour as “total punk rock shows” and points to this experience as an epiphany that what he “does” as an artist is not suited to such settings. English’s long-running interest in perception of spatial environments manifests in performances that are carefully attunes to the diffusion of sound in space, and thus physicality is about more than noise, more than “feeling” sound as much as hearing it, but in the kinds of awareness that can only be triggered through sound.
The first half of this interview was conducted in the spring of 2017, the second half in the spring of 2018, over email. We discuss the nature of collaboration, what it means to translate theory into practice, the important of diffusion in distinguishing live performance from studio recording, and much more. (Joseph Sannicandro)
INTERVIEW
Many of your works have a strong conceptual grounding. Works responding to a particular composer (Cage, Ferrari), utilizing field-recordings from a particular location (Antarctica, Australia, Japan) or of a particular phenomenon (wind, winter, fog). Despite the deep conceptual grounding, however, my first reaction would be to compare Cruel Optimism with Peregrine and Wilderness. These too take inspiration from literary sources, but Berlant’s book is rather different in genre from a poem or nature writing. So I want to ask about how you view the connections between your work and these works which have inspired you, and how your approach to Cruel Optimism may differ (or not) from those of the past.
When I start working on a project, almost always the process of making the work is born out of something that is largely unrelated to the material content of the sound. I know plenty of wonderful musicians who can just create music from nothing. That is like magic to me and in many ways the exact opposite to to how it is I operate creatively. For me, there’s generally some kind of framework that is developed that constrains the ways in which the work might be realized. I find the tighter the frame, the more I can feel the binds around me, the more creative I can become over time. Instead of having everything available, I have a restricted range of elements so that means I need to drill into them and extract everything I can from them. It’s challenging, but somehow in the tension it creates there’s a great satisfaction to be found.
With specific reference to Cruel Optimism, the relation of Lauren Berlant’s wonderfully provocative text to the sound is both direct and tangential at once. The book very much helped me decode the experiences and concerns I had whilst examining all the raw material that fed into the record. I was deeply affected by this global sense of unrest and discontent that was breeding such diabolical political and social relations. When I announced Cruel Optimism, Drew Daniel [of Matmos] wrote me a lovely note talking about the application of theory to practice. I hadn’t necessarily thought of it in that way at that stage, but I think his reading of the record drawing on the text of the book is spot on.
I also wonder what it means to translate the lessons of Cruel Optimism regarding our (unhealthy) attachments into an artistic response. For Berlant optimism is a belief in the possibility of a good life, but she sets out to show the way this cruel optimism is what keeps us stagnant, unable to make changes because of an affective investment (in the object of attachment, the thing which is in reality making us unhappy). After leaving NY I lived in Montreal for years before coming to Minneapolis, and it has struck me how different the social scenes around similar styles of music are or can be. Observing, for instance, younger people invested in the hardcore and punk scene, as I was as a teenager, or some of my old friends who are still doing the same thing in our 30s we were doing in our teens, I can’t help but wonder if music, or the social scene around music, might be one of those unhealthy objects of attachment. Where is the line between music as something which can be liberatory and cathartic, and music as another unhealthy affective investment keeping us from changing our lives?
I think that’s a really interesting question. Music and any form of entertainment that fosters notions of fame can be a locus for the conditions that could be analyzed through that lens of cruel optimism. Obviously it’s a case by case situation, but from my thinking, the clear example I can think of is this notion of fame as it relates to music. I think this is a very peculiar attachment object for a lot of people coming to music and can be incredibly damaging to people if they aren’t able to navigate through it reflexively.
In the first instances fame is problematic as people simply don’t have a working definition of that. That lack of clarity around how it’s understood is cruel in that it remains elusive and unproductive. Really though, the cruelty lies in the fact that the notion of fame is essentially hollow and reflects only the paper thin veneer of a life. I’d argue it’s a kind of temporal broadcast that doesn’t accumulate anything meaningful across time. It doesn’t speak to the practice or the quality of engagement you maintain with the work. As an attachment object it obscures and distracts people from their primary goal which should be making work that speaks to them, and potentially to others.
I’d argue if you are engaged in music making and art practices more generally as a means of self-reflexive practice that is likely not going to be a cruelly optimistic setting. If however your focus lies in the trappings of what might be in a life such as that, then surely cruel optimism is a critical point of analysis. There are of course many other conversations to be had around these topics, such as the nature of precarity that rules so many lives in the arts, but that’s a whole other issue.
Especially given the collaborative approach that seems central to the record, Cruel Optimism seems to me to take a different path. And this collaborative nature is also something unique in your oeuvre, is that right? Your past collaborations seem to often take the shape of duos.
The dimension that collaboration played in the creation of Cruel Optimism is an exception in recent times. But early on, say with the first three or four solo records, collaboration was a central mechanism for me to achieve the kinds of sounds and ideas I was interested in creating. At that stage, I was very much interested in making those connections I had in my life weave into the music I was creating. In about 2007, for a whole range of reasons, I tended to move away from collaboration in that way and made a decades worth of music largely on my own. With Cruel Optimism I wanted to radically reposition myself and my expectations for the work. Collaboration was one of the tools I used to do this.
I really enjoyed your record with Stephen Vitiello for Dragon’s Eye. How did you approach working with Stephen? Or with Werner Dafeldecker? Were these remote collaborations or did you meet and record/perform together in person? You’ve also done splits, like with Alberto Boccardi for Gianmaria Aprile’s Fratto9label where you each worked from the same recordings of a choir, or with Francisco López, but these are of a very different character.
Every collaboration I have done has been a pleasure. Each one of them too has revealed new approaches or methodologies for creating work. Each artist is different, we all share an interest in sound, but how those interest manifest in the work itself is very different. I’m fortunate to have learned so much from the people I have worked with.
Can you tell me more more about the collaborations on Cruel Optimism? This LP doesn’t feel like a departure for you at all, so perhaps you can also speak to the technical or formal elements that went into its creation, and how your collaborators played into this? How has your approach to working with sound changed over the years? And to what extent has your formal approach changed in response to the growing sense of malaise and global catastrophes?
The collaborations in Cruel Optimism took place across the whole period of the record. Some of the collaborators such as Mats Gustafsson and Tony Buck were amongst the first contributions to the record and their work helped frame up some of the raw character of the album. The collaborations continued all the way through and even in the final days of mixing the record, some of the pieces were still quite dynamic. Heinz Riegler played a series of guitar layers on “Object Of Projection” that entirely solidified that piece. Up until then it was unclear if that piece was going to be part of the record. So it was those kinds of moments that made the collaborations so valuable.
I think what was wonderful about the contributions from people like Thor Harris, Chris Abrahams, Norman Westberg, or Vanessa Tomlinson was that each of them are so very directed and focused in their own right that they bring a huge amount of musical personality with them. That mean new relations within the work were always bring brought to light. My sense of harmony is not that of Thor or Chris, so I am constantly having to consider how it is those contributions mesh into the music. It was a wonderfully dynamic process.
Speaking of social connections, I had read in an interview with David Toop about his relationship with Room40, and it struck me that in your capacity as a label head you’ve played an important role collaborating in very different capacities. I was very impressed by the fact that you know Herzog (!), and introduced him to J.A. Baker. How did that come about? Did you also share your album with him, or just send him the book? I’m very interested in the relationship between different art forms, the way that social relations and institutions can work to separate (or gather) work that may have affinities that are more central to their meaning than their differences in media.
I’ve had the great fortune to come in contact with some wonderful artist and writers over the years. This most recent tour of North America [in 2017, now the second most recent], I’ve made time to visit with folks like Genesis P Orridge and Mark Pauline from Survival Research Labs, to discuss possible projects. I also met with Lauren Berlant whose work has been so very important for me. When you make those connections, you’re reminded that this whole cultural ecology is just that, an ecology. It’s a network of interrelated parts that needs each other if it’s to flourish.
So in saying that, when I read The Peregrine, I was really motivated to share it with as many artists as I could. People whom I felt would extract something positive from it and potentially draw a little of that creative energy I did from it. I must have bought 100 or more copies of that book and shared them. One person I sent it to quite early on was Werner Herzog. To me, Baker’s writing shares Herzog’s intensity of observation and celebration of the incidental. My dear friend Douglas Quin kindly made an introduction for me and I sent the book and an LP off to Werner. A few weeks back he wrote back and said how much he’d enjoyed the book and that he didn’t have an LP player any longer. I ended up making a CD-R for him. For about 4 years there he was the only person with an original digital copy of the record apart from me as it was only available on vinyl in its initial pressing. I’m glad he found it so inspiring and has subsequently shared it. That’s what needs to happen with great works!
Fantastic. Now to some more traditional Sound Propositions questions. Do you have a current favorite piece of gear you’d care to talk about? Not necessary from a technical standpoint, but as a piece of equipment that you’ve developed a kind of personal relationship with.
You know what I love, a patchbay. I know this sounds like a frivolous thing to say, but honestly, I can’t praise this enough. For me, the patchbay is this matrix of possibility…so much of my work is process oriented, in that I start with one element and then transform that element across time through a variety of treatments. So much of this is made possible by the patchbay and being able to really deeply explore the interactions between various kinds of inputs and processors like pedals and the like. Quite often I have moments where sounds arrive, say some of the material for For/Not For John Cage or even the first couple of minutes of “Another Body” from Wilderness Of Mirrors, where they results far exceed what I expect from the process leading to them. The patchbay allows this fluid, flowing possibility and for me that’s really quite valuable.
One of the tensions I’m interested in exploring through Sound Propositions is the difference between working as an artist in the studio (producing records and compositions in “fixed,” recorded form) and in performances. So, how do you approach recording versus performing? How much do you conceive of these as distinct practices, and how much do they overlap for you?
The studio and the stage are two entirely different zones of engagement, each with its pleasures and pains. Temporally they are very different; in that the studio is about an accumulation of time, things worked and reworked, drilled into, buried and then exhumed. The studio encourages a kind of endlessness to time, which is wonderful if you can know how to control it. The studio also is about a selfish use of sound in space. It is a restricted exchange as you create the work and it’s not until publication that the sharing occurs. At that point too, any sense of control is handed over as the music enters the world as its own object, to be used by others in the ways they see fit.
The stage by comparison is about the momentary nature of time, in that the performance unfolds around you, and audience and within a place. This is, under the right circumstances, completely consuming and spellbinding. I know I have been both a performer and an audience member and been wholly swallowed in time and place, lost in this connection of moments that collide into one another. It’s pure magic!
I’m especially interested in live performances that break away from the typical stage-oriented approach. The “stage” – both literally and metaphorically – has generally dominated the live and recorded presentation of music. That is, audiences orientated visually towards a performer on stage, albums mixed as if the listener is seated in the ‘sweet spot’ in an auditorium, reverbs modeled after various concert halls or rooms, etc. Do you have a very different approach to a live situation in terms of improvisation as opposed to how you work in the studio?
I do. Quite often I perform diffusions in spaces. I think though for certain types of music, mine included, every concert is site specific to a point. Working with electronic music, the instrument is in many respects the PA and knowing how the PA can articulate a space and bring it to life. The music, as an input, is the material gesture in some respect.
Can you provide us with a breakdown or walk-through of a particular track? My interest isn’t necessarily in any particular track, but instead to illustrate how your creative process develops.
I think each piece of work emerges from quite unique circumstances in some respects. The starting points might be the same, in that I have some go to instruments and ways of treating sound materials, but after that things usually are a one to one basis. On Wilderness Of Mirrors and Cruel Optimism, many of the pieces have only come together at what you might say is the last minute. They are processes of extreme iteration and transformation. The starting place and where they end are usually radically different.
A pieces like “Negative Drone” for instance really only took form, to my ears at least, when Norman Westberg played some baritone guitar on the piece for me. It was in that moment, listening to him play that I suddenly realized what the piece would become. It was one piece of the puzzle that unlocked the rest. Similarly, Heinz Riegler’s work on “Object Of Projection” completely refocused that piece for me and added some critical tonalities that made the piece actually become cemented. Before his contributions that piece was destined for the graveyard of delete, so to speak.
Cruel Optimism seemed to take a pretty explicit position with regard to the crises currently facing our world, and so I’d like to ask about the relation between art and politics with this in mind. Not in the sense of electoral politics or policies, but rather if you understand your work as having some broader relationship to these questions. Is there a politics (or an ethos, perhaps) to your work? And considering the society we live in such an artistic labor of love as running a record label and producing art, a dedication to qualities that can’t be measured or reduced to an exchange value, seems to be significant (at least to how I understand “politics”).
I think any art is in fact rooted in politics. The way that relation is examined and understood is something that is both for the artist and those approaching the work, whether that be as audience or critic, to interrogate. I think it is important to recognize what the political means in these terms. It is, as you say, not rooted simply in the ideas of government, though certainly the actualization of policies developed by governments can be a very inspirational and powerful thing to respond to.
For my work, I am interested in questions of agency in the broadest sense. How agency and a sense of the political become meshed and the potentials for work to be actualized out of this situation. I’ve used this phrase the ‘politics of perception’, as that for me is perhaps a good summary of how I feel the work relates at a political level. In some basic way it asks who is allowed to listen and to what and by default who is allowed to speak, of what and to whom. The music I make exists at a multiplicity of levels in any one moment and the depth to which the work can speak is articulated by the person encountering it. To some, the work is merely noise, or a background, to others it is a statement of intent, a way of opening out oneself into the world; a gateway to embodiment in the moment. The work also acts as a catalyst for conversations such as these, where the opportunity to speak to the root of the work is made available. Cruel Optimism has offered me the chance to speak to how important I feel critical theorists like Lauren Berlant are in the world we find ourselves in. I still love Carol Hanisch’s notion of ‘the personal is political’. Today, I don’t think anyone could believe it to be otherwise!
To further complicate this last question: I lived in Montreal for many years and still spend a few weeks there every year and may very likely return to live in the future. And over the years I know many artists have struggled with the question of accepting state funding, especially in relation to their political positions that are deeply critical of the state as an engine of imperialism and environmental degradation and so on. And cities like Montreal tend to use artists to raise their hipness profile and encourage real estate development and to lure tech companies and tourists and the forces of gentrification and so on. So, Australia has a generous grant agency for artists, does it not? Do you have any thoughts on this quandary?
I think the question of artists as the vanguard of gentrification is a very important question. I’ve spent some time in Los Angeles over the past half decade and the changes there speak to this crisis really acutely. I think it’s a hugely complex issue that extends beyond those individuals seeking some capacity to maintain their lives. The issue speaks to the commodification of property; to have affordable and secure housing is a fundamental right in my opinion. The fact that we’re in the midst of this enormous and global exercise in flipping properties speaks to some significant failings in urban planning, government policy and the like. It speaks to the success of neoliberal agendas however and the redefinition of how it is we perceive and utilize things like property.
As to the question of funding: Here in Australia, at a federal level at least, our funding body (the Australia Council For The Arts) is arms length from the government. That however does not mean the government isn’t consistently interfering with the guiding principles of the organization. I was a board member on their music board for almost 5 years and in that time I came to respect the potential of what good people in organizations like this can do. After all organizations are simply shells, like governments are simply shells, it is the people that make them valuable. I believe there is a value to taxation and to that taxation being used for things like art, as well as for things like road maintenance. I feel the huge challenge for art, operating in the current economic and politic environment, is to reconcile the qualitative impact the work has when we are so wed to quantitative tools for assessment of meaning and value. This is a fundamental point of conflict, and extends well beyond art into areas of education, the environment and other core social functions. The fact that we rely so heavily on quantitative methods of deriving value is one point of how we find ourselves in this giant mess we’re in right now.
Yes, Los Angeles is a really interesting example, both because of the increase in foreign capital flowing into the city, but also as the area has continued to attract educated / creative young people from around the country priced out of other cities. And we’ve also seen methods of possible, and seemingly successful, resistance to art gallery-led gentrification in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, a historically Chicano area.
And to bring things to a close, I always like to ask about an artist’s favorite work outside of sound art or music. What books, visual art, plays, films, etc you are inspired by, or find common cause with? Are their artists working in other media (past or present) that you feel an aesthetic kinship with?
Most certainly. J.A Baker’s The Peregrine remains a source of immense pleasure for me. Masahisa Fukase’s Karasu and Yasau Higo’s works around maternal shamans in Okinawa make me love having eyes!! In film, I am still haunted by so many wonders, Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil for example leaps to mind. But seriously, I only need to look out my window or at my cactus garden to realize just how damned amazing this place is. Everything is a wonder if you let it be!
Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time, Lawrence.
(Unattributed square-format photos that are not album covers are courtesy of Lawrence English’s Instagram account.)