Lawrence English
Lawrence English is composer, media artist and curator based in Australia. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He investigates the politics of perception via live performance and installation to create works that ponder subtle transformations of space and ask audiences to become aware of that which exists at the edge of perception.
Lawrence English is composer, media artist and curator based in Australia. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He investigates the politics of perception via live performance and installation to create works that ponder subtle transformations of space and ask audiences to become aware of that which exists at the edge of perception.
A Colour For Autumn
"Somehow, 15 years has passed since I worked on A Colour For Autumn. This recording was, in many ways, a critical one for me. In some respects, it rounded out a period of work that was focused on a particular marriage of thematics and harmony. Like For Varying Degrees Of Winter, it dwelled on old world impressions of the seasons, something that, in the southern hemisphere, isn’t intrinsically part of our way of approaching place. I think it was this incongruity with my own lived experience that …
(c)ovid's metamorphoses
Big Tip! With a wide range of work by sound artists and musicians, writers, filmmakers, photographers, and visual artists, (c)ovid's Metamorphoses uses the Covid-19 pandemic and its far-reaching consequences as an instrument for change, artistic and otherwise. A play on experiment across various fields of artistic practice, all featured work revolves around ideas of transmission and inspiration, conjuring up a massive body of vital and daring artistic expressions unashamedly avant-garde. (c)ovid…
Chthonic
Big Tip!. Red Vinyl Edition "Chthonic is the result of long-distance collaboration and mutual considerations. Lea Bertucci and Lawrence English met in 2019 at the Novas Frequencia festival in Rio de Janeiro and quickly became friends and collaborators, driven by musings on geological scale, movements – tectonic or otherwise – of the Earth, and subterranean density and pressure.
For people on visa in the United States during lockdown, it was impossible to leave and re-enter the country without p…
Tropic of Capricorn
Tropic of Capricorn is the second album by Lawrence English and Werner Dafeldecker. Based on field recordings made by the prolific Room40 owner that were subtly but decisively altered with electroacoustic techniques through the German improv legend, these two long-form pieces blur the lines between acoustic ecology and aesthetic interventions, concrete local sound worlds and boundary-defying art. They put a focus on our relationship with nature as listeners as much as they call into question whe…
The Shell That Speaks The Sea
*100 copies limited edition, slightly discounted - Please note sleeves have a seam split on the top side* "I first met David Toop some 20 years ago. I think we were in touch shortly before that, but our first meeting took place when I invited him to Australia to perform and to speak as part of REV, a festival held at Brisbane Powerhouse. It was a memorable meeting, I vividly remember his solo performance and the edition A Picturesque View, Ignored, documents an improvised meeting during that tim…
Wilderness of Mirrors
2023 stock. Wilderness of Mirrors is the new album from Lawrence English. This album has been two years in the making and the first album created since the release of his 2011 ode to J.A. Baker's novel, The Peregrine. It is English's most tectonic auditory offering to date, an unrelenting passage of colliding waves of harmony and dynamic live instrumentation. The phrase, "wilderness of mirrors," draws its root from T.S. Eliot's elegant poem "Gerontion." During the Cold War, the phrase became ass…
Cruel Optimism
Cruel Optimism is a record that considers power (present and absent). It meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility. This pyramid is an affective ecology of the (ever)present moment. This edition owes its title and its origins to the wonderful text of the same name by American theorist Lauren Berlant. I had the fortune to come across her writing almost a half-decade ago. In Cruel Optimism, I found a number of cri…
Colours Of Air
The union of composers Lawrence English and loscil aka Scott Morgan is seamless, sublime, and long overdue. Born of a conversation centered on the notion of “rich sources” as a forge for electronic music, Colours Of Air is a collection of recordings of a century old pipe organ housed at the historic Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia, which were then processed, transformed, and elevated into eight majestic electro-acoustic threshold devotionals. The timbre of the instrument and spatial fluctuatio…
The Prey And The Ruler
"The first time I witnessed Senyawa was in the early 2010s. We shared a bill at the MonaFoma festival in Hobart. Some memories hold strongly in your mind and Senyawa’s performance that day did just that. It was a monstrous portent of things to come. A promise, in sound, of the energetic force that has since come to mark them as one of the truly unique and visionary musical pairings from South East Asia. This project, The Prey And The Ruler, finds its root in the unsteady months of mid 2021. As t…
Approach
In 1985, Mangaka Yoshihisa Tagami penned Grey. Now, seemingly all but forgotten, it remains historic as it led the vanguard of manga translated and serialized in the west. Approach is Lawrence English's homage to the lasting impression the manga left on him as a 13-year-old. After rediscovering it in 2021, he was struck by how internalized some of the manga's themes had become and was compelled to create a soundtrack as a form of distorted mirror to its pages. What results is an intensely episod…
Viento
'In the summer of 2010 I had the opportunity to visit Antarctica through an invitation extended by the Argentine Antarctic Division. It was nothing short of life-altering, as I am sure anyone would suspect. Upon departing from Buenos Aires for the iced continent the Hercules transport aircraft, under direction of the Argentine military, made a routine stop at an airbase outside Rio Gallegos. What was meant to be a few hours layover turned into several days as, on landing, a strong wind storm ble…
Material Interstices
Tip! Lawrence English teams up with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart once again for another voyage into ambient music's punishing underworld. It’s their gloomiest slab to date - unfurling nightmarish Lynchian drones and seismic, overdriven rumbles that sound like a Thomas Köner and Wolf Eyes soundtrack to Dante's Inferno.
If the gaseous, clouded noise of 'Material Interstices' sounds as if it could be snatched from one of David Lynch's most unsettling dream sequences, we have to assume that's completely…
Breathing Spirit Forms (Book + CD)
* Matt laminate and embossed sleeve, insert card, CD and24-page book with text by David Toop, drawings by Akio Suzuki and photography by Lawrence English * In August 2013, David Toop and Akio Suzuki visited Australia. During a residency on Tamborine Mountain (an anglicized version of the Yugambeh word Jambreen), the pair were joined by Lawrence English for a series of site specific, environment-led improvisations created around the fringes of the Tamborine plateau. Embedded in place, these reco…
A Mirror Holds The Sky (Book + CD)
* Matt laminate and embossed sleeve, insert card, CD and 48 page perfect bound book featuring photographs by Lawrence English, taken on location in the Amazon * From Lawrence English: "In late months of 2008, I had the great fortune to spend some weeks in the Amazon. The visit, facilitated through Francisco Lopez's Mamori Artlab residency, remains one of the most deeply affecting experiences I have had . . . Living in Australia, tropical rainforests are not foreign to me. I would even say I am …
Observation of Breath
Do you remember the last time you were breathing consciously? Either way, you are likely doing it now. On his new album »Observation of Breath« for the Swiss-based Hallow Ground label, Lawrence English worked exclusively with an organ for four compositions that are exercises in »maximal minimalism,« as their creator himself notes in a nod to Charlemagne Palestine, who coined this term. While it seems somewhat fitting that those four pieces based on a steady flow of air were conceived and recorde…
Selva Oscura
Special limited edition of 1000 copies on opaque light grey vinyl. For over half a decade, William Basinski and Lawrence English have been in regular contact with one another. During that time their paths have crossed repeatedly in various cities; Zagreb, Los Angeles, Hobart and more, in a variety situations. It was from these chance encounters – and the strange familiar of lives lived in transit – that their first collaboration, Selva Oscura, was seeded.
The phrase Selva Oscura draws its root …
On the Completion of My Master Work
* Edition of 100. Hand-stamped pro-dubbed C38 NAC super-ferric cassette tape with recto/verso printed golden card. Printed in Indonesia. Including download code of high quality digital version.* For this volume, Sydney duo Andy Rantzen and Jochen Gutsch team up with Brisbane-based Lawrence English to create a new trio work, themed around the ideas, life, and personality of a German philosopher, poet and thinker, Arthur Schopenhauer. Based on Rantzen’s spoken words and English’s haunting sine wav…
Immediate Horizon
Lawrence English and Alessandro Cortini issue Immediate Horizon,
a live recording, made at the premiere of the piece, held at Kraftwerk
in Berlin. Having become mutual admirers of each other's work; English
of Cortini's Sonno (HOS 412CD, 2014) and Cortini of English's Wilderness Of Mirrors
(RM 460CD, 2014), the pair were very pleased to receive an invitation
to collaborate together. Following a number of months exchanging
compositional ideas and materials, Cortini and English met in Berlin…
Approaching Nothing
Approaching Nothing is Lawrence English’s response to one of his favourite concrète works, Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien. Its title is a direct english translation, and the piece follows very similar methods of recording and collaging with minimal alteration made to the original source material, which was also collected on and around the Croatian island of Vela Luka where Ferrari visited and made his original recordings in the ‘60s.
Fable
Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello are creators of mythology. Their mythology renders a series of acoustic spaces, haunted by narrative and hinting at happenings unseen, but certainly heard. With Fable, we are presented with their second duet. It chronicles three years of intermittent audio communications in search of new collaborative approaches. The results focus on the pair’s joint interests in modular synthesis, field recordings and the blurry boundaries between acoustic instrumentation a…