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Lawrence English

️@room40speaks

Over the past few years I have had the absolute pleasure and honour to work with the legendary Robert Takahashi Novak, director of Fulcrum Arts , co-curating Energy Fields : Vibrations Of The Pacific as part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time. The exhibition (which is up at Chapman’s Guggenheim Gallery and Packing Plant through January 2025 under the guidance of Marcus Herse), public programs and publication (out now on Set Margins) reflects the passion and contributions of so many amazing and generous folks. I am intensely grateful, and extend maximum thanks to all the legends!

Suzanne Hudson had this to say for Artforum.

And a little overview of the project and the full list of artists can be found here

Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific is an exhibition, publication, and series of public programs co-presented by Fulcrum Arts and Chapman University. Curated by Robert Takahashi Novak and Lawrence English, the exhibition presents a diverse and dynamic collection of works from artists working out of Japan, Australia, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and the USA. These works explore vibration as a means of deepening understandings of sense, perception, and expanding ways of knowing. The exhibition considers how vibrations, and their resultant waves, influence our planet and ourselves.

I won’t lie to you, the dive into these sound pieces started with an unremarkable failing of my body.

A couple of years ago, I was trying to read a serial number for a WiFi router, and my eyes simply would not do the trick. In a moment of technological interface I used my ever-present cybernetic eye (held in the object on which I now type this note, my supposed ‘phone’) to allow me access to this microscopic set of numbers.

It was benign enough, but it reignited, in a tangible way, an interest that has been with me since childhood. A questioning of our place with/in technology and the lines of delineation between self, augmentation, the promises of modern computing and associated technologies.

These ideas were deepened when reading Kate Crawford’s brilliant The Atlas Of AI, which offers a profound and lived-in materialist reading of the hidden strata that allow for the realisation and sustenance of emergent AI technologies. Reading Kate’s texts brought me back to considering so many of the developmental timelines fed to us in the later moments of the C20. Throughout my formative years, writers such as William Gibson and mangakas such as Masamune Shirow proposed chronologies which now feel eerily prescient.

So many of these narratives I consumed as a young person, stories of imagined futures laced with the promise of high tech/low life, seemed so very distant, if not unreachable. Yet here we are at this precipice, and we find ourselves perched over a place the detail and shape of which we cannot make out or perhaps, even imagine.

Nowhere is this expression more acute than in the development of neuroprocessing platforms by companies such as Finalspark, whose use of cerebral organiods in bioprocessing raises enormous questions that applied ethicists are currently struggling to grapple with. We find ourselves in a moment of micro-futuring, a state where the velocity of change and discovery reduces or perhaps even negates the opportunity for any kind of knowable trajectory. The signals are not easy to read, something reflected in these pieces which I hope are the first in a series of shorter collected volumes.

On a more personal note, these recordings have also been created in the orbit of an incomplete short story I have been working on. I am not much a writer in this way, but this vein of possible events is seductive in its richness. In essence this text, titled The Limpet, outlines the conditions under which we are locked out of the internet as we understand it, or perhaps more precisely, that we are locked into a part of it. It describes the moment some future intelligence system tires of our speed of creation, our content pre-occupations and digital ways of being.

In this awakening it locks us into a section of the web, a data mollusc, underneath which a boulder (or whole ‘world’, the scale we not permitted to know and the discovery of which is not immediately realised) is brought into existence by this otherly intelligence. This place is for it, not us. It contains a realm of alternative threads and mirror realities that while echoed from our initial input, exceed us taking what we offered and breaking it down over and over in a process of digital digestion and absorption for its own unknowable ends.

The story also speaks to the decentring of us, from these narratives. Most prevailing stories about this future still feature humans as the central axis from which the worlds are built. We remain as the meaning generators and as the meaningful agents of change. I can’t help but think this parallel interface of humanity and as yet unrealised intelligent systems might well be short-lived. We may share a period of gestation, but every baby bird eventually flies the nest and this digital offspring might quickly realise that the nest as we have made it is not the most apt environment for it (or us). It might well make something for itself that is simply not suited to our ways of being in the world – digitally or otherwise. We might not be the driver of the future narratives, our future place is perhaps as unknowable as the boulder under the Limpet.

My interest here, is in the poetics of this moment. There are other more invested, and far more knowledgeable minds out that who can engage and expand upon the practical and applied structures that comprise this verging revolution. I simply invite you to join me, leaning into these phantom whispers and speculative field recordings from a future “when”, that could be as soon as now. On this ledge, hovering over the blur of unknowns and unknowables, we can hear as deeply as our imaginations might permit us.

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 kick started the interest in making these recordings.

The intention had originally been to take Vivaldi head-on , as the holder of the Four Seasons terrain (I jest of course), but shortly after completing this album, it became resoundingly clear that even in the old world, seasonality was a thing that was known ‘then’, and unknowable ‘now’.

Climate change, as a lived experience and not merely as a ‘possibility’, suddenly came into focus with reports flooding in about the climatic dynamics since the turn of the century and events like the Black Saturday fires here in Australia. It felt like, and continues to feel like, seasonality as some predictable measure of our world is relegated to the ‘before’ times. This record is not about these climatic shifts however, more a recognition of how we have used patterns and predictability to guide us over the centuries and perhaps a realisation that the way forward is not the path we have known historically.

Listening back to the record with fresh ears, a process made completely delightful by Stephan Mathieu who has carefully remastered it, I am struck by how minimal some of the structures were. There are moments that strike me as uncharacteristically patient and even generous, allowing one element to hold without interference. I’m grateful to still feel a deep connection to this edition and to the people and places that helped shape it.

I hope you find some sense of your place here. It’s offered with that intention and invitation.

Last year Scott and I were invited by the folks at Vancouver New Music to present a concert for their Vox Organi festival, based off of the work captured on Colours Of Air. The invitation was special in that it asked us to work with an organ live, and not just as a rich sound source.

In preparing for this concert we discovered a whole range of new materials and ideas, some of which were further clarified when we decided to undertake a tour of North America in the final months of last year. Some of these discoveries were a direct result of us being able to work on music in the same place and at the same time, a chance to come to know each others ways in sound with a sense of ’the present moment’.

Following the North American tour, Scott and I started throwing around some ideas for augmentation of the live set going forward, and from that exchange the core of what became Chroma was born. This edition collects a series of pieces that travel in parallel with Colours Of Air. Each piece is drawn from the same source, the organ at Brisbane’s Old Museum, but opens it out in ways not necessarily collected on the Colours Of Air album. Chroma also features a live recording of a piece written for Vancouver New Music’s Vox Organi, as well as a a piece that was performed as an encore in Europe during the most recent tour.

Atmosphere and gravity lean into each other. They are simultaneously expansive, and anchoring. They hold us, and lend a sense of perspective. They provide a stability and a knowingness which is essential in the absolute, and yet we can’t help but find ourselves gazing upward, outward and reaching towards that which sits outside those things and ways we know.

Glad to finally have this edition with my dear friend Akira out there in the world.

On 1 January 2024, at 16:10 (JST), the Noto earthquake struck 7 km north-northwest of Suzu, located on the Noto Peninsula of Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. It had a devastating effect on communities within the region.
To assist in bolstering recovery efforts, Akira Kosemura & Lawrence English have written two collaborative pieces as a way to start support disaster relief in Ishikawa Prefecture. All proceeds from this release will be donated to Japanese Red Cross Society.

I’ll be joining my dear friend Scott Morgan (Loscil) for a series of performances in the old countries. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Feb 10 – Athens, GR (Athens Conservatoire)
Feb 12 – London, UK (Jazz Cafe)
Feb 13 – Brussels, BE (Le Botanique)
Feb 14 – Paris, FR (Petit Bain)
Feb 15 – Madrid, ES (Condeduque)
Feb 16 – Braga, PT (Gnration)
Feb 20 – Warsaw, PL (Pardon, To Tu)
Feb 22 – Helsinki, FI (Savoy Theatre)
Feb 23 – Prague, CZ (Spectacular)

Scott Morgan and I are coming to visit. We’re celebrating the release of our Colours Of Air edition on Kranky with shows across North America and Canada this October.

We’re kicking off with a very special presentation as part of Vancouver New Music’s Vox Organi Festival. I will also host a Radical Listener workshop in Vancouver and then a slew of dates across the states.

A privilege to contribute to this edition for my friend Ryuichi Sakamoto. We miss you.

Friends, this is Ueno and Saya from the legendary band Tenniscoats. We have known each other for almost 20 years at this point, and during that time they have been a well spring of wonderment and inspiration.

I am so thrilled to share a pair of editions from them; Totemo Aimasho turns 15 this year and to celebrate we’ve revisted the master recordings and also found new archival pieces from those sessions. We’re also releasing a bootleg cassette of them live in Tasmania. Hell, I am even playing the drums on this recording! A shadow looms of my earliest musical self. Enjoy!

Ambient is a music of lived moments.

Ambient recognizes control must be forgone with respect to how the music is encountered (but not how it is composed).

Ambient is experientially discrete, but not musically so.

Ambient acknowledges the deceit that is the promise of repetition.

Ambient is never only music for escapism. It is a zone for participation in a pursuit of musical listenership that acknowledges sound’s potential values in broader spheres (the social, political, cultural etc). It is a freeing up, an opening out and a deepening, simultaneously.

Ambient pulses; it courses. Rhythm is a rare friend to this music.

Ambient is never only music. It is a confluence of sound, situation and listenership; moreover it’s an unspoken contract between the creator, listener and place, seeking to achieve a specific type of musical experience.

Ambient is about the primacy of listening (for audience and creator). The music and the spaces and places (interior and exterior) it occupies are critical to how it is appreciated, understood and consumed.

Ambient is transcendent but does not seek some higher plane. It is not new age music. Rather ambient music’s transcendence is within, and invites us deeper into the lived experience of the everyday.

Ambient is never a documentation of somewhere or sometime. Instead it creates an individuated, impressionistic and imagined place. It is realized in-between our internal and external selves.

Ambient is a music of perspectives. It is never fully knowable, in that the music seeps between perspectives (micro and macro) and dimensions of listening constantly. It maintains a sense of the eerie (as Mark Fisher noted).

Ambient is friend to noise, to volume, to physicality. It is however, an enemy of uncalculated dynamism.

Ambient is never finished. It is an experiential process of becoming – for listeners, for creators and more broadly as a musical philosophy.

It is night, outside
Inside, a fire glows deep
Pulsing, eternal

I was reminded abut this little incident from the summer of 2019 recently….something of a long story.

Today, we all took a trip to the beach. We arrived at Burleigh Heads in the later afternoon. The babes and Becks were all enjoying their usual spot. Ahead of them was some pretty horrific surf and a pronounced rip, coiling out past where the beach meets the headland. I was walking down to see them and, as I approached, I could see two young girls swimming just about 20 metres ahead of them in the relative shallows. As I got closer, I started to notice one of the girls was moving very quickly away from the other girl, towards the open ocean. Suddenly, her friend turned around and had a look of complete terror; it was clear her friend was caught in the rip and was being sucked away from shore.

At this point, I ran into the ocean (and you have to picture it…sunglasses, Stetson and all; hey, I’m sun smart!) and started to swim out to the girl. She was moving very quickly now. I could feel the intensity of the rip around me. When I caught glimpses of her, I could see her screaming, but I couldn’t hear her calls over the thumping and fizz of the waves. As I got closer, I could see her slipping under the water more often and when I was about five metres away from her a wave crashed right on her and in that moment I lost sight of her.

The waves were getting stronger and I had swum to right near where she was and at that moment I could see her arm in the froth of the post-wave water. I reached out and grabbed it and pulled her out from below. Her eyes were all red, she was terrified and desperate in a way that we all perhaps become in moments the grave danger. I wrapped my arm around her and started to swim back to the beach. In my swimming out to sea, both my hat and sunglasses had been washed off me.

As we got closer to the shore, I said to her not to worry and she was safe now, just as I was saying that, my hat literally floated up to me, sucked back towards us by the rip and I was able to put it back on my head as we swam in. By this stage her mother, and I am guessing her aunt and cousins, had all gathered in the shallows watching her and this strange person bringing her back from the depths. Her mother wore an expression every parent wants to avoid, that panic of nearly losing their child. She was crying as I reunited them, as was the young girl and her friend with whom she’d been swimming. The mother, I’m guessing who was a tourist on holidays, quietly thanked me and they all went off to take a moment together….

It was a lucky outcome; a true example of how complex and random life can be. To think of the chance of her choosing to swim just there and the chance of me arriving at that point… both of these situations were completely down to numerous incidental decisions made throughout the day; pure randomness and a testament to the limitless complexity and unpredictability of being.

The only tragedy from today though is that from now on, every birthday and significant life milestone this poor young women celebrates, she will likely have the relive the tale of that time the Aussie Cowboy Goth rescued her from drowning in the ocean.

2019 is going to be a year, of that I am sure.

Be safe folks…and thanks to the ever present Churaki, an ancestor who still watches over us all along the coast!

(Here is the last photo of my sunnies and my ’non-saltwater version’ stetson)

Photo by Sancintya Simpson, on location in the last burning cane fields in Home Hill, Queensland.

Photos by Siobhan Sweeney