Posts Tagged ‘Lawrence English’

Listen: ‘One Line Sky’ by Lawrence English

Posted: 20 June 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Lawrence English shares a second piece from his forthcoming album, The Rest Is My Ghost arriving on Room40 on 7th August. ‘One Line Sky’ starts uneasy, towering and stuttering before bursting forth into an ecstatic wash of bass heavy, dense harmonics.

About ‘One Line Sky’, Lawrence says, "I spent a good deal of time researching in mega-cities whilst making this record. ‘One Line Sky’ was a term passed to me by a friend in Hong Kong. It has numerous readings, many of which float around the experiences of being at the bottom on these long canyon of buildings. which form the one line sky. The sky then is a slither of something else we can see beyond the immediate towers of architecture. I like the sense of escapism that is promised in that view, that outside of these places we build and sometimes cage ourselves into, a whole other possible life exists."

Hear ‘One Line Sky’ here:

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Photo credit: Traianos Pakioufakis

Helen Svoboda – Headwater

Posted: 17 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s rare that an album sits so far beyond the realms of any genre that it’s difficult to know where to start in discussing it. Helen Svoboda’s Headwater is one such rare album.

The pitch describes Headwater as ‘a stream of fragmentation, individuality and wholeness, shaped by disparate and complementary aspects of Helen Svoboda’s solo practice. Sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ run throughout the record to form an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved songform. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself’.

Lately I’ve been quite amazed by how little people I know can actually remember from times past. I don’t mean the fact that friends from school can’t remember people from our year we weren’t eve n friends with (although I do), but just events and things in general. I find myself haunted by memories stretching as far back to when I was just three, but most people I know can barely remember what they did last week, or what they had for dinner. Seeing my mother slide rapidly into a haze of dementia forgetfulness in recent months, I’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting on memory on many levels. I’ve long considered it analogous to a vast ROM drive, but have wondered about the means of access to the stored files. And as much as these contemplations have led to some dark places, I’ve become more accepting of different capacities for recollection, while still feeling a degree of fear for the future.

The ensemble she’s has assembled certainly makes for an unusual combination, consisting as it does of Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production). Double bass is rare. Two double basses – in a quartet – is unheard of, and makes for some incredibly unconventional instrumental interplay across the sixteen compositions.

Many of those compositions are brief – under two minutes in duration – but convey so much.

‘Veins’, released in advance of the album and featuring vocals from Selma Savolainen is sparse, ethereal, and is representative – to some extent, although the range of the compositions is such that no one piece could ever truly summarise its contents.

The album’s first song, ‘If’, is a deeply atmospheric amalgamation of stylistic elements. In many respects, it’s predominantly a folk song, and one built on foundations of curving drones and rousing vocals. It’s stirringly evocative, and calls to mind in some ways the earthy feel of Wardruna, only without the tribal percussion or sense of the cinematic. This feels more inwardly-focused and reflective, but is certainly no less powerful.

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‘Child’ begins almost acapella save for a sparse, low-key drone, but builds to a wailing crescendo, and Svoboda’s voice is nothing short of captivating, conveying so much more than the words alone. In contrast, the instrumental ‘Blur’ is a sawing strain of dissonance as a cacophony of strings scrape and scratch discordantly to create a nerve-jangling tension. It may only be two minutes in duration, but it’s ten minutes in intensity.

There’s spacey experimentalism and loose jazz leanings on ‘Void of Space’, and ‘Evening Hepuli’ brings high drama and breathy, operatic hysteria over stop/start strings which ring and reverberate. The final piece, ‘Hepuli Earworm’ is commanding, in places a wild jazz frenzy, occasionally inviting comparisons to The Necks, in others conjuring expansive soundscapes and moments with real emotional edge.

Headwater is not a straightforward album: it’s quirky and unconventional, and not always immediately accessible. But it’s inventive, imaginative, truly unique in composition and delivery, and, in parts, incredibly powerful.

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Photo: Celeste de Clario

Watch: ‘If’ by Helen Svoboda

Posted: 31 March 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Room40 – 31st March 2026

Room40 announces a new album by the Finnish/Australian award-winning double bassist, vocalist and composer Helen Svoboda, arriving on the 26th June.

The distinctive sonic world of Headwater weaves sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ built around two double basses, two voices, and electronics; heard as singular and combinatory bodies of material. The album forms an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved song form. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself.

On revealing the album opener, ‘If" today, Svoboda says “’If’ explores a dream shaped by constant interruptions. The sleeper is caught in a series of jolts, driven by the fear of losing precious hours of consciousness within a fleeting human life. Each disturbance prevents a descent into deeper sleep, yet the body never full awakes.

“The video, directed and filmed by Angus Kirby, captures this state between rest and recurring subconscious thoughts. We filmed this around the corner from my house in Melbourne during, and after, a stunning summer sunset.”

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Songs are glued together by extended instrumental practice, improvisation, and strands of Svoboda’s cultural heritage. As a Finnish-born artist who has lived in Australia since the age of five, Svoboda delves into her Nordic background largely through the album’s vocal work, which carries echoes of Finnish folk harmony and traces of invented “Finnish” words, explored in collaboration with Savolainen as the second-voice. Svoboda notes that she does not seek to emulate or replicate this style of music, but has taken and nurtured the seeds of its influence on her musical language into something deeply personal and intuitive.

The instrumental pieces reveal an articulate language, with an expanded approach to the melodic and textural qualities of the double bass. Svoboda’s fascination with timbre is explored with collaborator Jacques Emery through the interplay of the two basses and Robinson’s electronics, extending traditional understandings of how the double bass might typically operate in a chamber context. The result is a different sound-realm entirely – traversing between spaces of lightness and weight, bound by a sense of youthful curiosity.

The ensemble features Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production). 

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Photo credit: Celeste de Clario

Richard Francis – Combinations 4

Posted: 26 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 19th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

2025 has been something of a year of noise for me – on the reviewing front, for sure, but perhaps more so on the creative front. Noise doesn’t have to be confrontational or antagonistic. Moreover, it can most certainly be a release. Richard Francis’ latest offering, Combinations 4, is a work which offers up some substantial noise, with a broad exploration of frequencies which are immersive rather than attacking. Churning, droning, unsettling, it spans the range of what noise can do without venturing into the domains of the harsh. Nevertheless, this makes for a pretty challenging work.

Francis’ summary of his working practice and of this album is worth digesting, for context, as he writes clearly and factually:

‘Since 2010 all of the recordings I make and release are improvised live takes, recorded down to a stereo digital recorder with very little editing other than EQ, trimmed beginnings and ends, and the occasional layering of two tracks together… I arrived here through spending many years prior trying to build an electrical system (which I now call the ‘fugue system’) that would do what I did in composition/studio work but in a live setting: combining together dozens of sounds with open feedback and generative channels, and discrete control for each. Then when I finished building that system using digital and analogue tools, I preferred what I heard and recorded ‘on the fly’ more than what I was doing in composition, so that system is now my instrument in a way.’ Precisely what this system is and how it works is unexplained, and we probably don’t need to know: process and tech can very easily become tedious and adds little, when ultimately, it’s about output.

As the title suggests, this is the fourth in his Combinations series, and here, Francis suggests ‘there’s a bit more structure and layering to the works, if that makes sense’. It makes more sense in context, I assume, because on its own, Combinations 4 is a tour though difficult terrain, and any structures are at best vague.

‘Four A’ is a deluge of dirty noise, curtains of white noise rain cascade, and ‘Leave it all alone for months’ is a queasy mess of drones and groans, a morass of undulating dissonance. This piece is quiet but uncomfortable, the sound of strain, whining, churning unsettling. ‘Parehuia’ booms frequencies which simply hurt. In places, it gets grainy and granular, and the experience is simply uncomfortable. I feel my skin crawl. From here, we plunge into ‘My Fuel! I Love It!’ It’s six-and-a-half head-shredding minutes of sonic discomfort, dominated by rising howls and rings.

Assuming ‘Phase effect on wet road’ is a purely descriptive title based on the source material, it’s three minutes of the sound of heavy rain heavily treated while undulating phase hovers and hums, creating an oppressive atmosphere which bleeds into the slow ebb and flow of ‘The alphabet is a sampler’. The effect of Combinations 4 is cumulative, and while the final four of the album’s ten compositions tend to be comparatively shorter, they’re dense and difficult to process. By the arrival of the quivering, quavering oscillations of closer ‘Four J’, which become increasingly disjointed and discombobulating as the piece progresses, you’re feeling a shade disorientated, and more than vaguely overwhelmed.

For an album which appears, on the surface, to be a fairly innocuous work of experimentalism, with Combinations 4, Richard Francis has created something which delivers substantial psychological impact by stealth.

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David Shea – Meditatons

Posted: 21 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room 40 – 7th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Today, December 21st, is the Winter solstice: in terms of daylight hours, the shortest day of the year, and the longest night. As I write, we’ve had cloud, fog, mist, and rain most days here in York for weeks, so it’s essentially felt like one perpetual night for nigh on an eternity. I’m certainly no summer sun lover (I have fair skin and suffer with hayfever), but do struggle with this time of year – always did, but personal circumstances have accentuated the struggle. Watching Shutter Island with my fourteen-year-old daughter earlier (it seemed like a good idea to avoid conventional ‘family’ ‘Christmas’ fare), she commented on how the ‘man with dead wife is troubled and has wild dreams’ trope is perhaps disproportionately common in movies. She’s absolutely right, of course, but the observation hit hard and brought me back to the reason we were avoiding the schmaltzy family Christmas shit – and reminded me that there’s simply no escape from my personal narrative, that my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer just before Christmas in 2021, and died just after Christmas in 2023. These facts not only make it hard for Christmas to be happy, but dealing with all of the stuff like Christmas shopping, present-wrapping, arranging seeing relatives, etc. – stuff that was primarily her domain – on my own is a significant source of stress.

And this is why, on seeing this release had arrived for my attention, it made sense to do myself a favour, for a change. Music is, after all, one of the best therapies. While I’ve little to no interest in new age cack or pseudomystical bullshit, and have generally failed at any attempts to mediate with the limited assistance I’ve had, the idea of a method of achieving mental calm still holds significant appeal.

As David Shea explains in the album’s accompanying notes, ‘Meditations is a set of 8 works based on the experience of meditation practice. Music made for both meditation and reflecting the realities of a life of daily practice. The breath, the quietness, the listening, the distracted dissonant and consonant thoughts that pass through. The texts throughout the pieces are fragments of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the shortest and created from a mixture of traditions and sources, produced long after Buddha’s death and meant to be chanted or sung as a ritual and personal meditation. The experience of meditation, so often covered in mythology and one dimensionally peaceful symbols, is in fact a complex set of traditions in all cultures and has roots in indigenous cultures world wide and involves the limitations of thought as well as the quietness of the mind as a source of understanding and health.

‘The Buddhist teachings that are in focus in this album are in a sense a sequel to the record Rituals of 2015 in that they are adapted as Meditations that cross and combine traditions with any attempt consciously to synthesize them into a new whole. A conversation between traders, in the form here of musicians, languages, sound sources and the peace and struggle of maintaining a real meditational practice and living in the chaos and violence of society as well as accepting the world as it is, with all of the internal conflicts and release and rise of tension.’

Each of the eight pieces is around eight minutes in duration, and are centred around Shea’s piano, with a host of musicians bringing a range of electronic and acoustic additions, ranging from singing bowls and vibraphone, to samples and midi guitar. The resultant work is gentle, subtle, and sedately-paced. There are tweeting birds flitting around notes which hang, suspended, resonating for substantial durations. Hums and drones. Hints of melodies. Any structures are not based around motifs or repetition, but a flow. That flow is not a linear trajectory, a passage from A to B, but a flow which weaves into the places where the calm is residing.

As much as I’ve always struggled to work with visualisation in guided meditation, Meditations somehow conjures mental images through its abstraction – perhaps because of its abstraction. Being told to visualise a stream, a woodland, a beach, is too much direction, too much ‘relaxation to order’, the meditative equivalent of mandatory of fun in a corporate environment. But with open-ended, non-specific assistance, the channels seem to open more freely. Just as I find ideas and words come to me more readily while out walking, when my blood is oxygenated and my lymphatic flowing comfortably, music which invited free interpretation and successfully evokes images without directed prompts unlocks doors and presents access to unknown passageways.

Piano and acoustic guitar ripple and trickle and ebb and eddy. On ‘Sitting in a Painted Cave’, which ventures more overtly into experimental and Eastern-influenced territory, picked acoustic guitar weaves a textured tapestry. The spoken word interjection is something I find proves to be a distraction in terms of the flow, but I feel this is more because my ideal tranquil space contains no evidence of human existence whatsoever. As a human being myself, I do accept this contradiction, just as I accept the irony of my rage at the presence of others when out for a walk seeking solitude. The track’s second half is rather more dissonant and difficult, with muffled voices adding an unsettling edge. It’s rather less relaxing.

The harmonics, drone, and piano-led ambience of ‘Stillness’ is rather more tolerable, but still wailing drones and tapers quaver before the rippling piano rises from the dissonance of amid-range feedback.

I might have expected ‘The Morning I Awoke’ to be more uplifting, and more… hippy, but it’s largely piano and calming acoustic strums and brooding strings. ‘Tye Heart Sutra’ more than compensate, and offers a spiritual trip and then some. But how to differentiate between business as a need to maintain production? It’s felt like It’s felt like the longest night of the year for about 2 months now.

‘The Heart Sutra’ arrives unexpectedly, before ‘Svaha’ arrives boldly but swiftly tapers into a droning serenity. The sound is dense, a resonant ‘om’, and it leads the listener – at last – to slow, deep breaths, as an undulating vocal –a folky, almost shanty-like lilting quaver- comes to the fore.

Despite its intentions – as specified by the title – Meditations is not quite the sonic still water is first implies. There are dark currents, difficult swells amidst the soothing flows. But for that, it feels more honest, more real.

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Erik Griswold – Next Level Avoidance

Posted: 19 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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ROOM40 – 9th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been some time since I’ve sat down to listen to a work created using prepared piano. It’s been even longer since I spent time with Erik Griswold’s work. Perhaps the two are related, as Griswold’s accompanying notes recount how it’s been a while for him, too:

Under the house again, just me and my very old piano. Have we got anything more to say to each other? Will some new toys spice things up a bit? The creative process seems to swing like a (Foucoult’s?) pendulum, always returning to the same spot again and again, eventually. When I last made short form prepared piano pieces in 2015 (Pain Avoidance Machine) I was “feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat.” If only I had known how far we had to go.

To the sounds of my 1885 Lipp and Sohn, prepared with brass bolts, strips of paper and rubber, I’ve added an analogue synthesizer, extending the exploration into the electronic. The tactile quality of both instruments is central to my approach, with small inconsistencies of sound, attack, decay, filtering all foregrounded. It’s a very intimate setting with just two C414 microphones at close distance to capture the granular details of sonic materials. The addition of “frames,” “windows,” and “sonic mirrors” produce a ritualistic aura hovering above and around the music.

I take a moment to reflect on reading this, before I can even bring myself to listen, reflecting on the title. Putting things off is… well, it’s a way of dealing, but it’s not really coping, is it? Not that Griswold hasn’t been making music: he’s maintained a steady flow of releases over the last few years, even during the COVID years – but to return to the piano is a significant step.

The title track raises the curtain here, and at times the tinkling tones are achingly beautiful, graceful, delicate, the most magnificent invocations of neoclassical perfection – albeit alternating with plinking, plonkling randomness which flips between low-end thunder and what, to the untrained ear or anyone unfamiliar with the instrumentation, sounds like clumsy stumbling.

‘Wild West’ isn’t a twanging country tune, and says nothing of the wiki-wiki-wah-wah we know, but a rolling piano piece with the prepared element adding a taut, almost electronic-sounding aspect – like the plucking of an egg-slicer – but also abstract, and strangely evocative. Meanwhile, the gentle, somewhat vague, and perhaps rather progressive-leaning ‘Ghost in the Middle’ radiates a hypnotic beauty.

The album’s mid-section takes on a dreamy, drifting, hazy quality, floating from here to there, with scratches and scrapes, forward and backward providing texture to these ponderous sonic expanses.

‘Uncertainty’ again balances neoclassical magnificence with angular irregularities and some jarring alternative tuning which continues into the trickling ‘Poly cascade’, a stack that’s subtle and in some way grounding.

‘Colours of Summer’ lands as a surprise and completely rips out those roots in an instant, being a throbbing techno track which completely goes against the grain of the album. In complete contrast, ‘Ghost of Ravel’ returns to classical territories, and is nothing short of beautiful, although as the album inches towards its close – the atmospheric bubbler that is ‘X-Mode’ which calls to mind the Krautrock bubbling of Tangerine Dream, and, more contemporaneously perhaps Pye Corner Audio’, find ourselves floating, drifting, unsure of where we are. Next Level Avoidance is full of surprises, and is in essence representative of the prepared piano, in that it’s unpredictable, unstable. Dim the lights, breathe and feel the flow.

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Sadie Powers – Souvenir

Posted: 19 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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9th May 2025 – Room40

Christopher Nosnibor

Souvenirs are unusual things, in that they’re intensely personal, and imbued with a resonance which is often difficult to articulate.

I will revisit an anecdote I relayed no so long ago: my dad gave me £15 spending money when I went on a Cub camp in Yorkshire when I was probably fourteen. We had a day trip to York, where I discovered an independent record shop, the now gone and sadly-missed Track Records. I blew most of my £15 on 12” singles by The Sisters of Mercy: Alice, Temple of Love, and The Reptile House EP. On returning home, my father was not happy: he’d given me the money for real souvenirs – fridge magnets, mugs, erasers… but the fact that I still have those records and tale to tell says these were the best souvenirs I could have ever purchased. Would I still have an I Heart York mug or a tea towel thirty years later?

But one thing that’s become apparent is that for fringe, niche, and unestablished acts like Sadie Powers, even when released by labels like Room40, physical releases are becoming less of a thing. It’s a sad reflection on the state of the world and how the arts in general are suffering. People don’t want to pay for stuff, or they can’t afford to pay for stuff, and the end result is the same.

Souvenir is a sad album, based on a premise which resonates on a personal level. I’ve written extensively of late on both the impact of the pandemic, and of losing my wife, and Souvenir is a work which explores grief, with a particular focus on the pandemic. Powers explains the album, its context, and its musical limitations and development in terms of instrumentation, in a fashion which warrants quotation in full:

‘Between 2020 and 2022, a significant number of friends and family passed away. Due to the pandemic, funerals became impossible to travel to or just didn’t happen. How does one grieve alone? What is that language? What is that movement? What do I do with my hands, with the muscle memory of care weaving phantom thread? What is the shape of the shelter one makes to bear this loss? If I’m not holding, will I sink to the bottom?

‘What is my last memory with them? Almost always, it is of embrace.

‘I’ve had a relationship with fretless bass for about 20 years. It’s an unforgiving instrument. It exposes everything. Like porcelain: elastic, pliable, detailed, expressive. Suggestive to subtle touches. It shows the hand of the player. I began recording improvisations with silence, thinking of those I’d lost, their embraces, those moments of stillness and when time folds in on itself, then cutting the tracks up processing and layering them, a sound collage. Programmable music box bells, sheet metal, cardboard box, and field recordings from the same spot on the back patio of my former home color the shape. Like a bird collecting items to create a nest of memory. Sounds drifting in and out like recollections, like ghosts. The practice became a life raft, or a grieving raft.

‘Is the souvenir the embrace? Souvenirs originated from pilgrimages in the Middle Ages, as a remembrance of a journey.’

The four compositions which make up Souvenirs are each approximately ten minutes in duration, and this would have made for a magnificent vinyl LP, particularly given the texture and detail of the works.

The first track, ‘Right After’ is exemplary: it begins so quietly as to be beyond range, before the crackle of a slow fade-in becomes discernible. And against this, and some rumbling dark ambience, there is the strolling fretless bass work. I can’t help but think – however fleetingly – of Duran Duran, not because it actually sounds like Duran Duran, but because that fretless bass has such a distinctive sound – thick, bulbous, rounded, warm.

‘Soft Materials: Permanent Rose’ is move overtly ambient, and ripples its way along in an understated fashion, and ‘Rabbit Hour, too, hovers and hums, clatters and clinks, plunging deeper into abstraction, drifting cloud-like and formless, hovering, while occasional scrapes and nails-down-a-blackboard feedback sounds cut through the soft waves.

‘Princess Moo Bear’ may sound soft, but the clanking chines are pitches against thick helicopter sounds and dark abstraction, before finally expanding and drifting to nothing.

Souvenir is not an easy or instant album. Quite the contrary is true. But it is detailed, layered, and has much going on.

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Merzbow – The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue

Posted: 7 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 9th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Merzbow is an artist who requires little to no introduction, and one with a catalogue so immense – with in excess of five hundred releases credited – it’s beyond daunting for not only a beginner, but even a keen noise-lover. This is the reasons I personally own very few releases, and have only picked up a few incidentally along the way.

As Masami Akita approaches seventy, and Merzbow marks forty-five years of noise, this output shows little sign of abating, but it does seem an appropriate time to reflect on some previous releases which may be considered either ‘classic’ or ‘pivotal’. 1994s Venereology has been receiving some retrospective coverage of late, revered largely on account of its reputation for being the loudest, harshest thing ever, ever.

But here we have a reissue of The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue, released a couple of years later, a much lesser-known work, but still during what’s broadly considered to be the golden era of the 90s, and, as the accompanying notes suggest, it’s ‘one of a series of unique editions from his vast catalogue that reveals a side of his practice often under represented.’

During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Masami Akita was sometimes working on film and theatre music. In this space he created a series of recordings that capture the full scope of his sound worlds.

Given the nature of these settings, his compositional approaches were varied, seeking to create both intensely crushing walls of sound and more spatial, and at times rhythmic, pieces that plot out an approach to sound making which atomises his universe of sound, and uncovered the singular detail that is often consumed in the whole.

The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the soundtrack to the theatre piece Akutoku no Sakae/Bitoku no Fuko by Romantica. Based on Marquis de Sades’s Historie de Juliette ou les Prosperités du vice & Les Infortunes de la vertu, this recording was originally released with limited distribution and remains one of the lesser available Merzbow recordings.

Completely remastered and contains an additional cut from those original sessions, this reissue of The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue presents nineteen blasts of noise and rumbling and shrieking, scraping discord and dissonance. Many of the pieces are brief – a couple of minutes or so – and there is so much texture and tonal rage here, its sonic vision is remarkable. To many, of course, it will just ne noise – horrible, nasty, uncoordinated noise. But listen closer, and there is a lot happening here. The noise is, indeed, nasty, and the output is, brain-blasting chaos, for sure. But what these untitled pieces showcase is an intense focus and an attention to detail which is so much more than brutal noise. The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is, comparatively speaking, not that harsh – although when it is harsh, it’s absolutely next-level brutal with shards of treble exploding in walls of ear-shredding punishment. It contains a lot of clattering and crashing, like bin lids being dropped, and cyclical, thrumming rhythmic pulsations. There are tweets and flutters, bird-like chirrups flittering above cement-mixer churning grind with gnawing low-end and splintering treble, overloading grind and would oscillations.

The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the sound of a man pushing all the buttons and turning all the dials at once and seeing just how far he can tweak them. There are moments of minimalism, of slow, stuttering beats, of mere crackles, passages one might even describe as ambient – a word not commonly associated with Merzbow. But the way in which The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue explores these dynamics, and contains quieter more delicate segments, not to mention some bleepy electronica that borders on beat-free dance in places, is remarkable: while so much noise is simply repellent to anyone who isn’t attuned to it, The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue offers engagement and offers openings to listeners with a broader interest in experimental music.

Eclectic is the word: we hear a chamver orchestra at the same time we hear strings being bent out of shape and what sounds like a Theremin in distress. While a fire alarm squawks in the background. This is everything including the kitchen sink. Imaginative and experimental, it’s noise with infinite dimensions.

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Lawrence English – Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds

Posted: 23 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 31st January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It begins with a rumbling roar, like a persistent strong wind rushing over moorland, before ripples of piano delicately drift over it to altogether calmer effect – although the roar continues beneath. The juxtaposition brings a balance of sorts.

Just a few days ago, I wrote on Circuits From Soft Frequencies by Jamie Lee, which was recorded among the sound mirrors at RAF Denge, in Kent, and touched on the fascinating nature of these structures, and opined that ‘often, the most alien and seemingly otherworldly creations are, in fact, man-made’.

Lawrence English’s latest work seems to contribute to this dialogue, albeit approaching from a different perspective.

‘I like to think that sound haunts architecture,’ he writes, and goes on to remark, ‘It’s one of the truly magical interactions afforded by sound’s immateriality. It’s also something that has captivated us from the earliest times. It’s not difficult to imagine the exhilaration of our early ancestors calling to one another in the dark cathedral like caves which held wonder, and security, for them.’

English also writes of the relationship between space and place, and how ‘Spaces hold the opportunity for place, which we create moment to moment, shaped by our ways of sense-making… Whilst the architectural and material features of space might remain somewhat constant, the people, objects, atmospheres, and encounters that fill them are forever collapsing into memory.’

The album comprises eight numbered segments, ETHKIB I – VIII, all formed using fundamentally the same sound palette, and which flow into one another seamlessly to create a single, continuous piece, which is best experienced without interruption.

The piano and the undercurrents, which evolve from that initial roar to altogether softer drones which drift, mist-like, develop an interplay whereby the dominant sound switches, sometimes with one or the other fading out completely – but this happens almost imperceptibly… It isn’t that you don’t listen to the music, but the preoccupation of the listening experience is absorbing the atmosphere, and it possesses almost a physicality. By ‘ETHKIB V’ the sounds has built such a density that the sensation is like being buffeted. Amidst the deep drones, there are, in the distant, whirring hums and elongated scrapes which evoke images of disused mills and abandoned factories. Perhaps there’s an element of the power of suggestion, but it’s difficult to contemplate purely abstract visualisations, or nature without some human aspect somewhere in the frame.

The soundscapes English creates are evocative, and in parts, at least, haunting – although ultimately, what haunts us is our own experience, our thoughts, our memories. And in this way, from space, we create our own sense of place, and tie things to them in an attempt to make sense of the world as we experience it.

By ‘ETHKIB VIII’, it’s the piano alone which rings out, in a reversal of the opening, and some of the mid-sections, ending on a single, low note, repeated, held, reverberating, leaving, ultimately silence, and a pause for reflection.

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Lawrence English – A Colour For Autumn (15th Anniversary Edition)

Posted: 17 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 20th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Autumn is something of a difficult season to assimilate. As much as it can be filled with beautiful shades as the leaves turn and the sunlight takes on a softer hue, there can often be a hint of melancholy in the cooler air and darker evenings. Some may yearn for the heat of summer, but more than that is the reminder that we’re on a transition toward winter, and the passing of another year. The passing of time is something which creeps up on all of us with an inexorable inevitability, and while you’re busy living life – or, likely, battling just to keep on going through it – time slips by, and your twenties slide into your thirties slide into your forties… people, places, jobs all come and go. Go where? And what have you got to show for it?

As one of the most dismal summers in a long time – not to mention the coldest in six years – draws a close to the wettest eighteen months or so since records began here in the UK, where it’s felt like eighteen months of October, the arrival of the 15th Anniversary Edition of A Colour For Autumn is nothing if not timely. Anniversaries inevitably give pause for thought, inspiring reflecting on the time of the actual event, and the intervening period. And with in his reflections on A Colour For Autumn, and its context, Lawrence English makes some powerful observations:

‘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.’

‘Droplet’ seems to start midway through: there is no intro, no fade-in, no slow-build. We find ourselves landing in the midst of a long swell of ethereal sound, a chorus of spectral voices drifting in vapour and carried on clouds. Sometimes, ambience carries something of greater depth than is readily apparent. More than a medium to meditation, a conduit to contemplation, seemingly formless, abstract sound resonates on a subconscious level with and unexpected force. Over the course of almost seven minutes, the track drifts and twists and a squall of dissonance and a whistle of feedback builds in the background.

Just as the pieces merge into one another, so the titles of some of the tracks link together to form phrases, albeit with only vague meanings: ‘The Prelude To’ leads into ‘The Surface of Everything’. Elsewhere, English departs the surface and transports the listener high above the atmosphere in ‘Galaxies of Dust’. You almost feel as if you’re floating, detached from everything, even time, hanging in suspension.

Much of the sound on A Colour For Autumn takes the form of hums and drones, and while gentle and delicate, there’s an ever-present discomfort, something just beyond perception, on the edge of the senses, which unsettles, nags and gnaws. It’s this uncertainty, this element of disquiet, which makes A Colour For Autumn such an enthralling and evocative listening experience.

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