Lawrence English Interview
Below is the transcript to my interview with Lawrence English. The link here takes you to the podcast and video versions, as well as all the many links in the show notes.
Lawrence English (00:00:00):
I mean, that's the cruelty of it, but it's also, in some respects, I think it's actually very satisfying. I love the idea that I'll never get to the end. When I die, there'll be a lot of things that I have never touched that I probably could be quite fascinated by, but that's the promise of life and the world, isn't it? It's that thing that there is always more. And I think the great thing is kind of like the manifestation of curiosity is that you can always go deeper.
Leah Roseman (00:01:38):
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Lawrence English is a brilliant artist, composer and curator based in Australia. In this wide-ranging interview, Lawrence spoke to me about many topics, touching architecture, philosophy, field recordings, running a record label, and emerging biotech. One of his many projects is the record label Room40, which is celebrating 25 years, and punctuating this podcast are some clips from some of Lawrence’s albums, including Even the Horizon Knows it’s Bounds, Shell Type, and Observation of Breath. You’ll find several links in the show notes so you can explore each project more fully. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript to my website Leahroseman.com . It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at show notes where you’ll find the timestamps, links to Lawrence English, and different ways to support this podcast!
(00:01:39):
Hi Lawrence. Thanks so much for joining me here.
Lawrence English (00:01:44):
It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Leah Roseman (00:01:47):
We just had a teeny tiny mix up with a time zone because you have so many time zones in Australia, don't you?
Lawrence English (00:01:53):
We love time. We can't get enough, but so much so that we need to have time zones that aren't even aligned in terms of geography. So I'm not that far. If you to draw a line from where I live in Brisbane to Sydney, it's basically going to follow the curvature of the earth. But still, it's one hour different because here in Queensland we had a very complicated history in the 19, actually from the late 1960s all the way through until the 1986 where we had a very, let's say, problematic government. And during that time there was a lot of very foolish decisions made, and one of those was to not follow daylight saving. And the quote from the then premier's wife, who was also a sitting member of parliament because it was very incestuous here, was that we can't have daylight saving because it will fade the curtains that's literally in the hand side here. And the other comment was that it'll make the cows produce less milk. I was like, well, pretty sure that's not going to happen, but here we are. The legacy of those poor decisions 40 years ago is what I'm currently enjoying.
Leah Roseman (00:03:08):
So I've really been enjoying listening to Even the Horizon Knows its Bounds.
Lawrence English (00:03:12):
I'm glad
Leah Roseman (00:03:13):
I listened to it many times and it's very interesting to me that this was a commission for this gallery, which I'm not able to visit, but I encourage people to look at the stunning architecture. And how do you say that name of this is it
Lawrence English (00:03:25):
Naala Badu
Leah Roseman (00:03:27):
That's it, yeah. So tell us about this commission and this collaboration with so many other musicians.
Lawrence English (00:03:33):
Yeah, I mean it's an interesting one partly because I mean, definitely I enjoy architecture as a point of reference, I would say. And actually right now I'm very heavily involved in ironically another kind of architectural project looking at the metabolic movement in Japan, which is a kind of bio architecture that it's where the idea of the mega structure comes from. It's kind of a project I'm working on right now. But what's interesting about the Art Gallery of New South Wales is, I mean there's now these two buildings and historically there's this beautiful old, what we would say is very kind of classic colonial architecture in the old building, incredible spaces, very resonant, you would imagine traditional European art galleries to look like. And that this very large section of the land that was sitting next to it and an increasingly large collection of work that they weren't able to have on display.
(00:04:36):
And some time ago they decided to try and basically expand the gallery and have a wholly new modern side to the gallery, which was architecturally completely in opposition, I would say to the old building in that it was very open, a lot of glass, a lot of natural light, a lot of very large spaces that aren't traditional kind of gallery halls with the capacity to show works that were very, very ambitious and also required that kind of scaling. And the other thing that was really interesting about it was that underneath this particular space was a very large tank essentially. It was built during the second World War by, I'm pretty sure by the US military as essentially a diesel store, so to keep diesel for the war ships that were coming to the bay. And it had been abandoned essentially since that kind of early fifties period.
(00:05:39):
And it is an incredible space. I mean, it has a natural decay of about 41 seconds, so incredibly resonant and has these spines all the way through to support the ceiling. So they decided to actually work with what was there, and they've incorporated this tank into the build of the gallery. So it's an extraordinary building, an extraordinarily ambitious project. And when they completed the building, they were looking at ways to kind of invite people, I suppose, linger in the space to be able to come into it and to not just be guided necessarily by the works, but by the space itself. And as part of that process, Jonathan Wilson, who's the kind of curator around sound and community engagement there, asked me, would you be interested in making a work that responds to the physicality of the space and the way that sound operates in the space?
(00:06:39):
And at the same time, would you be interested in maybe bringing together people that have a connection to the gallery? And that was very much where it came from, this idea of trying to think about it in a familiar way. People that had operated in those spaces had a relationship with the art gallery of New South Wales and maybe trying to think about them as the sort of connective tissue between these spaces that you're imagining as you kind of walk through. So it was a really interesting proposition because I mean, one, it asks very directly to respond to a kind of physical condition and to think about the kind of architectural score. And at the same time, it's about this connectivity of musicianship and of sound essentially, and trying to find methodologies where you can bring people together and create something that is obviously very porous and kind of talks to itself, but also has this ability to become a kind of unified whole.
(00:07:47):
I mean, that's the kind of irony or not the irony, but the kind of curiosity of something like architecture is that we often think about the kind of external shell as the kind of manifestation of that thing, but those internal spaces all dialogue with each other. And I think that's a very good kind of metaphor for how this record works. There is this kind of holistic macro perspective that you can get from the record, but within that are all of these little conversations that are happening that are folding over each other as you sort of move through it.
Leah Roseman (00:08:16):
I love what you said about lingering in the space, and it seems to me the kind of art that should be included in more galleries as a way to get people to not go so fast.
Lawrence English (00:08:28):
Well, I mean it is like you look at the statistics around how long people spend with a work, and in some 2D works, it's a matter of seconds, for video work, it's generally a matter of just after a minute. So it's very short kind of burst. And I mean in some ways it's understandable. You go to a modern gallery and the scale of work that is available there after a while, that idea of museum fatigue I think is real. And it's something we need to pay attention to curatorially because we don't have the capacity to take in and take in. There's a threshold there.
(00:09:09):
And sometimes I agree, I think there is a role, the sound to play because of its temporal relation, that it exists only in time and it makes sense only in time. But I guess it's an interesting question of how that thing's brought in. I mean, when we look at the history of sound art, particularly from the late nineties into the early two thousands, the positioning of that work, it really existed somewhere between the way that we would treat visual objects and the way that we would think about sound as is kind of clash almost. Because sound is promiscuous, it's always coming around corners, it's kind of reaching out all over the place, which means of course there's these kind of collision points and there needs to be a sensitivity there about where works are placed and how it is that we make acoustic space full works, not just physical space.
(00:10:10):
And they're two very different things. The horizon of vision and the horizon of audition are completely different sorts of environments to work in. So it is a really interesting thing to contemplate. And I do like that idea, that invitation, like you say this word lingering is a really good word, I think to work with or dwelling I think is the other one that you can just be, well, in some respects, you can give yourself permission to be patient that you don't need to see. Maybe you don't need to see everything on one visit. I mean, that's always the cruelty in a way. I know for myself, I once went to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in the old days when Russia was still a place you could go. And I mean, it's an extraordinary, extraordinary collection beyond words, how you can experience that thing. But at the same time, it is so grand and so vast and so enormous that you literally cannot make sense of it in one sitting. You need many days there because some works are going to demand that sense of attachment. You need to spend 25, 30, 40 minutes an hour just with one of those Fabergé eggs because they are so intricate and so extraordinary. And the craftspersonship that goes into that is just in itself something to be kind of bewildered by.
(00:11:42):
So yeah, it's an interesting question of how sound can do that. And I think I would like for me, the thing that interested me is ideally how it is that you can be in the gallery and absorb the acoustic of the gallery and also have this relationship to the sound. And Jonathan Wilson, the curator there, has actually done some really beautiful works where at the thresholds of the gallery you've been able to walk in, there's been a sound piece playing one of their commissions that they've had during the Volume Festival, incredibly successful program that they've run there at the gallery. And you have these kind of buffer areas where sound kind does dialogue together. And for me, that was incredibly satisfying to experience the way that he's approached that work. And it maybe is that in some respects, the next logical place that you would take something like this idea of even the horizon knows its bounds in that you are actually having sound in the space rather than sound and headphones, which is pretty much how that piece was designed. It was like people would put that in, then they'd walk around in the gallery. So I like that relationship, the blurriness between the material of the sound work and the kind of implicit sounds that exist in that space.
Leah Roseman (00:13:05):
By implicit sounds, you mean the sounds that are just there in the soundscape?
Lawrence English (00:13:09):
Absolutely. People walking, people talking three floors up, that kind of gentle din of the air conditioning, all of that is part of the fabric of the sound and the stuff that actually really I find very satisfying because you know that each time you encounter that piece, the environment that it's situated in gives you a particular perspective and some things are more apparent and other things are less apparent. And when you go back to that space again, it's different each time. And I think that's a really powerful promise that is held in sound work.
Leah Roseman (00:13:50):
Now, of course, this album will be linked along with your website and everything, but I noticed if people go on Bandcamp, which I'm a big fan of, you can hear the whole thing on it interrupted, but I believe in the streaming services, you've put it sliced up into the different movements, right?
Lawrence English (00:14:05):
Yeah, it is cut up on the streaming services. I mean, it exists as one complete file on the Bandcamp. The thing about the streaming services is that they actually, and this is no disrespect to Bandcamp, but they will allow seamless play, so it plays like one piece, whereas Bandcamp, because of its caching I assume means that whenever you move from one piece to the next, there is a kind of gap that appears, which is hopefully something that Bandcamp addresses. I love Bandcamp, but it is definitely something that I know for me when I'm listening to work on Bandcamp, sometimes you get that gap, which is a little frustrating, but obviously on Apple Music or whatever platform you choose to use, there is actually a kind of integrated function, so it just plays as one piece.
Leah Roseman (00:14:55):
I see.
Lawrence English (00:14:55):
Okay.
Leah Roseman (00:14:56):
Now can we use any clips from that in this podcast? Will I be able to edit something in?
Lawrence English (00:15:01):
Yeah, I mean there is the video actually you could potentially use, which is on YouTube. I can definitely, that would be totally fine. Scott, who is the editor would be totally okay with that, I'm sure.
Leah Roseman (00:15:13):
Okay. So what we'll do is we'll integrate that and then for those people listening to the audio version, I will have a direct link to the video separately so people can click on that if they want to check it out.
Lawrence English (00:15:25):
Yeah, that'd be great.
Leah Roseman (00:15:37):
This is an excerpt from Even the Horizon Knows Its Bounds. The evocative video was made by Scott Morrison and it's linked in the show notes to Room40's YouTube channel. (Music)
(00:15:37):
Now, you mentioned something in passing, you said, I'm now involved in these meta structure Japanese bio architecture project. What was that?
Lawrence English (00:20:09):
Well, the last few years I've been thinking a lot about, and it's partly strangely at the same time as this recording was made, I was thinking about how it is that we come to think about the places that we live in as we move forward into the 21st century. I think historically the kind of shadow of the 20th century is quite long. I still feel like we're escaping that shadow a little bit. And certainly in terms of the kind of political landscape, it very much feels that we're still dealing with the kind of mentality of the 20th century, and there is always a lag. If you look at the 19th century into the 20th century, there was about a 20 year lag there just after the first World War. There was the real kind of arrival of that new time.
(00:21:06):
So I was thinking about the kinds of ways that we've interpreted the places that we might want to be. So it's civil planning, looking at city structures that have served a certain kind of society very successful in some cases and less so in others. And as we move into the 21st century, we can see these kind of mega cities becoming more prevalent and also larger in their scale. And I'm really interested in how it is that we start to vision what it is we want for those kinds of environments. Because I think there's a sort of assumption, not always, but there's an assumption that maybe what we had before is enough and that it can function like that. Maybe it just organically grows. In Australia, particularly where I am in Brisbane and also in Sydney and some of the other cities, it's a fairly loose arrangement the way that the cities have grown because of civil planning and population growth.
(00:22:16):
And the infrastructure here struggles because of that. I would say, I mean, it's not that it's terrible, but it's just not as efficient as other places. You go to somewhere like Japan, particularly in Tokyo, and you're having something like 3.6 million people a day going through Shinjuku Station. The capacity of that organization is extraordinary. And I became really interested in obviously places like Tokyo and Osaka were some of the earliest mega cities, particularly Tokyo. And around this period in the late 1960s, there was a series of architects that developed this idea of metabolic architecture, so a kind of approach to architecture that was interested in the sort of biological referencing of organisms and these two architects Tange and Kurokawa and have basically developed this set of plans basically, that started to be kind of realized. And there was a sort of manifesto that was written, and the whole idea was that you could have these, I guess, skeletal buildings that basically a very famous one was this capsule hotel, which unfortunately was knocked down a couple of years ago in Tokyo where the capsules themselves, the living quarters could be unplugged and plugged back in.
(00:23:50):
So you could kind of update them as they need. There's a technological advance or a kind of living decision that was made. You could basically just plug them into the spine of this building. So over the last couple of years, I've actually been going to Japan and I've been visiting some of the sites. Obviously that site is now gone. Most recently I visited the Shizuka Broadcast Tower, which is in Ginza, this incredibly strange, quite futuristic looking building, but again, works with this kind of idea of a skeleton and flesh almost. And again, it hasn't been updated. This is the kind of irony of the whole thing. The propositions that they had in their work were not necessarily fulfilled. There's other really interesting stories as well around natural reclamation. The reclamation of Tokyo Bay is another area I'm kind of super interested in because it is a really, it's a very long history. It's actually a few hundred years old. As soon as they moved the capital to Tokyo, they were already doing stripping out of swamps to make raised land for the early settlements of castles. And it continues today, and there's very famous stories about Yumashina, which is sort of dream island in the Bay, which was actually where all of Tokyo's rubbish was dumped in the 1950s and sixties. And there's a very famous story of the people in Koto City having basically a fly plague one year where, and there's a point which I've been trying to find, where there's a plaque which basically shows whether people fought back against the flies. But what was really interesting about this particular island was that they basically expanded the island by using the waste. So they were basically building the island on rubbish, and it's this huge space now. It actually has the largest incinerator in Tokyo that also now fuels two biodomes that are on the same island. So they basically pump the heat through underground from the incinerator to these two tropical biodomes on the island. It's a really kind of curious thing. I mean a strange translation of waste into something else.
(00:26:00):
But I think what's interesting for me in that is that we have to start to think about the scaling of how it is that we want to exist and the way that we can set up situations where we find the things that are critical to what it is that we need, not just to be able to move through a city, but to be satisfied by it as a living environment. And we're really fortunate here in Australia, I mean I live about two kilometers from the city center here in Brisbane, but I'm surrounded by trees. I have an enormous ficus tree at the back of my house here, and every night I have possums running on my roof and I have fruit bats. It's an incredibly living place, and I think that that's fantastic, but maybe there's some shortcomings in terms of how we have developed our infrastructure.
(00:26:54):
So it's like how we have these conversations around that is the thing that I'm interested in. So I'm hoping to kind of make some kind of work that I guess responds to those interests, which will probably be some form of sound work and honestly maybe an exhibition at some point around it. I think it's a really rich area to think about, and really for me, it's a really pressing kind of concern because we are going to see some enormous changes in so many things, even down to something like, not to get Dickensian about it, but the idea of a kind of leisure time as jobs begin to be diminished by, I think it's a long way off, but AI and other kinds of just changes in industry, we're going to have to think more about how it is that we make spaces for people to have that opportunity to be fulfilled in the time that isn't labor going forward. I think we will have a change in that understanding of the idea of nine to five is already kind of out the door, partly sped along by Covid. We have a lot more sort of home office kinds of arrangements. So you can see those things beginning to change, and I feel as though there's going to be a couple of rapid onsets where that's going to really be something that's much more played out and we need to be prepared for that. I think.
Leah Roseman (00:28:24):
Super interesting. Now, you are very involved with the art world and music and many different strands. I'm hoping we can get to a few things. One of the things I was interested to read was your sort of essay from 2011, the Young Person's Guide to Hustling in Music in the Arts, which I understand it's used in several universities and it's good. It's really good.
Lawrence English (00:28:46):
It is, for better or for worse, I'm not sure. Yeah, it's a curious one.
Leah Roseman (00:28:53):
It got me thinking about many points, and actually one of the things I remember reading about is you said you want to say yes to things, I'm sure, particularly early in your career, and you had said yes to a lecture about location recording early on, and that led to a commission from a museum, which was maybe an early commission for you. Is this right?
Lawrence English (00:29:12):
Yeah, I'm trying to think of exactly what that story is, but yes, I would say, I mean often there is that continuity around practice, and even if it's not direct, it's not a kind of linear continuity. I think there is a lot to be said about that sort of relational approach and in some even more practical way, sometimes when you do one of these projects, even if it's not something that you're necessarily a hundred percent engaged with, it's very clear to you that it reveals a certain kind of either interest or not. And I think that's actually really helpful and it's definitely been helpful for me. Sometimes I've been invited to respond to things. In fact, last night I was going through a hard drive trying to find something, and I actually found a set of recordings I made, honestly, probably 20 years ago or more that I had, if I'm really honest, I've just completely forgotten about that.
(00:30:09):
Were actually for architects here in Brisbane that had done a lot of the major sort of commissions. And it was just strange to go back to that and realize obviously this has been a recurrent theme, even if I'd not thought about it in those terms and not necessarily seen that as the starting point. I think it probably was the first time I directly responded to buildings, but it was just curious to see that and recognize, oh yeah, there are these threads in our life. And I think that's the same for everyone's practice. We have this moment where something arrives and you realize that the seed for it might've been something from 25 or 30 years ago, but it just arrives and suddenly blooms at a point when you maybe don't expect it to. And I think that's actually one of the joys of practice is that it's not always apparent where these things come from.
(00:31:06):
And when you do make those connections, when they become a conscious connection rather than a subconscious one, it's actually kind of delightful because you realize, well, this is obviously something that I've been involved in, even if it's at a kind of subconscious is probably the best way to describe it, way it's just been flowing there. It's one of these streams. Yeah, it's a curious thing, but the Young Person's guide was something that very much came out of. I think probably just trying to formalize some of those experiences and make them apparent. I think the challenging thing for all artists that are emerging, and I definitely found this for myself, is that there is no map. There's not even really a terrain. We just have this sort of field in front of us. And in some respects, you kind of have to build whatever it is that you want that thing to be, and that can be really challenging.
(00:32:04):
And I think unfortunately, I mean, I look at my contemporaries that I started with, and of those maybe 10% are still active. And I can say that there are many, many people, much more, I feel much more interesting and talented than I was, and I'm merely here through belligerence and good fortune. And I think that's a shame because it means that the best, potentially the most interesting ideas sometimes don't get to be realized through circumstances that are maybe just purely economic or where people don't feel that they have the toolkit they need to do the multiplicity of things that is actually being an artist and a maker. So yeah, it's a very big question to think about. And I think it's only harder now. I mean, if I was, I look at the younger artists that we work with and the complexities that they face because of not just having to work two jobs, but having to work three or four just to make a baseline means that that time for risk and that time for experimentation is reduced.
(00:33:12):
(00:33:12):And that's a huge problem because you don't, without that desire for failure and that recognition of the importance of failure, if it can only be about successful execution, then you're limiting your field so greatly. And I think that's something that we're actually going to have to really grapple with as a kind of creative culture going forward, because you need chance and you need mistakes, and you need the opportunity to do something that is completely against everything that you think you should do. Because even if it doesn't work out, the lessons learned there are enormous and invaluable.
Leah Roseman (00:34:03):
When did your work go from music into sound art? When did that sort of
Lawrence English (00:34:10):
Lawrence English (00:34:10):I actually think they almost developed. I mean, actually I played in bands when I was a teenager, which is a totally sort of separate history line I guess. But very early on, I think even before I had made a solo album, I had shown and work as kind of sound installations because I was kind arriving, particularly here in Australia, it was a little bit slower in Europe. I mean, obviously there was the Sonic Boom exhibition that David Toop curated at the Hayward Gallery in the UK Sonic processes at the Pompidou, there was Bitstreams that was at the Whitney. There was a series of these kind of digital music sound exhibitions that were really kind of foundational. But here in Australia, we were, for whatever reason, which was largely down to just a kind of curatorial shortfall really, we didn't have the kind of curatorial practice here to really engage with it and maybe lack a lack of interest potentially from the state galleries. There was no kind of major sound presentation here until really the sort of mid to late two thousands. So what was happening though was there was some festivals, like liquid architecture that started in 1999 that were kind of advocating for that recognition of sound as a site of artistic interrogation and excellence in the same way that visual arts were kind of considered that they were also advocating for the sort of development of that curatorial aesthetic. And Room40 was very much part of that conversation at that point as well.
(00:35:56):
But there was independent practice here, so there were small festivals or independent galleries that were really trying to push along that approach. So some of the first pieces that I made, I mean, there's a piece from I think 2000 maybe it was recorded in 2000, which was installed at a kind of regional gallery here that was just a kind of sound, almost like a sound map exercise. And then after that there were kind of series of other exclusively sound pieces. And then I went on to do Ghost Towns, I think, which started in 2003, which is an examination of the abandoned history of ghost towns and mining and extraction of gold here in Queensland, which sort of wrapped up in the sort 1890s. So we went to a lot of those locations and made recordings and video, and then there was kind of a work that was made that showed a bunch after that.
(00:37:01):
So it's always been, I think traveling together. I would say I probably had more output around the kind of fine art side before I got into the recorded music work. But I see them as traveling together. They're different. The mediums that are proposed by a gallery or a physical format or a digital format of music, each of them I think holds the same kind of promise. You have to respond to either the ambiguity of it, how someone is going to engage with the work, and when you're making a recorded piece that you sort of pass out into the world or thinking about that kind of porous reading of sound that you get in a gallery space where you can somewhat predict what's going to be there, but the dynamism of people engaging in that space means that it can radically change. You can have a lot of people talking. You can have a kid crying, whatever the case might be. And that becomes part of the experience of people encountering the work in those spaces. And I like that. I challenge of having to think, well, how broad but focused can you be in the work that you do and the way that you think about the work that you do?
Leah Roseman (00:38:13):
So your label Room40, the name of it comes from England and World War I with code breaking?
Lawrence English (00:38:20):
Lawrence English (00:38:20):Yeah, Bletchley Park, the facility of Bletchley Park.
Leah Roseman (00:38:24):
Yeah. I just want to ask you about curating, because I'm sure you get far too many submissions than you can ever, even though your output is so large in the last couple years, what couple hundred recordings you've put out in the last five years?
Lawrence English (00:38:37):
Yeah, I mean in 2020 and 2021, we did 140. So it was a lot. In terms of submissions for the label, it's a huge challenge, honestly, we get a quiet day when you get maybe seven and a busy day, sometimes it's 20 something. Yeah, it's something I think about a lot because I know what it's like to send out work as a maker, and I do try and respond to people. I mean, in some cases I'm many months behind on the work that comes through. If someone is writing to me kind of introduced by someone else, I try and respect that introduction that someone else has made as best that I can, but just mean sometimes the blank emails that are just like, hi, no attribution, here's the blah, blah, blah. I try and respond to those eventually, but I think, and I sort of talk about this a little bit in that Young Person's guide is the thing that you have to remember is at the end of the day, there's a human being at least at the moment, at the end of that email, and the dialogue that you're having is with a person that has their own life going on. And I really understand that from the label perspective, but also from the maker perspective. I respect and I am grateful when labels take the time to write back and particularly if they've got some feedback. And I do try, and if there is something that's useful to be there, even if it's just like, that's a really great record, I'm so sorry, we can't do it. Because quite often we can't. And more often than not, we can't. I mean right now, the next year is incredibly dense, the 25th anniversary of the label, and we, I'm trying to find a new equilibrium, quite honestly, around how much work we can properly support and the work that is there.
(00:40:45):
Even before Covid, I was very conscious that the label had reached a sort of threshold where because it had been operating for nearly 20 years, we developed a lot of relationships in that time. I was aware that if each artist made an album every year or every 18 months, there would be no new space because there was a kind of finite number of things that we could support. There'd be no new space for any new artist to come into it. And that actually really was not something I was interested in because I think partly labels need to constantly be reaching in all directions, not just to new artists, but to other artists whose work maybe is not in focus as much as it should be, or that they believe isn't in focus. I mean, Room40 is a very particular kind of label. We're not driven by this thing's popular or this thing will sell copies.
(00:41:44):
I mean, that's not even a consideration. If that was why I was doing it, it would look like a totally different thing. And also I probably wouldn't be doing it anymore. I think I get very bored with that. What I'm really passionate about is work is ideas, and in some respects for me is making those connections, which I guess is a sort of generational thing in that I've now been around long enough that I can look forward to the artists, some of the artists that are in their seventies and eighties and make connections between that and younger artists. And trying to find those points of connectivity or of relationality is actually part of the pleasure of the curatorial side of the label. And it's also, for me, it's a way of, in some respects, celebrating someone's work that maybe I think Akio Suzuki is always out there in the ether, but I've really been pleased to be able to celebrate him and his work now.
(00:42:53):
I think it was his birthday yesterday. I think he's 84 this year. He's really a senior artist in all ways, and it's really important to, I am the happy face of other people doing that where you presented someone's work, and particularly when it's a body of work, you can realize the richness of practice that is there over the decades. I mean, I think about how I was introduced to Akio, which I've realized on the same trip happened. I went to the UK in 2003 and I managed to see the Sound Spheres installation at the British Museum that he had installed. And at the same time, David Toop had a copy of the CD called Odds and Ends on his desk. David Toop's desk is a kind of gold mine for me when I used to visit him quite regularly. I've discovered so many fantastic things on that desk, and I'm eternally grateful to David for that. But he had this copy of odds and ends that I must have possibly ripped, which I guess is bad. That was theft back in the day and had on my laptop and was listening to. And then two years later, I'd invited Akio to come and present his work in Australia. So that was the kind of process, and it still is in a lot of cases. So yeah, I'm really conscious of that connectivity and the challenge that comes with, as you sort of highlighted, the body of work that comes through here. The potential body of work is something that I think label probably has to deal with, but I'm acutely aware of the threshold I would say that exists for what we can do and not just can do, but can do well. I think that's the point of difference you have if someone is giving you a work that's their acoustic baby, and you have to kind of nurse that baby as best that you can and connect it to ears and support it in a way that respects the work actually, if you don't respect the work that no one else is going to. So I think that has to be part of the compact that is set up between any label and an artist.
Leah Roseman (00:45:16):
Yeah, I mean, everything you've said resonates with me so strongly as someone running a music podcast myself, because it's the same thing. I wouldn't be doing this frankly volunteer work unless it was interesting to me. And I do get submissions absolutely every day of the year, sometimes many, and I can't. There's no way. And there's so many interesting, fascinating musicians, many who are multidisciplinary such as yourself. So
Lawrence English (00:45:43):
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. We have to negotiate. We can't do everything. I mean, that's the cruelty of it, but it's also, in some respects, I think it's actually very satisfying. I love the idea that I'll never get to the end when I die. There'll be a lot of things that I have never touched that I probably could be quite fascinated by, but that's the promise of life and the world, isn't it? It's that thing that there is always more. And I think the great thing is kind of the manifestation of curiosity is that you can always go deeper. That is really the thing, and you can always go back forward wherever it is, but there is always another place to explore and another connection to make, and another thing to realize that you have been living blind in the world, which I love when that happens. It's like, how did I not know about X? Whatever it is, all of this time when it's been something that's literally directly connected to this other thing that I'm fascinated with. I think that's just an amazing circumstance to find yourself in, to still be excited. And that's what I love about working with some of the kind of senior artists that we have. Folks like Mike Cooper or Annea Lockwood, when you talk to them, they are so animated about the world and about their practice, but also the practice of others. It's just this kind of generosity that is, I just find so affirming and actually really reassuring about the way that you can travel as a maker in the world.
Leah Roseman (00:48:20):
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Jesse Stewart, Ceara Conway, Linsey Pollak, Verna Gillis, and Stephen Nachmanovitch. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mubs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend. Thanks.
(00:48:20):
And I listened to quite a lot of your work. I'm sure I only scratched the surface, but some of the things that interested me were your field recordings, for example, in Antarctica, the storm, just the clanging windy, yeah.
Lawrence English (00:48:35):
Viento
(00:48:37):
Viento,yes. And also the toy store in Japan, and it just brought me to that place, and I'm here in my room in Canada listening to this stuff that you recorded years ago. It's really quite magical. This is a clip of Viento(Antarctica). (audio clip)
(00:49:14):
It's an interesting, I think field recordings are an interesting practice in their way, and I mean, I'm glad that you could be transported. I think that is obviously the aspiration of any person making field recordings. And I know for me, the work that I am most drawn to is that work that does kind of take you somewhere. And at the same time, I always like to think about it as this kind of opportunity for listening to be shared. Now, there's a fantastic provocation by a French author called , and he had this book, Listen, Ecoute, and he sort of proposes these two ideas. One is, can one make a listening listen to? And for me, what I really like about that statement is it's not can one make listening. It's not this kind of broad thing. It's a listening. It's the kind of pathway that we follow in a kind of agentive way as a listener, which is very different to the idea of maybe hearing.
(00:50:20):
I draw a separation between hearing and listening. And then he says, and if you can, you transmit that listening as unique as it is. So for me, that is actually field recording. It's about recognizing that a field recording or a practice of listening that is about recording, is about a listening, not all of the listening, but you can have 10 people in the same place at the same time. And each one of those is going to be focused on a different element in that time, in that place. And also that if we're going to be able to transmit that, to share that field according that potential experience, then we have to think about not just the kind of interior psychological listening that we're doing our sort of interests and preoccupations, but also this if you like, the prosthetic ear of the microphone, which has its own agency to degree a technological agency, and how it is that we bring those things into relation with each other.
(00:51:12):
And I sort of developed this theoretical framework for listening, which I call relational listening, which is basically recognizing that at any point, and using field recordings as an example, at any point, there are two horizons of audition that are in action. One of them is the horizon of audition that is maintained by the interior psychological listening that we're doing. Your interest preoccupations your pathway through a series of events in time, and that's one kind of horizon. And then the other is the kind of prosthetic ear of the microphone, that kind of connective tissue, the opportunity to transmit your listening. And basically what I thought would be useful is to think of a way that we can kind of approach that problem because they don't always align. And relational listening basically is about bringing those two horizons into relationship with each other. So as they cross over, the further they cross over and the further they share that horizon of audition, the more successful the opportunity for the listeners listening to be transmitted is it's the kind of direct response to she's provocations.
(00:52:21):
And that was essentially what my PhD was. It was looking at trying to think about how we can reconcile the kind of subjective function, which is for me, where the creativity lies in something like field recordings, the kind of subjective experience of these places that we're rejecting that kind of ethnographic objective capture of the world in favor of this sort of subjective rendering of it. And at the same time as thinking about this sort of phenomenological subjectivist position, recognizing that there's a kind of material implication, which can be through the microphone, whatever the case might be, these things, some people feel that they're in opposition, but I think actually they're not. They're in relation. It's just how it is that we set up the kind of connective tissue between those two things to reconcile them. They don't need to be in opposition. They can actually work together.
(00:53:22):
And in fact, the friction that might be there can be a really powerful tool to have because it means that we have to think more deeply about these positions that we sometimes hold as a prior positions, they're preexisting and that no conversation needs to take place. I absolutely reject that. I think that that is what is one of the fundamental crises for us going forward, is that we feel ourselves, we are kind of taught, and from an education standpoint, we're taught to move towards answers. But I would argue actually, particularly going forward, what we need is to have the capacity to ask better questions.
Leah Roseman (00:54:17):
This is a clip from Toy Store Ueno Japan from the album Songs of the Living and the Lived In (audio clip)
Lawrence English (00:54:48):
So we need that ability to deepen the kinds of ways that we think about things, and rather being satisfied with the first proposal that arrives, the first kind of conclusion that we draw. We need to think, well actually does this take in the complexity of the situation that we face with ourselves. And I mean, it's understandable that we're kind of fatigued potentially around that because there's a lot of complexity in our daily lives. But to shy away from that complexity, I think reduces the world in a really unproductive way. And I don't mean in a capitalist way, I mean unproductive for our relationship with the places that we live with relation, the people that we have around us, our relationships with the kind of economic and political structures that we operate within. We need to be interrogating those things. We need to be restless and not easily satiated with the kinds of circumstances that we find ourselves in because there's a responsibility to the future, I guess, that questioning needs to be maintained.
(00:56:00):
And even something like scientific methodologies, what they're doing is proposing the best answer to the question with the available resource we have in that moment. It's not fixed, our understanding is about - For me, the thing that always gets me is Pluto's no longer a planet, and that's a definition change, but fundamentally, that was the deal when I was a child. Pluto was a planet. We thought about it. It was real cold, looked blue. It was the best we had. That has changed, and I think it's emblematic of the fluidity of these things. And that can be challenging sometimes to think we have new realizations all the time, and I think there's a lot for us to be drawing from that and a lot of inspiration that we can take from that uncertainty. We don't have to know sometimes the unknowable unknowns or the unknown unknowables or whatever it was that Donald Rumsfeld said, and that was his one great contribution, that one quote about no one unknowns, unknowns and unknown unknowns or whatever it was. It's a great quote. Everyone should go and look it up. It's the only thing that he potentially provided that was of any use to any of us, but that is actually really true. To recognize the scope of what sits in front of us is really something that we need to be attentive to because it's very easy for it to fall out of focus.
Leah Roseman (00:57:40):
When you were talking about this, I was thinking about your work Shell Type, which was inspired by cerebral organoids, 3D tissue. Can you explain it? It mimics human.
Lawrence English (00:57:51):
Yeah. I mean basically they're clusters of brain cells, mini brains. And what I mean, this is one of a number of technological changes and biological biotech changes that are going on in the background right now. I mean, we're spending a lot of time talking about ai, which I mean, I've just been thinking about it again a lot recently. Partly because the kind of public dialogue around AI is so very 20th century. It's so very male and kind of patriarchal and hegemonic. It's really so depressingly familiar. I would say partly because of the structure that these things have to operate in. The kind of aspirational promise of what AI can be is somehow overshadowed by this pretext of how we're going to control it or how we're going to monetize it or how we're going to sell it as a product that is such a sort of dominant discourse.
(00:59:00):
At the same time though, you have these people that are looking at the problems and the challenges that will sit around ai. I mean, Kate Crawford's, the Atlas of AI, the book that she wrote is an extraordinary materialist reading of AI, looking at the backside of AI, how these things are manifest and maintained. Those kinds of texts are incredibly powerful. And I mean there's a good few of them now that really start to open up this dialogue around it. And again, it's this thing of recognizing the complexities of the circumstances we find ourselves in, and that even though we think about it in a kind of immaterial digital way, there are actually material costs that travel with that. You type a paragraph into chat GPT, and it's going to use a bottle of water to cool those towers to create that. So it's wild when you start thinking about it in those terms.
(01:00:05):
It's something that I think we struggle to reconcile because it is very abstract in a way. But when there are those opportunities for people and caters an extraordinary example of that, people that can demonstrate and make visible these kind of, let's say invisible phenomena, it's so provocative and it reminds us that sometimes we need to embrace that sort of unknowableness and begin to interrogate that and see what we can extract out of it. Because there is always things to be pulled out, ways of understanding, ways of being essentially, and eventually that can be drawn out of that. So for me, the Shell Type piece was really a way to, in some respects, I kind of thought about it almost as a field recording project, but it was a field recording of a place that I'd never been. So it might be pulling out the elements of this future environment and using that as a contouring tool for a series of sound pieces and the cerebral organoid work that companies like Final Spark are doing where they're basically using the mini brains, the organoids as Bioprocessing chips.
(01:01:28):
I mean, the reason that has become such a heavily subscribed area is because the energy usage of these bioprocesses is about 16,000 times less than the current kind of AI processing that's going on. So they see it as a very, if they're able to monetize it, then it will be something that like a game changer for that entire sector. But at the same time, the thing that is not necessarily being talked about is the kind of ethical questions that lie within that. If we are using these mini brains and of the mini brains that they have, that they've grown them for 12 hours, 24, 7 days now, I think it's a hundred days of the ones that grew to a hundred days, something like 60% of those developed photoreceptors because the retina is a hard hardwired part of the brain. So they essentially growing eyes for of a better term.
(01:02:37):
But if 60% of those organoids are developing these sort of eyebuds, that's a really kind of quite - that line, which I think is the thing for us that we struggle with is between how is it we conceptualize things like consciousness. And for me, this question with the organoids is how do we start to think about this idea of consciousness without sense? Okay, so if there's a photoreceptor, there maybe becomes a point of sense. But I think it's such a powerful idea to think about this idea of consciousness without sense. And I mean other people have definitely sort of looked at that, but it's such a wonderful jumping off point to start to think about these things going forward because those questions, that interface of ourselves and our bodies and technological augmentation of those bodies going forward will be a very practical thing in a certain amount of time.
(01:03:37):
It might be a decade, it might be five decades, who knows. But there is a point at which that will become a sort of everyday occurrence because that is what we do with ourselves. That's we can't help it. That's what we do. And what I think is worth contemplating is looking at something like the way that social media just arrived. It's a good example because it did just drive with very little dialogue, very little checks and balances, very little anything. And now I think probably there is a generation of people that will be affected by that going forward for the rest of their lives, a certain kind of change, whether it be inside very manifest ways like bullying or whatever the case might be, or just in terms of the way that you start to consume data and information and the kinds of capacities for holding thought and the timeline that you can spend with something. Going right back to our conversation about visual arts at the very beginning. No wonder we're only spending three seconds with a painting because we're skipping through our Instagram one after the other, and sometimes giving it less than three seconds and still being satisfied by it in some sort of serotonin release, in our brains. So it's a really interesting area to dive into and I think a really rich vein for artists to work with.
(01:05:01):
The reason I think I've probably spent so much time thinking about it is because a lot of the stories and characters and situations that were given to me as a young person, and particularly like I read a lot of manga when I was a kid, and Japan was obviously very obsessed with that idea of the body and of the future and of cybernetics and the promises of technology specifically I'd say during that time, a lot of those timelines of those stories are now, and the same with Blade Runner. Blade Runner has expired was 2020 was when that story was told. So I think to see those chronologies and see some of the early stages of the things that we talked about is a really interesting alignment and reminder that we need to be engaged with that. And potentially also, this is a bit of a sideline, but where is our futuring now?
(01:06:03):
There's a really wonderful text written by Franco Berardi called After the Future, and his proposition in this text is basically that the future no longer exists. And his argument for that is that there have been no visions of the future given to us in the last 30. He actually says from 1977, I think, is he chooses, I dunno if I entirely agree with that, but I think it's a great provocation nonetheless. But there is no vision of the future offered, so therefore the future does not exist. And I think it's incredible. It's very cheeky to kind of frame it like that, but also really powerful because it does ask us all how is it that we imagine these kind of even fragmented visions of the future, the kinds of things that we see in contemporary cinema or in literature. A lot of it's really familiar. It's an echo of a time and a concept that has already been,
Leah Roseman (01:07:03):
This is an excerpt from Shell type, the title track from that album.(Music) Well, if we could talk about some, one of the strands of your career as a touring musician. I mean, you've played every continent on earth, I believe.
Lawrence English (01:08:43):
Well, I would say the performance in Antarctica is probably, it's a very solo performance. But yes, I mean, I did make a work that was performative in Antarctica, so I think I can say that I have performed on every continent.
Leah Roseman (01:08:56):
So as an electronic musician mostly is what you've,
Lawrence English (01:09:03):
Yeah. I mean, some work I think I had, particularly in the early 2000s, a lot of the work I was with electronics, but it was much more improvised. It was more collective, more collective kind of performance. I was really heavily interested in the Onkyo movement in Tokyo, which was that kind of new silence movement that arrived in the late nineties and early two thousands. And I participated in the tail end of that, which was for me really challenging at that time and also really satisfying. I had to think about what those exchanges meant with the musicians that I performed with. And also just being in the orbit of some of those people and the ways that they were thinking about sound and the absence of sound in performance, I found really inspiring and also challenging. Honestly, some of the most unreconciled, my feeling coming out of a concert where I'm most uncertain about what just happened were some of those performances.
(01:10:17):
And I really value that. I mean, I like not knowing. I like the uncertainty. I like the lack of resolution because it means that you have to be reflexive and contemplate how it is that not only you fit in those circumstances at that time, but also internally, where do we derive satisfaction from? Where do we derive the kind of capacity to continue developing our practice and how satisfied can we be with certain things? So for me, I think that was a really interesting time, really challenging time. And since then I've moved more to solid performance. I would say really since probably 2007, I moved more to solo performance. I kind of stopped improvising largely. I mean, it still happens, but it's less and less. And partly that was because I didn't know if I had anything else to say there, quite honestly. And I think sometimes it's important to make the decision to be quiet, even though I've talked a lot and I apologize in this conversation. But yeah, I feel like there are moments where you don't need to if you're not bringing anything to a space or to a conversation that maybe you don't need to be in that space. And I really felt, I would say sometime around that mid nineties that I didn't bring anything important to those conversations. So I basically stopped improvising and that's when I moved more into the solo practice.
Leah Roseman (01:12:01):
But your solo practice, I mean, just because I'm coming from acoustic instrumentalists, I'm just trying to understand because you record these beautiful organ sounds, you use all kinds of things, keyboards, and then you're generating ideas. So there's no improvisatory element to your solo performances.
Lawrence English (01:12:17):
No, I mean there is to a point, I guess I'm meant more collaborative interaction with other musicians. The irony being that next week I'm performing in an ensemble which will have that improvisation is a very big crowd of that with Senyawa, the musicians from Indonesia and Peter Knight, aviva endean, two Australian musicians, which we have this group that kind of started strangely during Covid and we're doing this sort of first live presentation of that here in Australia. So it's interesting to be moving back into that. And honestly, actually, I would say that the last couple of years I've been a lot more interested again in that idea of improvisation, partly because of experiences. David Toop and I made a record together a couple of years ago, and that very much opened up a lot of techniques and approaches that I hadn't thought about for a while that were more acoustic, I guess you could say, or physical material. And I've been thinking a lot more about the dimension of performance. I haven't really performed a solo electronic set since 2018, so that's a very big gap. I kind of had a small break that became a really big break, and it's been really interesting to have that gap there because I mean, it came on because I felt that I had exhausted some of the ideas that I had and I'm not easily satisfied I think, with those questions.
(01:13:58):
So I took this pause and it's been really helpful to have that gap. I mean, I did a tour with Loscil Scott Morgan, who is from up your way. And partly it was fantastic. I really love Scott. He's very enjoyable person to spend time with. We both love brutalist architecture, so we basically just travel around taking photos of chunky blocks of concrete. But what was really nice was it was very social, this kind of performative thing together. I really enjoyed that. And in some respects it was a soft start to see whether I was still interested in performance because I was really unsure whether that was something that I wanted to be part of the practice. And it was funny getting on stage for the first couple of times. There was a strange muscle memory that existed there that I found quite curious. And also just the physical sensation of music air in air was really powerful actually, and quite delightful.
(01:15:01):
And I thought, oh, okay, this is still something I clearly have an offended for. But at the same time, I've been thinking a lot about the kind of intimacy of performance and how things can translate from, because I think particularly during that period of wilderness mirrors and cruel optimism, those shows were very big. They were very physical, they're about vibration. They needed a certain kind of sound pressure to get to the quality of experience that I wanted an audience to have with the physicality of the sound. Not just the kind of interior, but the exterior, the bodily listening, the ear as a body. But I'm really interested in starting to think about very much more intimate things than I was in the Indonesia last year with Senyawa and Peter and Aviva, and we did one of these performances in a village, and it was, some parts were incredibly intimate. I sort of went out with just a handheld radio and was able to make these very gentle sounds and it was very direct with the audience and I really enjoyed that. So I think next week is a bit of a test of where we want to take that approach because much more of a club situation where this performance is happening, can that translate? Can it be point to point in any kind of setting? How pliable is the kind of performance methodology? So I'm going to try and test that.
Leah Roseman (01:16:29):
Okay. I was listening. I'm trying to remember the name of it. Oh yeah, Observation of Breath. Do you want to speak to that a little bit? Do your opportunity to record this organ?
Lawrence English (01:16:42):
Yeah. So I live very close to this organ. Actually I could walk there in about 30 minutes. It's in an old building that used, it's called the Old Museum, and it used to be the Queensland Museum up until the kind of early eighties. And then they basically stripped the museum and moved it to the other side of the river. And the building, which is a beautiful kind of old style brick colonial, was left destitute for a long time. And very slowly they started to introduce other things that made a concert hall, the youth orchestra moved there, and as part of that move, they actually had an organ that was located elsewhere in the city, moved in and installed in the concert hall. And it is a beautiful, incredibly beautiful, incredibly particular instrument that does, I mean, every organ is its own universe. And I think that's what's so wonderful about it.
(01:17:37):
I always loved presented Charlemagne Palestine performances a number of times. And what I love is at the end of every performance, generally he'll get up and just say, look, basically, he gives a, writes a love letter to the organ and just reminds people that this organ is unique. This is my organ. There are many like it, but this one is mine. That's that kind of thing where you just have this very deep connection to that instrument and the potential of the instrument is so individuated. So the one that I recorded for Observation of Breath is this one that's at the old museum. And it has a couple of features that are very particular around the bellows, around the way that the sound occupies the space, because that's really powerful about organs for me, is that you only really understand the organ in a space. It doesn't make sense as a close relief instrument.
(01:18:33):
It's that kind of bloom that you get in a room that is really beautiful and also so particular. So I spent many, many weeks playing this organ first with Latitude actually, which is the piece that was the Covid period time with the organ, which was amazing. There was very little traffic. So it's incredibly quiet recording. I was able to get very intimate sounds. And then Observation of Breath, I guess is the second approach to the instrument. And for me are really quite a different record. Some of the pieces are quite short and timbrally quite different, I would say to the pieces that recorded on lassitude. But what is really seductive, I think about the organ is that it requires you to be very patient, I feel, to get the things that I want from the organ, which are those very subtle shifts of breath that are about sustain and not about attack.
(01:19:45):
For me, it requires a physicalness to the playing of incredibly glacial movement of the stops, for instance. And the stops on this particular organ are very pliable. They can really just manipulate them so well, unlike a lot of other organs that have, depending on what the of the stop it is you can have that are just on and off. And I'm not so drawn to those organs, I have to be honest, not my kind of interest, but this particular organ, the ability to slide the breath is so extraordinary. And that's how you get those beautiful. And even the kind of low energy, the sort of shifts in low energy that are possible are just really delicate and it allows you to create that sense of deepening. I think that is, for me, what I'm drawn to when I listen to organ work. I think there's a real old invitation, ironically, to dwell with the instrument, to let it sort of wash over you, to be inside it and to be aware that it's a living thing, that it's not a fixed state, and that the subtlest changes, even in the power flowing through the building, can actually affect the way that the instrument sounds.
(01:21:09):
And I think that responsiveness or that sense of life that it proposes is really one of its great charms.
Leah Roseman (01:21:22):
This is And a Twist from Observation of Breath.(Music) And it's not for people who haven't heard this, it's non rhythmic music. It's very, well,
Lawrence English (01:24:19):
I was going to say it's pulse. I mean mean for me, there's two broad churches in music. There's rhythm and melody and there's harmony impulse. And I feel that a lot of my interest is in this other church, the dark church of harmony and pulse. And that's not to say that I don't respect rhythm and melody. I can absolutely see that as a really powerful tool, particularly for popular music. But I think the domain of harmony and pulse is there is a lot there. And for me, there is more challenge operating with that part of the church, so to speak, because of the relationships that are proposed and something like that. This organ work definitely demonstrates that it is that it is this proposal for deepening. That's for me very satisfying.
Leah Roseman (01:25:21):
And certainly to listen to it with headphones, it is very meditative experience. And sometimes I'm curious to see listeners' reactions to things. I'll look on a place like Bandcamp or I dunno, where I might've seen the social media or something, and some guy had written, "I can't study this year without listening to this recording." So for him, it put him in that space of being able to concentrate, yeah, whatever people use it for, right?
Lawrence English (01:25:45):
Oh, that's great. No, I think it's a really interesting mean, it's a whole other conversation, but the idea of functional music is really, I mean obviously it's a huge growth area and it's partly a result of playlisting, I would say. But I think music has always played a role in our lives and it continues to play varying roles. But I'm always happy if people can find a place or a space for the music in their, that is actually part of it. And I know for me, the last three to four months of my PhD, I basically listened to nothing else but Merzbow when I was writing that PhD up because I just found that it completely rearranged my brain and I could go to something completely another place. And Merzbow facilitated that very well.
Leah Roseman (01:26:36):
Sorry, I'm not understanding what that is, is it?
Lawrence English (01:26:39):
It's Merzbow an artist from Japan. It's like they described as the king of noise, and it's basically very dense, very arrhythmic, very disharmonic music or sound. But I found it really completely broke my brain open when I had to do writing. It was amazing. It blocked out the world. I became, I mean, I think why I've become such a, I've always been a fan of Masami's work, but I have a very deep understanding of it after consuming it for four months straight. And anyone that's listened to Merzbow will probably be, they'll understand that what that actually means.
Leah Roseman (01:27:19):
So in your childhood, I understand there was classical music on kind of in the background of your family's life.
Lawrence English (01:27:26):
Yeah, I mean, definitely in the car. I didn't actually know there was any other music until I was probably eight or nine or something like that. I mean, I guess probably I heard pop songs every once in a while, but I thought that the majority of the world was classical music. That's what my father listened to in the car. I mean, my mother didn't really listen to a lot of music, but my day-to-day exposure was definitely that, I would say. And when I finally did discover other music, I mean, I think the first CD I got was a Beach Boys CD, one of those great kind of very cheap department store compilations it, I think it was called Summer Dreams or somewhere they probably had a wave and a surfer on the cover, some sort of nondescript West coast surfer vibe look. But when I discovered that, I was like, wow, there's this whole other thing there. I mean, partly it was the vocals and songs, but also those Beach Boys records still are just magic to listen to in terms of the kind of compositional arrangement that vocal harmonies and stuff are just to this day, absolutely wild.
(01:28:39):
But then, yeah, from there, it kind of opened up pretty quickly, I think. But it was really interesting to have that period of extended time with instrumental music and with music that often is about those questions of harmony timbre and to some degree melody. So yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if it had any sort of really significantly lasting effect, but it's certainly something that I recognize as a point of difference maybe to other kids. And it wasn't like music was playing all the time. It really was just when we were traveling. It wasn't like something that was happening in the house or anything like that, which is interesting because I know my parents were interested in music, but I don't think it was a big part of their lives necessarily.
Leah Roseman (01:29:26):
So did you take formal music lessons?
Lawrence English (01:29:30):
I played acoustic guitar for a really short amount of time. I played piano for a little while, but I mean, I stopped doing when I was at school. I think I failed music in year eight because honestly, I hate the recorder. And when I say that I hate children's plastic recorders with a passion. I think it's the worst thing you can give to a kid to play music with. Someone playing like Natasha Anderson playing bass recorder. I'm 100% there. She's incredible. But a plastic awful sounding torture device that we give to kids, that's the worst. So I kind of rejected that entirely, obviously, to the fact that I didn't even pass the course. And then I didn't do music in high school formally, but I was a drummer by this point. I was playing the drums. A kind of like self-taught drummer. And I remember that the band that I was in actually one battle of the bands in my final year of high school, and three or four teachers came up to me after this, the performance on school, there was like a thousand kids, and we kind of played Metallica, actually half of Search and Destroy and the other half of Am I evil, because we couldn't play the whole, the guy couldn't play the solo, so we had to cut it in half. So we had this weird blending thing, which is quite improvisatory now that I think about it. But we played this in a bunch of teachers come and said like, oh, we didn't know that you liked music. You don't do music. I said, no, I don't because basically I hate the recorder. And they're like, oh, okay. And then ironically, the woman that was the head of the music department, her family actually ran a studio here, and I think it was the year after I'd left school, maybe it was the final year of school, I went to the studio to make a DDP, which is the kind of glass master you do to make a CD. I was going to release a compilation CD on my label, which this is before Room40.
(01:31:46):
And I turned up and Mrs. Jacobson, because somehow you always remember all your teacher's names, looked at me and she said, what are you doing here? I said, I run a record label now. She just looked at me and I said, I play in bands. And she was like, but you hate music. She said, oh no, I don't hate music. I just hate recorders. And I could see this thing kind of processing through her mind. I didn't like the way that music was taught. And anyway, she was quite surprised. I returned to the studio numerous times over the next few months making other CDs and whatever. And it was just an interesting reminder that sometimes it's the mechanisms or the formality or the structural questions that dominate the way that we acquire something that actually can be in the way of us properly engaging with that.
(01:32:40):
And I think there is a real place for virtuosity and for people to obviously really spend time cultivating those skills. And I had enormous deficits as a maker and a composer because of not having that engagement during that time. And I do regret that in some respects. But now I just see those shortcomings as the kind of binds or the frame around which I have to make work. So if I'm going to do something, then I have to recognize all those failures, all those shortcomings, all those inabilities, and make that part of the process. And again, going back to that conversation we had before about risk and failure, that's part of it.
(01:33:23):
We're never going to be everything. We need to be something. And I think actually that's something I say a lot to younger artists when I'm talking to them because I think particularly now, it's never been easier to make anything at all. You can sit down with Ableton live and compose a film score or or a pop song, whatever the case might be. But the challenge is not to make anything. It's to make something. And that requires your voice, your agency, your interests, your passions to be channeled through that technology that you are commanding that thing and you are making it responsive to the ways and means that you want to recognize in the work that you do, not the reverse.
Leah Roseman (01:34:11):
Well, Lawrence, there's a lot we could talk about, but I do want to wrap this up soon. Looking at the time. Is there things we didn't talk about that you'd like to talk about?
Lawrence English (01:34:19):
No, I mean, I think you've asked really great questions, so thanks. Honestly, it's nice to kind of cover a bunch of terrain. I mean, like you say, there's lots of things we could talk about, but I feel like I've talked a lot and anyone that makes it through this podcast, my hat's off to them for taking in what is a pretty broad palette of material that we've covered.
Leah Roseman (01:34:43):
That's what I try to accomplish with this series.
Lawrence English (01:34:46):
Beautiful. I think we need more of that. The broader, the better.
Leah Roseman (01:34:49):
Yeah. Well, I am a classical violinist, and I grew up with this tiny box as the idea of what your life could be. And I actually managed to fit into that box quite well. But I really want the world to realize that the world of music is so broad and beautiful and so much, there's just so much there. So I try to talk to all kinds of people of other life and music. Yeah,
Lawrence English (01:35:12):
I mean, I think it's great. It is. And I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with fitting into the box in that way because I think the violin is a great example. Once you look inside, it's dark and deep. You can kind of go forever, not just in terms of virtuosity, but in terms of the language that instrument has. And I mean, I always think about Tony Conrad, or actually in Australia, there's a violinist called John Rose who's super interesting. You would probably appreciate some of his work. I mean, he is a kind of exploratory violinist, I would say, but has also taken that love of strings and played long wire fences in the outback. And all of this kind of stuff really expanded the language of the instrument. But I think there's a pleasure, and I find this definitely with the work that I make, there is a pleasure in the bind.
(01:36:12):
The fact that you are defined by a thing or a way or in some respects by the things you don't have, it's actually really, it's powerful because you have to work with and against yourself all the time to deepen that way of playing or deepen that way of composing or whatever the case might be. And I think actually that's good. And the thing is, all of that conversation, like exactly what we've been talking about this last hour, that's all the stuff that is in orbit of what we do. And it's still part of the conversation and part of the ideas and part of the inspiration, the very direct inspiration for the way that we might approach an instrument or a piece of music. But it's sometimes easy to forget that. And I think having that very much at the center of our way as we kind of move forward through our lives as an artist or however we want to describe ourselves, it's actually, it's worth keeping that sort of front and center sometimes.
Leah Roseman (01:37:17):
Well, thanks so much for this today. Really appreciate it.
Lawrence English (01:37:20):
My pleasure.
Leah Roseman (01:37:22):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
