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Lawrence English: Dead silence
The man behind Room40, one of Australia's preeminent experimental labels, talks cultural identity and "sightseeing for your ears."
As I'm writing this, the Australian state of Queensland is being ravaged by floods due to ex-tropical cyclone Oswald. It's the same devastating natural disaster that happened in 2011, but thankfully this year isn't quite as bad. Bundaberg is the worst affected town, with 2000 homes and 200 business flooded and 7500 people displaced. 400km south in Brisbane, there are fears that the city of two million people could run out of fresh water.
On the night before Oswald was set to hit Brisbane, Lawrence English wrote on his social media: "An unerring quiet on my late evening walk, broken only by the clapping of umbrella tree leaves, palm fronds scratching at each other in the breeze, a sole possum traversing an iron roof and a lonely car droning its way through the distant streets…Brisbane sleeps heavy tonight…"
It seems like an appropriate introduction to a sound artist who is acclaimed for his "use of space and silence," as The Wire once put it. As I discovered when I sat down with English in Melbourne a few months ago, space and silence form the fundamental lens through which he sees the world.
In a collection of essays titled Dead Silence, English prefaced the writings of Keiji Haino, David Toop and Terre Thaemlitz with a thesis of his own:
"Silence is an unknown and as a species we fear nothing more than that which we don't understand."
It's clear that English has a complex relationship with sound and his surroundings. The true value of his efforts has been realised in his Room40 label, which has frequently placed Australian artists in a global context. Releases from locals like Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi & Robbie Avenaim and Robin Fox sit alongside a long list of international artists such as Bee Mask, Tim Hecker, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Lee Ranaldo and Rafael Anton Irisarri (AKA The Sight Below). It's all in keeping with English's continuing project of "trying to find how we [as Australians] fit in the world."
The Brisbane-born artist is enchanted by Australia, its environment and its people. Where the "cultural cringe" is a knee-jerk reaction among generations X and Y, English is not embarrassed by contemporary Australian culture. In fact, he seems uneasy for not interacting with it more. It prompted him to take a road trip around Queensland in 2011, visiting regional towns and cities.
"What were the people like?" I ask immediately in an expectant tone. (If ever there was an example of cultural cringe.)
"You realise that there is a huge cultural divide between the metropolitan and rural areas," he says, "and that culture is a luxury. It's very easy to exist on a one-dimensional plane. You live in a city, you go to your favourite shops and restaurants and things just happen. I realised I'd built a gated existence."
"Music no longer involves a financial exchange. It's a time exchange."
His extensive field recordings are anything but. In 2008 he released Studies for Stradbroke, which was recorded on Stradbroke Island, 30km south-east off the coast of Brisbane. In the same year, he released Kiri No Oto on Touch, which used sounds from environments in Australia, New Zealand, Poland and Japan. And his recent digital release, Songs of the Living, is a snapshot of his trips to the Antarctic and the Amazon.
"It's sightseeing for your ears," he explains. "A way of finding unique sound spaces that might not sound the same when the next person goes there ten minutes later." But for all the sounds he explores on foreign shores, it's bringing these experiences back to Brisbane that motivates him. "I love being at home. I like the birds in the trees and the possums on my roof. I like wandering around seeing tawny frogmouth [owls] hunting rats in the street at night. That kind of thing is great."
Ben Frost, a long time friend of English's who relocated to Iceland in 2005, comes to mind when discussing Australian identify. Last year English reissued Frost's acclaimed album Steel Wound on vinyl nearly a decade after it first came out on Room40. "Ben has completely removed himself from Australia," says English. "To a point, he will always be Australian but he loves Iceland; loves living there, loves the people, loves the environment. He never felt at home in the environment here," he adds with an air of understanding. "I, on the other hand, love visiting other places but I love coming home to the space I've created for myself."
English is also keen to show international artists what it is about Australia that intrigues him. It's led to an astounding number of tours from cutting-edge artists like Bee Mask, Grouper and Mike Cooper. Once again, English acts as the intermediary between foreign and local scenes. He started an "artist in residency" program, the first of which was last year with Grouper. "I wanted to create a situation for Grouper where she could work on projects," he says. "We went to the mountains on a field trip and set up a Room40 'residency'." It's all about a cross-cultural dialogue, where Australian sounds and artists can be heard.
Then there's the Open Frame Festival—a "festival of sound and media"—which has hosted acts as diverse as KK Null, Sun Araw and Pete Swanson. From visual art, to harsh noise and psychedelic and experimental rock, Open Frame has tried to expose Australians to variety of things: rather than settling on one sound, it showcases "intensity." I put this to English and he agrees, in part. "I think the lingering memory and legacy of performances is where the value is. Obviously you want to go and have a great time, enjoy some music, be challenged and engaged, but more than this, I want to remember it 10 years on."
Another reason English has been able to continue touring artists and shaping Room40 into such a powerful force is that he's embraced the challenges of digital culture. "Music," he says, "no longer involves a financial exchange. It's a time exchange. The challenge is how you get people to give you more of their time."
In an effort to meet this hurdle, English took the counterintuitive step of launching a cassette label, A Guide To Saints, and releasing them from the Room40 online store. "I had so many cassettes as a kid and fast-forwarding was really, really annoying. So, rather than sitting there and just fast-forwarding and skipping and never engaging it made me figure out a framework around what it was I didn't like."
The first release came from Motion Sickness of Time Travel and was full of wonderful, woozy synths. The most interesting of the tapes to date, however, is Submarine Love Songs by Tralala Blip. The vocals are haunting and stilted—it's very strange music to come from the town of Lismore in regional New South Wales, population 30,000. (I'd urge anyone to listen to the tape and come to an opinion before looking up details of the collective's backstory.)
More broadly, Room40 is an escape from the hype. Ben Frost released on Room40 before he was "Ben Frost." Tim Hecker and Keith Fullerton-Whittman are tucked away in the archive in a space outside of their popular works. Oren Ambarchi & Robbie Avenaim's continuing contribution to Australian experimental music was celebrated through the reissue of their early work.
As for English, his role in Australia's scene is largely unacknowledged. When I suggest this to him he's humbled and uncomfortable. "That's the really interesting thing about information and the Web is it's not time-based, which is really useful because you tap into people's lives at a strange point. Actually, chronology is quite baffling and hard to piece together."
Room40 will continue to exist on the Web for people to discover. What little noise it has made has been of incredible quality.
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Published / Wednesday, 13 March 2013
 7 Comments
Photo credits /
Header - Lawrence English
Storm - adrenalinmatt
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