Lawrence English: Capturing the Impossible Trio
The Australian composer and Room40 founder discusses his new collaborative album 'Trinity' with Stephen Vitiello, his theory of relational listening, and why he spent eight years interrogating the meaning of live performance before returning to the stage.
Today we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on artist, composer, and curator Lawrence English.
Australian composer Lawrence English has spent over two decades treating sound as something that occupies your body, not just your ears. Putting The Tonearm’s needle on Lawrence English means entering a sonic world where you’re never quite sure what you’re hearing or where it’s coming from, and if you are a listener like our host, that will suit you just fine.
Lawrence’s recent album Trinity pairs him with Stephen Vitiello and guests like Brendan Canty from Fugazi and Chris Abrahams from The Necks. Each track builds what English calls “impossible trios,” turning geographic and other constraints into creative fuel.
Lawrence is here to discuss collaboration, the art of curation, and what it means to make meaningful work in an age drowning in content.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello’s album Trinity)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Lawrence English at lawrenceenglish.com and follow him on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and Bandcamp
• Purchase Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello’s Trinity from American Dreams, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Learn more about Room40, Lawrence English’s label celebrating its 25th anniversary
Collaborators on ‘Trinity’:
• Chris Abrahams (The Necks) - pianist
• Stephen Vitiello - sound artist and composer
• Aki Onda - multidisciplinary artist
• Marina Rosenfeld - turntablist and composer
• Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics) - drummer
• The late Steve Roden - artist and lowercase musician
Books and Theory:
• Peter Szendy - ‘Listen: A History of Our Ears’
• Neil Postman - ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business’
• Lauren Berlant - Cruel Optimism theory
• Mark Fisher - cultural theorist
• Xenia Benivolski - curator and writer of contemporary art
Places and Concepts:
• Gunkanjima (Battleship Island) - abandoned coal mining island off Nagasaki
• Hashima Island history - most densely populated place in history
• Japanese Metabolist architecture - architectural movement English researched
• Art Gallery of New South Wales - collected English’s bell work
Musical Groups and Ensembles:
• The Necks - Chris Abrahams’ improvisational jazz trio
• Tenniscoats - Japanese duo Saya and Takashi Ueno
Academic and Philosophical Concepts:
• Relational listening - English’s PhD theory on reconciling psychological and technological audition
• Acid nostalgia - English’s working concept on how contemporary nostalgia corrodes the past
• Natsukashii - Japanese concept of longing for a time/place you were never part of
• Tsundoku - Japanese word for collecting books you don’t read
• Ma - Japanese concept of the space between elements
Related Works:
• Lawrence English - ‘Cruel Optimism’ (Room40)
• Lawrence English - ‘Wilderness of Mirrors’ (Room40, 2014)
• Chris Abrahams - ‘Thrown’ (Room40)
• Chris Abrahams - ‘Appearance’ (Room40, 2020)
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
The Tonearm Interview: Lawrence English
Lawrence Peryer: You're in my kind of environment. It looks like you're surrounded by ideas and inputs.
Lawrence English: Yeah, there's that tsundoku, you know, that Japanese word for collecting books that you don't necessarily get to. I'm very good at doing that. I have like a section just here. I was actually in Japan for a month. I've come back with many new piles, which means that the prolonging of this thing is only going to get worse. But yes, I'm 100 percent with you. If there's no ideas, then there's nothing.
Lawrence: Yeah, there you go. And you also, I think, go through periods, particularly—and I'm sure you find the same thing—where you're kind of in a delivery mode where you're doing a lot of making and things are going out the door. But at a certain point you need that moment where actually you need to put things in, otherwise the river runs dry.
Lawrence English: Yeah. What's the relationship between consuming ideas, especially reading, and musical output? Do you recognize—I mean, you articulated a bit of like, if things are going out, things need to come in—but do you see that connection directly in your musical work?
Lawrence: Look, I'm one of these people that cannot make work from nothing. And when I meet—in some respects, I make sound work and music, but I don't necessarily think of myself as a musician. I probably, if you're going to pick a word, it would be composer. And that's partly because when I meet musicians that can pick up an instrument or sometimes just objects, like I have friends, there's a Japanese group called Tennis Coats, and what I love about that band is that Saya and Takashi Ueno, this duo, they make the most beautiful, melodic song-based work. But you can give them almost anything, a glass bottle and a fork, and somehow they will find this musical language out of that object. I do not have that. I cannot make work like that. And I'm so impressed and jealous of people that can. They can pick up their instrument and find something in it that becomes theirs, so you hear their voice. I don't do that so much.
Lawrence English: For me, the boundary, if you like, or the frame, the vines, are actually what make the work. So right now I'm halfway through this new project, which is actually—it's been going for quite a while, but I've been spending a lot of time doing research around ideas of metabolic architecture from Japan. So I went to look at all of those buildings. I'm thinking a lot about this idea of nostalgia as a problem maybe, or as something that has become a site of crisis in the modern age.
Looking at some locations, I went to Gunkanjima, which is Battleship Island. It was the most densely populated place in the world, per square meter, in the mid-twentieth century. It's this little island off Nagasaki, which was a coal mine, and it was abandoned in 1974. I've been trying to go there for two decades, and they now actually have a boat that goes out every day. So the first time I went out, I was trying to convince someone to take me out there from the shore because there was no way to get out there.
Lawrence: Wow.
Lawrence English: Yeah, it was amazing to kind of see this environment and try and reconcile all of the histories that kind of travel with that. That's the stuff that feeds into the work because it helps with context, but it also helps with—it's interesting, you know, the world is really enormous and tiny at the same time, and that dichotomy is so great.
Lawrence: You know, your reference to the issue of nostalgia is a little bit top of mind for me because going through the holiday season, there are often those types of feelings that come up or reflections and things of that nature. But I think a lot about, especially in America, our conception of the holiday season and of the Christmas holiday. I think of American Christmas as essentially a mid-century phenomenon. All the Christmas films, everything from the thirties to the early fifties, all that content is so deeply nostalgic about this other time and what Christmas was. And I can't put my finger on when that time actually existed. Like when was Christmas this idealized thing? It's so strange.
Lawrence English: Well, I think sometimes they don't exist. I mean, there's a really great Japanese word, natsukashii, which basically means a kind of longing for a time or place that perhaps you were never part of. And I think that's a very clear delineation between that and nostalgia, which—even the original kind of use of the word was through a kind of medical context. This idea of the desire to return home. It was to do with people that had been at war or away, and this idea of a longing to kind of return to a place that they knew already. That was the kind of tether, if you like, that tied someone to a place and a time.
And I think what's interesting now about nostalgia is that there's this reconfiguration of it where it has become much more like what we would call natsukashii, this idea of something that never existed really, but we're somehow presenting it as a thing that did. And it's partly come to mind obviously because AI has really helped that image mapping of a kind of nostalgia.
And I think for me, what I'm interested in—I've sort of come up with this working term "acid nostalgia," which is a little bit of an odd term. Mark Fisher actually, who I think really pioneered a lot of the thinking around some of these ideas—the reason I've called it acid nostalgia is because what I think this new version of nostalgia does is it's like pouring acid on something. The thing can still be there, but it's heavily transformed and changed, and the detail of that thing, that memory, that attachment to that place, is gone.
I think there's an interesting idea to untangle there around this idea of decontouring the possibility of the future. I'm very interested in this idea of possible futures, and I think this idea of nostalgia now is about reducing the past and kind of weaponizing it against the future. I think you see it actually—I mean, in the States particularly—I think that idea of driving towards a certain kind of, like you're talking about, even with Christmas, I mean, it's not quite the same, but there's a sort of attachment there that almost weighs people down.
It's a little bit like, you know, I made a record called Cruel Optimism, which was about Lauren Berlant's theory of cruel optimism. In some respects, it's the same thing. It's about maintaining bad attachments, or in this case, kind of creating possibilities for bad attachments to be maintained. It's an interesting one. I mean, I'm still working through it. It's a kind of active investigation, but I think there's something really in this idea of decontouring the future, trying to reduce the detail and the nuance. And it sort of carries through in lots of other areas too, like civic infrastructure, in the kind of practicalities of how we plan the places we live, even the way that the net operates now.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Lawrence English: It's so much less than what it could be. And it seems like we can't quite find our way back to making it be this progressive kind of environment where anything is possible. Now it feels really restricted and heavy and unable to maneuver, and there's not much room for people in it.
Lawrence: Yeah, there's a lot in there. It's interesting when you talked about the initial meaning or use of nostalgia. I think that makes sense to me. There's somebody in this crisis situation—you said, you know, in war—longing to be home. Okay, that seems reasonable to me. But now we have people in the present day. To me, it feels like this sort of rise of everything being coded in nostalgia. I can't disentangle it from societal alienation, like widespread alienation. How can I be optimistic about the future when I see the news and I go on social media? All those things that people have in their sort of cultural stew right now, it feels profoundly unhealthy.
Lawrence English: Well, I think it's difficult to be where you are and to kind of be rooted in that thing. It's increasingly difficult. And it's funny, you know, Neil Postman, one of your great thinkers of the twentieth century, wrote this fantastic book about public discourse in the age of television. It's Amusing Ourselves to Death is the name of the book. And he has this great story—I'm pretty sure it's in that book; it's either in that or it's in one of his essay collections.
He talks about the introduction of telegraph wire and that information could travel much quicker than it could previously. At that point, publishing is becoming a really big thing in the United States, almost a couple hundred years ago. Suddenly there was this opportunity for people to read about—they're living in Arkansas, but they can read about a giant fire in Chicago. And it's terrible, this horrific kind of reportage about what had happened, who died, the kind of horrific situations that people have faced. And when people read that, they had no meaningful way to engage with it. It was in a whole other place, in a place they'd never seen, and they'd never understood the kind of lived context of that thing. And they felt anxious and frustrated and upset, but there was nothing to do with that. You just feel anxious, frustrated, and upset.
And I think somehow social media particularly, and I guess the idea of the news cycle that's really shifted in the last two decades, plays completely into that. You are never let off the hook. There's always another problem, always another thing, always another report about however many hundred days of the Ukrainian war or another healthcare disaster or the government continues to be shut down. There's never good news in a way. And if there is, the good news is really at a different scale.
And actually the problem for us is we can't separate the scales anymore. We're somehow entangled in a geopolitical environment that we have, honestly, as individuals, very little to do with. And yet we tether ourselves to these things, ballast ourselves on them, and travel with them, when actually what's really important is making a meal together with your family.
Lawrence: Right?
Lawrence English: Or talking to your neighbor. And we don't all share the same views. Talking to your neighbor—because community is not agreement. It's actually an active discussion, and it's willing to be generous and brave enough to open yourself to other people. And it's a very interesting moment where a lot of those ideas seem to feel very distant. And what feels up close is all of this other stuff that is kind of the noise, if you like, in the system, not actually the communication.
Lawrence: It's fascinating because all those things are very real. Those are real experiences happening to real people. But to your point, they're disembodied people from a practical sense. I can imagine the experience, but here I am, a middle-aged white man in the Pacific Northwest of America. I'm probably not going—I'll have my own hardships, but I'm not going to have theirs. And it's very hard to metabolize that.
Lawrence English: Yeah, it is. It's one of those things where I think we can attach ourselves to the world, and I mean, just if we're going to talk about being present, maybe right now outside my window, you can hear a baby bird waiting to be fed by its mother. That is the world that we live in. (laughter) This is the relationship I should be having: looking out my window, seeing a noisy miner—that's what they're called, noisy miners—just basically begging to be fed. That's lived experience right there. It's this kind of moment-to-moment thing that is really valuable and actually joyful.
I love looking out the window and seeing birds. I'm very fortunate. We live in Brisbane, which is a kind of very subtropical city, and you are living with the world all the time. And sometimes, perhaps a little too closely. I just came back from a month away, and literally on the back of my house was a giant, sort of three-meter-long python skin, and I thought, well, that's good to know that there's a python in the yard. (laughter)
It's quite interesting to sort of have these moments where you recognize that you are not alone, that you are sharing the space and the space should be shared. And we just all need to come to a nice situation where we can reconcile the boundaries. Maybe you stay outside or on the ceiling. I'm happy with that, just not in the house, if you know what I mean.
Lawrence: Yeah. My partner's the same way when—there's a season, there's a time of year here where we get a lot of spiders. She always tells me she has an agreement with the spiders. They can have the yard; it's theirs. They're outside. I get the inside. If they come inside, I will help them get back outside, and I will tell them, stay outside, but they are not allowed in the house.
Lawrence English: Yeah. You've got to find comfortable boundaries, and it's an active discussion, but that's what keeps it interesting.
Lawrence: Yeah. Well, I'm going to do a very inarticulate pivot here, in terms of active discussion. I want to talk to you a little bit about your theories of collaboration. I'm very curious about the—the pretense for us getting together was I had received some information about Trinity, your new work, or your newest work with Stephen.
Lawrence English: Oh yeah.
Lawrence: I love the construct of the project, of the individual tracks—you bringing in an individual different collaborator for each track, but only one at a time. I'm curious about that. I talk to a lot of artists about the idea of constraints and systems and prompts as a means to ringfence the work so that you have something to operate against or within. And I'm curious, was this construct a constraint that you both developed as a way to guide the project, or how did this all come about?
Lawrence English: Look, I would say that any situation like that is simultaneously a constraint and this amazing sort of floodgate opportunity. Because I think that's what's really interesting about collaboration. Obviously collaboration takes many different forms, and the way that it operates is different case to case. And it's down to personalities, and it's down to the way that we choose to kind of negotiate with each other, I would say.
But for me, what I enjoy about collaboration is that ambiguity, that it's never really set. There's no—I mean, you can kind of set up rules or structures or limitations, but inevitably you will exceed them in a way that you don't expect. I mean, that's what I've found, at least. I have been very fortunate in my life as a maker to collaborate with people that I have honestly found to be extraordinarily generous, porous, and open, and fearless, actually.
And it's been really a constant learning curve for me. So with this work with Stephen, I mean, Stephen and I have known each other now for very close to twenty years—actually, more than twenty years. I invited Stephen to participate in a project on Room40, I think in 2002 or 2003. We've really known each other a long time, and I've had a huge amount of respect for his work as an artist and as a musician.
So we've had a few exchanges already, and I think when you return to those exchanges, what's interesting, and actually what's a joy about them, is that you can begin to sort of feel at the edges. Because every collaboration is this kind of—it's setting an environment that you're going to potentially live in for a while together. And at a certain point it's like Monster Island. You eventually want to find where the edge of the island is. It's more of a peninsula—that's a Simpsons reference if anyone gets it. (laughter)
But you do want to kind of feel at the edges of that. And then in some ways you kind of reclaim more space. Potentially it becomes like a kind of reclaimed situation where you're building out these edges. And I think for Stephen and I, with this work, we'd already been kind of developing some of the material together. We were talking about, what's the reclamation here? What's the kind of expansion into this other thing? Where's the edge?
I'd had this idea of impossible trios. Which, for me, is actually a really practical thing. I live at the bottom of the earth. For me to come to you is a solid, probably with transfers, maybe like twenty-two hours, maybe a little bit less if I'm lucky and I get a quick pass through LAX. But it's far. I go to Europe, it can be anything up to like thirty-five hours depending on the transits. It's a really practical thing that sometimes I physically cannot be with other people to make work.
So I started thinking about this idea, and we were discussing it. And what was interesting was when we started approaching people and asking for contributions, sometimes it worked in very different ways with different collaborators. And each of us, I think, led the—obviously Stephen was recording with Brendan, so there was like a very direct connection there. Stephen had been with Steve when they'd made that recording. I'd just been in Japan with Aki Onda, and I'd seen his bells because we were working on an exhibition of his that I curated in Melbourne.
So there were these very active connections that were going on. I think what was wonderful about that interplay was that as soon as that person, that third voice came into the piece, it completely changed the piece. And it wasn't—sometimes it wasn't radical. Sometimes it was very kind of subtle, or it was a detail, or it was some other part of the piece came to the surface that wasn't there before. But each one of them reshaped the way that the articulation of the voices was. It was like you suddenly have a soprano or a baritone in something that's been like an alto choir. There's a whole other register that opens up. And that register is complementary, and sometimes can be overpowering, and sometimes can be really just about reinforcement.
Actually, it was surprising in ways that I didn't expect. And I think that for me is one of those affirmations about why collaboration is still relevant for me. I mean, I'm well past the halfway point, I would imagine, at this point in my time on this planet. And I have to say, I had a big break from live performance. I hadn't, until last month, performed live solo for nearly eight years. I decided to stop performing largely because I wasn't really sure what that relationship was between the stage, myself, and an audience. I tested a bunch of things that felt really meaningful and engaging, and I felt like that period of experimentation or relationship, whatever you want to describe it as, needed to be rethought.
In 2018, I stopped performing, basically the end of 2018, and I didn't quite expect it to be as long as it has been. But COVID helped with that very much, so I could be very slack and really dive deep on those midlife crisis questions. But having that moment to actually interrogate, think about the relationships that you do manifest in those situations and the communalness of that idea of performance—that shared experience—I mean, it's obviously an individuated listening experience, but it's in this shared space. So we collectively in time experience something together, even if we are interpreting it in our own way.
That was an active question as much as this work was with Stephen recently, where I was thinking, does collaboration still have a place? Do I still learn something? Does it still hold the chance to be surprised? Because I'm just, honestly, that's what I'm looking for. That's getting back to what we were talking about before, about the idea of ideas. I want to be surprised. And the world is super surprising, and relationships are super surprising, and people are super surprising. You've just got to be there to let that surprise happen. And I think I had that really reinforced with Trinity, actually. I'm still a believer. (laughter)
Lawrence: In collaboration?
Lawrence English: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence: In the power of collaboration. Yeah.
Lawrence English: And in the power of surprise and in the power of being attentive to the world, that there's still so much there. And it can be absolutely insignificant, and it is insignificant most of the time. But in that insignificance, if you actually dig into it a little bit longer, you see the kind of beauty of it. And that's certainly for some of the collaborations that I've had in my life—very offhandedly, people have made comments or I've made comments to them, and those offhanded insignificant things become the crux of the record or become the crux of the project. Because they somehow speak to something that is more than the flippant offering that it is. There's something subconscious, atmospheric, that's there that's somehow just hovering, and you don't quite know what it is, and you say something, and then suddenly it unlocks that thing. That's really delightful.
Lawrence: There's so much you touched on that hinted at things that were in my notes. But one of the things I wanted to jump to was almost the physics of what you do. And by that I mean, temporality and time is the most obvious physical element of music, but space and distance and even spatiality seems to play such a big role in your work. And part of that is the nature of ambient-inflected music and that work. But I wonder if you could talk a little more about how you view space, and I hear it in the mixing specifically of this record. What intention is behind that? Or if any?
Lawrence English: So if I think about it from—because I have many lives because I'm probably too easily distracted—(laughter) but if I think about it through the lens of field recording, I draw this differentiation between the idea—and I think it applies just to composition as well. I draw this line between the idea of space and place. Space is the kind of physical environment, if you like, the hard fixed architecture of the world. But what happens in that architecture is the stuff that I guess I've been talking to so far, this idea of the incidental things, the bird being fed outside the window. I look out the window now, and still the tree is there and the sky is blue and whatever, but that event has passed.
Somehow, miraculously, the baby bird has been satiated. It never happens, so this is a miracle, a Christmas miracle. (laughter) But to recognize that there is this evolving, unfolding, multifarious narrative going on all of the time out there, that's place. And if I'm not here, you are not there. If you are not paying attention out the window, then you never see the spiders. If you're not present, then you don't get that. You're not afforded the opportunity of that experience.
And for me, that's something that I try and carry across in all of the work. It's about being there. It's about being inside. If it's the case of a composition, it's about being inside the composition and also being available to it. Because I think there's a certain point at which you make work or you build a relationship and you begin to expect something from that relationship, or you begin to think that you know it. And you do, in a certain way—you do know it. But all it takes is the smallest repositioning of yourself, and sometimes in a really physical way.
If you're monitoring material, investigating the strata, if you like, of the piece—and I do that a lot. I'm working my way through working on this new project, and I'm very much in that stage of going in a very kind of geological way, digging through the layers of what has become the piece. Because a lot of my work is about iteration and about this idea of construction and deconstruction, and erosion and things being kind of worn down over time. I think that's a very fitting way to describe what happens. And it is about this kind of compression, this sort of weight of one thing being laid on the next, on the next. And sometimes the pieces are sort of eighty or ninety layers deep. And do you hear layer eighty-nine? Maybe you never do. But when you take it out, you notice that there is some kind of something that changes in there, and it's like that gauze-like blur. I think that's actually really important. It's certainly important for me because I know I experience it in the world every day.
I love the idea—I love actually having to listen in environments and think about those ideas that we're talking about, this idea of how sound—it's a great example for that because it's so tangible. You can be standing somewhere listening to something. The horizon of audition feels limitless. You know that you can almost hear out forever. And then all it takes is someone driving past you to suddenly shrink it to just the closeness of you in that car, and everything else in the world is gone. It's just you in that vehicle. And then that vehicle slowly leaves, and suddenly this kind of blooming of the rest of the world comes back.
I love that experience, and I think for me, that's one of the things that actually keeps me with something like field recording as a practice, is that you are constantly piercing out into the world. You're reaching towards your listening and all of those possible listenings in that moment. And sometimes you're fighting for that listening. You're really trying to hold that point of focus or attention. At other times, you are being pulled by these events. It's almost like a stream of consciousness of chaos that's going on. And I love that. I love that counterpoint. And I love that you can't—you're just there. You're part of it, whether you're lucky or not. And if you try and fight against it, that's where the frustration is.
In the same way, I think, to some of the other points that we've spoken to, it really is about that idea of recognizing where we fit and how we fit in the places and the spaces that we're in.
Lawrence: When you are conducting field recording and you come back to review the work, how often is the experience of what you captured and what you're hearing during playback different from what you experienced in the field? And I don't just mean sonic timbres because the microphone sounds different than the ear or picks up things differently than the ear. I mean, how often are you, to use your earlier words, surprised, and you say, wow, I didn't even hear that in real time?
Lawrence English: Yeah. Look, I'm a doctor, and my PhD basically built this theoretical framework for listening, which I call relational listening. And it's about that tension, exactly how you've described it, between your listening and the recording of, potentially, that listening.
And basically what I was saying with this study was that—and I used field recording as an example because I think it really does summarize the problem and the question. I found a great text from Peter Szendy, who I always have to credit because I honestly feel it was these two provocations that kind of set me on this pathway. He wrote this fantastic book, Listen. And in the book he proposes these two provocations. The first is, can one make a listening? And if you can, the second part: if you can, can you transmit that listening as unique as it is?
And what I love about that pair of questions is, one, it recognizes that when we talk about listening, we're not talking about this holistic absolute. We're talking about our listening, the thing that you are listening to right now. So for someone listening to the podcast, hopefully they're being lulled by our dulcet tones. But maybe in the next room there's someone watching television or listening to music on YouTube or whatever the case might be, and they are thinking, that's a great track. And for a few seconds, they're lost from this conversation. That is their listening pathway in that moment. It's not absolute. They're going to lose focus on us, and this conversation drifts away and something else grabs people.
If people are listening now, and if they just take a second to kind of encounter what's around them, as long as they're not listening on noise-canceling AirPods, there will be this amazing series of events right now that you have been actively blocking out. I know for sure I'm actively blocking out the cicadas here because it's summer and we just have cicadas all of the time. They're going all the time. But I often catch myself thinking, wow, I haven't listened to them in like three hours. And it's such an interesting moment to think, wow, my brain has been just absolutely mind-bogglingly effective at filtering out the world.
And I think we are much better at filtering out than we are at listening. Because listening, it's like weightlifting. You can't start with a hundred kilos. You have to start with ten or five or two, and then you build up your capacity as a listener. It's not a right. It's a gift, and it's something that is earned over time.
And for me, the thing that—you know, coming back to this idea of surprise and field recordings—is I wanted to consider how you manage that idea of surprise. What are the things that you want to be surprised by? There's the great example of people going out with this border Zoom recorder or whatever the case might be, and they go out to record a bird in a tree. And they're standing there and they put their arm up towards the tree, and the bird's right there. And they're pointing the microphone at the bird, and they're listening to the bird, and it's like, wow, this is going to be such an amazing recording. I can't wait to go home and listen to it. They go home, nervously fumble the SD card into a slot, and they put it on and they play it back. And all they can hear is this intense traffic noise and this very distant bird. And they're like, oh, I was right next to the highway, but I wasn't listening to that. I was listening to the bird. But the microphone doesn't care about that. The microphone is this beautiful, to some degree democratic object that is just going to take it all in. It's like, I'm just going to grab whatever.
So there's this inbuilt tension instantly between the psycho—the psychological interior listening, if you like, the kinds of occupations and preoccupations and interests that you maintain as a listener—and then this kind of, if you like, the technological audition of the microphone as a sort of prosthetic ear and this device that, you know, Szendy talks about, that allows the transmission of the listener's listening to take place.
So for me, the whole study was around trying to reconcile these two, if you like, spheres of audition. They were both two horizons of audition: the interior psychological and the exterior technological. And this relational listening theory was about kind of bringing those two horizons into conjunction. And the further you could bring them into relation with each other, the more successful the opportunity for the listener's listening to take place was. That's essentially the PhD in a sentence. It felt a lot longer at the time. (laughter)
Lawrence: I mean, you've got to have a business card sell for the elevator. So there it is. (laughter)
Lawrence English: But a lot of what you articulate there, to me, is encapsulated in the medium of recorded music. That is what recorded music, or recorded audio, is doing. It's bringing those—it's attempting to almost dictate or control those two experiences. And it plays with time and artifice in a very—it's a very unique medium in that regard, even different from film.
Lawrence English: Yeah, I know, I agree. And it's interesting. I like to think of it as a kind of world-building exercise. My favorite records are worlds. And in fact, my favorite songs are also worlds. They're worlds that operate in a slightly different way. I mean, they're sonic, but they're also psychological.
Lawrence: Mm.
Lawrence English: I think that's really a very powerful thing that songwriters have. Someone like me, I'm not a songwriter. That is something very special that they have, and I respect that absolutely.
Lawrence: Sure.
Lawrence English: But I think for me, what I like to think about with sound and with composition is that you are trying to build this place that people can be inside of. And I think a lot of my albums are kind of continuous pieces. Trinity is not one of those records for a whole bunch of reasons. But my solo recordings largely are about this flow through time, because I agree—time is like the fundament of music.
What I hope is that when people come into that place, they can settle in it for that period of time. And when they leave that place, the ultimate goal for me is that they think about it again and that they are happy to return to it, and that it has more meaning for them than the actual lived time in that place. And I can say without reservation, I have many records in my life that are like that. I'm grateful for the excessive qualities that experience has brought me, that it's more than the time of the music. And I can return to a version of that place in my mind's ear that is still really valuable, even when I'm not listening to the work.
And I think for me as a maker, increasingly what I try and think about is the relationships between elements. And that might be really tangible things like we're talking about in terms of the kind of technical spatial structure of a piece of music. Or it's about those meeting points. And this is something I'm dealing with right now: the meeting points between two pieces of music that have been created kind of independent of one another, but there's a point they can meet, and that suddenly becomes this other strangely kind of collaborative situation between the pieces of music. And you have to manage that relationship or at least recognize it, try and find a way to make it its own space. The kind of in-betweenness, the ma, is absolutely as important, if not maybe more important, at holding that idea of a kind of suspension of disbelief in a record.
I think that's where the kind of interplay between something like film and music is really strong. The moment that you recognize the film or the moment that you recognize the shift in a piece of music, and if you are shifted outside of the experience of being in that thing, then that's a really massive—for me, red flag—unless we're talking about fourth wall in Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker films. It's totally fine. (laughter)
Lawrence: I knew I was going to get a Simpsons reference. I did not expect an Airplane! reference.
Lawrence English: Well, hey, you've got to—there's great stuff out there. And I can't tell you how excited I am that Mel Brooks has managed to make Spaceballs 2. May it be as—may it be the search for more money as he needs it to be.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Lawrence English: Yeah. I think there is a real—and that is obviously a Spaceballs reference for anyone out there that's thinking I'm ragging on Mel Brooks. I don't love that guy—I'm so grateful he's in this world still. But there's an interesting thing to be kind of recognized there about the way that we maneuver through those things and how we hold that sense of both space and place, and that we recognize the tensions that might exist there.
Lawrence: It's interesting, though. You specifically called out Trinity as not being like your other work in terms of a continuous piece of music. But I also am really taken with that world-building element in the way it manifests, in terms of there's all these different collaborators that come in, yet it's a very cohesive-sounding record. The collaborators don't break the world down, or to say it differently, it's not discordant. And I get that there's you and Stephen who sort of ground the work in a sonic universe, but even on tracks where there's maybe more beats versus more ethereal piano work, it's still very cohesive. And that doesn't strike me as a small feat when you have different personalities, different backgrounds, yet being able to maintain it as a work.
I mean, that's something that I think is honestly completely down to the strength and the vision of those makers.
Lawrence: Come on.
Lawrence English: I mean, we are better for them. Stephen and I are better for those people, without a doubt. I can say this without reservation: Chris Abrahams—we're talking about the kind of piano work—every single time I've just been working with Chris on his new trio and also on his new solo, which will come next year, every single time I engage with Chris, I'm just stunned by how naturally he finds the thing, whatever that thing is. It's not atmosphere. It's not mood. It's so many things all at once. He finds the thing. Actually, it's like the thing—it's constantly morphing and changing and becoming other things, but it's really like it's this morphic quality. He finds that, the core of what that is.
And I think each of the collaborators on that record did the same thing. They made an offering that was, in some cases, really unexpected. But what it did was it set up another kind of almost like a subarchitecture. Like there was already maybe a city, but they said, we're going to put these buildings in place. So when you look at the skyline, you can sense us, but it's still that place. And I think everyone did that.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Lawrence English: And I think the most radical ones in terms of the change, like the temporal change—someone like Brendan still found this way to make it not be drums. I mean, they are drums and he's drumming, but they're not—it has a sense of its own flow and temporal pull that is really somehow attached to the work. That, I mean, it comes back to this idea of, one, being willing to be surprised, but two, then kind of recognizing what that surprise reveals in yourself. We already have these expectations around where things might be, and I love it when I'm shocked or challenged by someone's offering, like that it doesn't meet the place that I thought it would land, which is always less than what they suggest. They are raising the bar. My bar is apparently very low, and every time I engage with them, I have this beautiful moment where it's like, wow, okay, you're thinking about this in a whole other way. And maybe it's just about—it's maybe it's not about height; it's about width. They see the horizon of opportunity as something more than I do, or they're not even looking at the same horizon, and we're just stacking those things together.
It's honestly, that's the real pleasure in that exchange, is just this thing where you suddenly recognize you've been looking at an object or an idea in one way, and someone else is just tilting your head to the side, and it's like, wow, I never saw the red part under there because I've been looking at the blue thing on top, or whatever the case might be. And that's, yeah, that's I think what keeps me coming back for collaborative work.
Lawrence: Did you have to learn that? Because there's a surrendering of ownership or a surrendering of vision there that I would imagine—I mean, certainly we've all read stories of other artists and bands and collaborators who cannot do that. Is that in your nature, or did you say, to get the most out of these relationships, I need to approach this a certain way?
Lawrence English: Look, everyone has an ego, and I'm sure I do too, but I'm pretty comfortable with where I fit in the world. I don't need to be—I don't need to be anything, actually. I'm not sure whether that is a net gain or net loss for collaboration. But I think what I really enjoy is listening, and I mean that in terms of the practice of listening as a studio craft, but I also mean it in terms of the exchange that's offered between the interpersonal side of something like collaboration. And I think, in some respects, friendship is a kind of collaboration in a very simple way.
If you're looking and thinking about it as an extractive process, I think you get a very singular take on it. It's that one perspective. It's probably just completely selfish. But I would be really bored if that was the case. What I want is to keep being surprised and keep being reminded that there are things that I've not never heard about but never even thought to—that that could be something I could hear about. I love it when someone surprises me, and you get that musically, but you also get it in the conversations that happen around a record.
Yesterday someone sent me a fantastic Times article about the Nazis who collected the bells, the church bells, which was a big thing. I'm very interested—I have another life as a, I guess you'd say, a fine artist, like a gallery-based artist. And a couple of years ago I found this bell, this amazing bell maker here, Anton Hassel. And it's just been collected by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and it's about to be shown again. I'm very interested in the history of bells. And there's this fantastic author, Xenia Benivolski, from Canada, and she wrote this amazing history, basically, of the graveyard of bells in Europe that were basically melted down for munitions. It's an amazing story—one hundred percent, people should check it out.
I was able to share her piece with some other people that just shared this New York Times piece with me, and it was this great kind of moment of exchange, but also the Times piece had a couple of little details that I didn't know about. So it was kind of expanding that, you know, pre-existing interest. That's what it's about. And it's the same vibration. It's about these little things sometimes that either allow you to kind of push out the edge of where you're going, or in some cases, these radical incursions where suddenly you've got to completely rethink about the way that you've thought about something, or the way that you thought that you knew something.
I mean, this idea of knowledge is so porous and pliable—going back to our nostalgia conversation—sometimes for the worst. But the thing is that there are certain—we have to be forgiving of ourselves and our own limitations, and accept that sometimes there's going to be this stuff that's in excess of us right now. But we have to lean into that excessiveness. We have to be available to it. And in my case, I'm excited by it. I want to be hungry. I don't want to be satiated. And I still am. I hope, anyway, I still am hungry. And I'm still willing to respect experts, actually. And I think that's part of the implication of something like collaboration, that that person is an expert in their craft. It might not be a technical thing. It might be that they have a certain kind of voice or way of approaching their composition. They are the master of that, and I can learn something from that. That's how I feel about it, and I'm grateful each time I do learn something from them.
Lawrence: I know our time together is coming to a close, but there's so much I didn't get to with you. But one of the things that's standing out for me: you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, in an offhanded way, that you didn't think of yourself as a musician. If anything, it's more of—composer would be more of the identity. I can't help but think what stands out for me—it stood out for me in my preparation for our time together and just hearing all the different ways you're speaking about your work and worldview—it's the role of curator seems very, very strong, whether it's through Room40 or the different festivals and series, and even as a collaborator, and choosing collaborators. There's this curatorial bent to how you move through the world. You're setting up these opportunities for dialogue, whether it's between works or between people. I wonder—am I full of it, or does that resonate? (laughter) And I'm curious, even something, to tie it back even into Trinity: were you curating that? And were those people in dialogue with each other, even though they were separate?
Lawrence English: It's an interesting question. I think if you meet me in a certain place, you would think of me as one thing or another. In Australia, I am largely a curator, honestly.
Lawrence: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence English: And that's something that carries forward from the earliest days of Room40. Because it's the twenty-fifth anniversary of Room40 this year, so it's been a twenty-five-year undertaking, which—
Lawrence: Beautiful.
Lawrence English: I mean, it's sobering, but also, I can say without reservation, I'm the most excited about it as a project as I ever have been.
Lawrence: What a body of work. My goodness.
Lawrence English: It is. I mean, it's six or seven hundred editions deep now. The relationships that have been maintained—someone like Chris Abrahams, you were talking about before—I released one of Chris's, I think his third-ever solo record, in 2003 or 2004. And I can still think about the night that he played it to me and being frightened by it because it was so unusual and strange to throw on. It remains one of those records that just scares me in the best way possible. I don't know how he's getting those sounds out of a Positive organ, but he is.
But to think about how it is that we build opportunities for things to happen—I mean, that's been something that was central to Room40 because we were so far away, and I was so far away. What I wanted to do was reach out to people and make connections and in some respects to recognize that all across the world there are these little clusters of people like me that are interested in the same questions and facing maybe sometimes the same problems. And there's a collegiality there that can take place. So I think from the very earliest time, that idea of connection and community and bringing together people was something I was really interested in. And I think to this day that's maintained. And something like Trinity is a good example of that.
People like Marina and Aki, obviously they know each other from their time in New York. Are they in the same circle? No. Do they share some of the same interests and have some of the same questions? Yes, particularly in their practice as artists, as well as musicians. So I think that certainly plays a part of it.
But if you were to meet me here, most of my life is as a curator. I'm organizing concerts, I'm organizing festivals, I'm curating exhibitions. I mean, actually, ironically, I'm curating an exhibition from Marina that opens in February. That's been something that's been on the cards for three or four years, and we're finally able to realize it. So I'm kind of actively involved in those things. And they are very time-consuming, and I think that's been interesting as well with Room40.
From a curatorial perspective, it has become increasingly time-consuming because we're releasing, I think this year it will be close to sixty editions.
Lawrence: Wow.
Lawrence English: Which is, yeah—that is also very sobering. But partly that is a recognition of something I think should be central in every label's mind. I got to—it was about 2018, 2019, during my high times of midlife crises, where I decided to stop performing. And I was obviously having crises everywhere. And I looked at the schedule, which is basically—I think we, at that point, were doing something between twelve and sixteen releases a year, and I realized that because we'd been, at that point, active for eighteen years, we had all these relationships and people that were making work regularly. I recognized that if I kept that number of releases each year, and even if the artist made an album every eighteen months or two years, there would never be space in the release schedule for someone new to come in until someone died. I thought, that is nightmare fuel in a way. One, I don't want to be wishing death on anyone, and two, the label needs to be alive. It can't become this fixed thing.
So I loved COVID. I'm just going to say that right now. Don't love the toll that it took on humanity, but I loved the fact that it gave us this little window through which we could see, oh, hey, there's a whole other way we can live, just for a few months, and then forget about it. Which I think is one of the great missed opportunities of COVID. At least some people can still work from home. But it was such a rupture that it really allowed us to recognize there are other ways.
And I saw that as this opportunity to—I'm in one place for who knows how long. I'm just going to completely invest myself in the kind of process of reinvigorating the label. I did that, and we released something like, I think it was 140 editions in two years. And there were many, many new voices that came through in that time. And now there's this kind of reinvigoration and excitement and new conversations that are happening between some of the older ones and the younger ones. And there are these new possibilities for things to happen that I love. And I think that is a very active curatorial decision that I don't want things to become fixed, that I don't want things to become—it's not that the work becomes dead, but the environment in which the work can exist becomes very fixed because of the way that very practical things like the possibility for releases to fit into a timeline. Now that is completely out the window. I don't know if it's maintainable. And I think, actually, in some respects, the biggest question I have right now is around listenership of an audience. Because at that number of releases each year, during COVID—yes, I can tell you categorically, I listened to more music in the few years of COVID than I did for the previous decade. And it was brilliant. I came out the other side feeling alive.
Lawrence: But can that be maintained now? I don't think so. So it's, again, this question is, do we need to find different audiences? How can we find spaces for this work that can connect to people? Because that's the whole point of something like a label, is to connect music to people and think about how it is we make the opportunities for that connection to take place. So I think that there is a really practical, curatorial sensibility that has to come into that in a very pragmatic way.
But also, I will say, I think curation, it's a little bit like mastering or production. It's a kind of dark art, and there's this ambiguity and sometimes a kind of porousness, or maybe it's even like a positive lack of clarity around exactly what that role is. And I have many friends that are curators here, and I know the difference that they make to the work. And I think the fact that it's not discrete and that it's not clear and it's not something that you can necessarily tangibly hold—I think that's what makes something like curation actually really powerful, is that it isn't one thing. It can be many things, and it's down to the person kind of engaging in that process to interrogate it and tease out what it can be rather than what we think it might be.
Lawrence: It implies a tremendous faith in your own taste or your own discernment.
Lawrence English: Maybe. I mean, look, I think that's another really interesting thing. I'm not sure if I agree entirely. I think there is a sort of taste-making element to some parts of it. But what I want is—I can tell you the labels that I respect the most put out twenty records in a year. Five of them I might love, five of them I might enjoy, ten of them I might not like, but I respect it. And what I respect is that I sense something there that is about that interrogation or questioning or some sort of fiber of something more than the work itself. And you don't have to—I don't have to love the work to respect it and to be inspired by it.
I think that's this idea. And it's a difficult thing because music, for better or for worse, has been so heavily showered by the idea of the entertainment industry.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Lawrence English: That we sometimes conflate the idea of entertainment and art. And that's not to say art can't be entertaining, but I think its primary role doesn't have to be that. It's about engagement.
Lawrence: Yeah, I get that.
Lawrence English: And I think music as an art form has been heavily weighed upon by the industry. And some of that inherent promise of engagement has been kind of overshadowed by the goal of entertainment. I think that's a shame because I think temporal-based arts are so powerful, and music is so powerful. It speaks to us in a way that is really kind of unbelievable when you think about what's actually happening when you listen to something. I think the opportunity for the profundity of the nature of being, being captured in an experience, it's right there. And yet what we did with it was, let's turn it into an industry where we can just churn people through this machine that generates income for a number of corporations. I mean, that's really so sad.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Lawrence English: And I think we're trying to work against that. And look, there have been moments where I think ideas have bubbled up where it's really pushing back against that. And I think right now we're in one of those moments again because of this introduction of the capacity of AI to generate material. I think that's a really interesting moment for us because it really does test us for the first time in a long time. What is our connection to this work? What's the value in the making that we as listeners have with that work? And is it enough that it's just a bunch of sounds that have been generated? Is that enough for some people? Probably, yes. Are those people critical deep listeners? Probably not. Is that important? I'm not sure, but it's a question. And I think for everyone else that is very engaged in that process, we have to begin to recognize and think about what it is that is our relationship with those sounds, but also with the contextual framework around the sounds, the societal place from which the music comes from. And we don't really do that because we haven't had to do that.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Lawrence English: So there's this kind of moment of, I think, a huge opportunity right in front of us to have a really serious conversation about what we think about art now and what role does art play for us as a society going forward, because we haven't had to do that in the twentieth century for a whole bunch of reasons. And now we're faced with this very particular—some would call it a crisis. I think you could also think about it as an opportunity to dive very deeply into the questions of what it is that we—where it is we draw value from this particular work. And that sometimes is really important to recognize. It's actually the making that is really important for people. And I think there's a role for community arts and community music-making. But at the same time, for us as consumers of that work, what does it bring to us? What does it allow us to feel and to be? And how does it push us forward? How does it make us more than what we are right now?
And I think it does do that. I can say my life is testament to that, that the engagements that I've had with people's work, with people's ideas, have completely transformed the way that I think about not just my own practice, but how I think about the opportunities that need to be made for other people to do the things that they do so well.
Lawrence: That's what I get out of this. I mean, these conversations for me are just—it's an endless source of material for my own practice and enrichment. Yeah, it's very selfish. My whole reason for doing this is quite selfish. (laughter)
Lawrence English: Only—but I mean, that is—I would say we're all in that boat together. But I think what it is selfish for us, but at the same time, what it recognizes is that the situations for people to kind of encounter conversation—something like conversation is a really good example. Not all of it is going to be for you. There might be two or three moments in there that spark something else, that incidental little note that sends you down the pathway of, oh, what's this Gunkanjima place about, a giant coal mine? And then from that, you somehow end up at Nagasaki. And before that, you're looking at the kind of mid-twentieth-century geopolitical history and the use of atomic weapons. And that opens up a whole other thing. It's just this cascade of possibility. And I don't think I have ADHD, but, look, maybe I do. I just think of it as being interested. That's how I think about it. And I think generally a lot of these things, it's about just being up for what the world throws at you and being excited by what the world throws at you.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Lawrence English: And I honestly, I am excited. And I'll say, in all sincerity, conversations like this are exactly what I hope for in these things, where we're not really speaking to, like you said, I think the idea was to talk about Trinity. We don't need to talk about that, because it exists as its own thing. It's all of the other stuff that sits around it. That's where the kind of golden opportunities for thinking and understanding each other come from, and I'm very grateful for the chance to have the conversation.
