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ENGLISH, LAWRENCE - Wilderness of Mirrors

Format: LP Label & Cat.Number: Room40 RM460 Release Year: 2014 Note: surprisingly rough & distorted droning new album by the Australian composer and sound artist (& person behind ROOM40), ambient noise filled with harmonic elements, between TIM HECKER and DANIEL MENCHE maybe... Price (incl. 19% VAT): €23.00 Warning: Currently we do not have this album in stock! More Info "This item comes bundled with a download of the exclusive live EP Parting Waves. Wilderness of Mirrors is the new album from Lawrence English. It is two years in the making and the first album created since the release of his 2011 ode to J.A Baker’s novel, The Peregrine. It is English’s most tectonic auditory offering to date, an unrelenting passage of colliding waves of harmony and dynamic live instrumentation. The phrase, wilderness of mirrors, draws its root from T.S Eliot’s elegant poem Gerontion. During the cold war, the phrase became associated with campaigns of miscommunication carried out by opposing state intelligence agencies. Within the context of the record, the phrase acted as a metaphor for a process of iteration that sat at the compositional core of the LP. Buried in each final piece, like an unheard whisper, is a singularity that was slowly reflected back upon itself in a flood of compositional feedback. Erasure through auditory burial. Wilderness Of Mirrors also reflects English’s interests in extreme dynamics and densities, something evidenced in his live performances of the past half decade. The album’s overriding aesthetic of harmonic distortion reveals his ongoing explorations into the potentials of dense sonics. “During the course of this record,” English explains, “I was fortunate enough to experience live performances by artists I deeply respect for their use of volume as an affecting quality, specifically Earth, Swans and My Bloody Valentine. I had the chance to experience each of these groups at various stages in the making this record and each of them reinforced my interest in emulating that inner ear and bodily sensation that extreme densities of vibration in air brings about.” The album is moreover a reflection on the current exploitation of the ideals of the wilderness of mirrors, retuned and refocused from the politics of the state, to the politics of the modern multiplex. The amorphous and entangled nature of the modern world is one where thoughtless information prevails in an environment starved of applied wisdom. Wilderness Of Mirrors is a stab at those living spectres (human and otherwise) that haunt our seemingly frail commitments to being humane. “We face constant and unsettled change,” English notes, “It's not merely an issue of the changes taking place around us, but the speed at which these changes are occurring. We bare witness to the retraction of a great many social conditions and contracts that have previously assisted us in being more humane than the generations that precede us. We are seeing this ideal of betterment eroded here in Australia and abroad too. This record is me yelling into what seems to be an ever-growing black abyss. I wonder if my voice will reflect off something?” Wilderness Of Mirrors is reflection upon reflection, a pure white out of absolute aurality." [label info] room40.org/site/ "Abstract or instrumental music is often described as cinematic, but it’s a term that can be problematic. For the sake of argument, a definition of the word as applied to music might incorporate a tendency to follow narrative arcs, expansiveness, expressive mood, and physicality. In that regard, Lawrence English’s latest album Wilderness of Mirrors fits the descriptor well. Tracks are painterly, with drones rendered in thick impastos and light washes that are constantly shifting, swelling and retreating. ‘Another Body’ crushes you in rolling waves of hot noise before weightless, trebly drones emerge from the clamour in a terrific manipulation of sonic space that’s alternately claustrophobic and expansive (and, occasionally, both at once). ‘The Liquid Casket’, the album’s soaring opener, sustains a harmonic drone throughout, English dotting it with metallic flecks and grinds and adding layers that mesh without merging into an indistinct blur as they fill the space. In an interview with John Twells, English explains that when he was producing the album “there’d be a layer, and another layer and I’d just erase that first layer. So what might have been a melodic progression… becomes a kind of harmonic echo.” On Wilderness of Mirrors’ quieter passages, the effect can be like a musical palimpsest. Take the clanking chimes on ‘Guillotines and Kingmakers’, submerged somewhere within a fiercely billowing drone, making for one of the album’s most intimate moments, before the dynamics rise sharply and the drones tower and solidify, growing dense and forbidding. In the text accompanying the release of Wilderness of Mirrors, English says that he was inspired by live performances by bands such as Earth, Swans and My Bloody Valentine. “I deeply respect [them] for their use of volume as an affecting quality,” he says, “and each of them reinforced my interest in emulating that inner ear and bodily sensation that extreme densities of vibration in air brings about.” Of course, the physical impact associated with those groups’ performances, and by extension this album, isn’t simply down to continuous high volume, but to huge dynamic range. The opening of ‘Forgiving Noir’ is frantic and severe, for instance, but its quieter passages wield power every bit as great, albeit more subtle, than the louder, more punishing sections. The track goes through so many phases, from the devastating low end of the introduction to feathery drones and abrasive harmonics, that it’s almost surprising they constitute one piece. English cites the “the retraction of a great many social conditions and contracts that have previously assisted us in being more humane” as central to Wilderness of Mirrors and although barring track titles the album is short on direct references, especially as English avoids using field recordings in more than a “spectral capacity”, its moods speak to this theme. They fluctuate from deathly paranoia (the middle section of ‘Forgiving Noir’) to breathless, unresolved tension (‘Graceless Hunter’) and latent ferocity (‘Wilderness of Mirrors’, the piece that most clearly betrays the influence of Ben Frost). As such, it has as much in common with both the extreme musicians English cites as an influence and artists such as Frost and Tim Hecker, who lace ambience with violence, as with the more conventional drone of, say, Slow Walkers, his collaborative album with Grouper. Drone albums are by their nature immersive, but it’s rare to come across one so tempestuous, evocative and compelling from start to finish as Wilderness of Mirrors." [Factmag] "A drop dead gorgeous album from Australian drone kingpin, Lawrence English. Wilderness Of Mirrors follows along the same woolly path that he carved out on Kiri No Oto and The Peregrine. Those albums bristled with a fracturous noise that was less of the raw-nerve probing and more a blast of polar wind smashing against your skin and racing past your ears whilst peering at the smeary, gray horizon line between a sullen ocean and a leaden sky. An existential gaze of self-reflection and melancholy. Wilderness Of Mirrors offers a similar avalanche of shoegazing droneworks with English layering noise upon noise upon noise, with everything blurring into a portentous density of somber, doom-laden downtunings broken apart by sparkling radiant bursts of tape-decayed synthtone. English further slows the melodic phrasing buried within the snow-packed masses of distortion, finding his work in very good company with the likes of Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz. The title is a reference to a T.S. Eliot poem "Gerontion" - yet another fine literary reference from the well-red English, who had adopted the quote's original sentiment along with its latter day meaning as a geopolitical meme in speaking about the prickly business of Soviets and American duplicity throughout the cold war. English posits the title in relation to his own aghast reactions to the contemporary unfolding of political crisis after political crisis; but far from being a mere political statement, English allows the album to unfurl as an allegory full of abstraction and fragmentation enshrouded in a glistening fog of emotive drone. Very nice." [Aquarius Records]