On July 21, Lawrence English will release Wilderness Of Mirrors, his first album since 2011’s J.A. Baker-inspired The Peregrine. It finds the Brisbane composer citing seismic volume fans Swans, My Bloody Valentine and Earth as influences for his "most tectonic auditory offering to date", taking its name from a line in another literary source, T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’ and the techniques of Cold War-era disinformation processes it inspired. "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," says the press release (which also tells us, somewhat less bafflingly, that English is both a "lightening strike survivor" and "has photographed ever bed he has slept in on tour since the early 2000s").
The trailer for the album we’ve got above does a good job of giving us a taster of what to expect: what begins as what sounds like a grandly unfurling gong chime, underlaid by ringing piano, cycles over, giving way to a massively satisfying crescendo of noise, that moves from a ripple to a juddering crescendo, all set to footage of a woman in a hellish loop of almost emerging out of a grotty forest dell before being reset to square one.
Says English himself: "We face constant, unsettled change. 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?"
Stay tuned to ROOM40, English’s label through which the record will be released, for further updates and read our interview with him from 2012 here.
