Australian sound artist Lawrence English has a new album. Not content with offering up a new works from some of the most forward thinking artists from Australia and abroad on an almost weekly basis via his Room40 label, in the last couple of months he’s released an incredibly bleak duo with legendary noise artist Merzbow (you can read our review here) as well as some incredible field recordings of the wind in Patgonaia and Antarctica (you can read our review here). This new work though, Approach, is continuation of the maximal all encompassing ambience and sonic grandeur of Cruel Optimism.
It’s a work steeped in nostalgia of memory that muses how experiences and encounters shape us in unexpected ways. He refers to it as a ‘distorted mirror catching the diminished glow of the fires that forged me,’ which is a pretty evocative vision. It’s also about manga. This is what he has to say about it:
“The record draws its root from Yoshihisa Tagami’s seminal manga Grey. In many respects this album is a soundtrack to that manga. What makes Grey unique, in the west at least, is that it was amongst one of the first Manga to be translated and distributed outside of Japan (yes, even before the touchstone that is Akira). It was one of the first droplets that has since become a torrent pouring outward from Japan. It was also the first Manga I bought for myself, when I was 13, and read as a serial.”
Approach will be released via Room40 on the 23rd of September 2022. You can preorder here.
