Frank's Corner #3: In Conversation With Lawrence English.
Quick saves, pipe organs, and an ode to "maximal minimalism."
A white, icy matrix gobbles a collection of simple audio mechanics with the swiftness of one quick breath. It is Lawrence English who is responsible for saving the day before the audio recording of its icy crumble goes to die.
English is one of the world’s field recording czars. Intentional, meticulous, and rarely over-synthesized, he champions the raw framework of the setting he seeks to evaluate and is fearless in sharing exactly what the mic hears.
Antarctica is his most recent conquest—an addition to the soundbite samples of mainland lakes, rivers, valleys, and mountains, all captured by the plain, simple nature of a handheld field recorder and the understanding that certain samples will, somehow, bind together in a cohesion that forms a collection or project that just makes sense.
I had the unbelievable opportunity to type back and forth with English, a (truly) personal legend of mine, to discuss the collection of scapes he gathered from the complete down south, his love letter to the pipe organ, and the conception of Room40—the label he created for experimentalists similar to and beyond the realms of his own creation.
I honestly cannot even believe this interview is real and I am so excited to share it with you all.
This was an insane starstruck honor moment for me.
25Frank: First and foremost, happy late birthday! What did you get up to this year on your special day? Are birthdays exciting for you? Bittersweet? Cathartic?
Lawrence English: Honestly, they are just another day for me. I don’t mean that to be a killjoy, but there’s a kind of arbitrariness to the idea of a birthday that I’m not always sold on. I think at certain points in your life they hold a specialness, when you’re a kid perhaps, but beyond their function as a mortality reminder I’m not super focused on them.
That said I got an amazing gift this year. My smallest child has a vivid and esoteric imagination and draws the wildest characters, one of which was turned into a doll by an artist here. It looks absolutely wild, a stunning thing to behold!
What does a day in the life of Lawrence English look like in the 2025 Aussie winter months?
Room40 is a large part of everyday.
Generally I am working on the label and its related actions from before 9am and then I finish close to midnight, I obviously break up the day with other things, but generally I work 7 days a week on it. I do a lot of the label related activities myself, as well as curation of sound performance programs and the like.
I’m in charge of all the distribution organization, production, digital ingestion, promotion, and even the packing of orders, so there is always something to do. It’s a proper DIY approach. I am super grateful to have help from folks like Traianos Pakioufakis who does a lot of our design work, and all of the physical format designs, that’s a huge help.
When there’s a spare moment I am trying to make time for my own practice and projects.
You’ve just announced that a new project, “WhiteOut,” is brewing. Do projects like these, that outline a specific excursion in your life, feel more exciting or anxiety-inducing to release to the public? Does it feel especially vulnerable, or are you able to remove yourself from the recordings and let them speak for themselves?
It’s an interesting question to ponder. I’m always curious about how people might feel when encountering the work, especially because their relation to it is going to be so radically different to mine. I have the benefit, or at least the position, of having to sit inside the material. I can’t ever really imagine it any other way, so my perspective is likely rather different to someone coming to it from the outside.
With that in mind, I really have to say I don’t feel anxious about releasing materials as I feel, in the very least, I have connected to them enough to allow them to come to a point of fruition. I figure if there’s something there, that has held me through the many hours of creation, then hopefully there’s enough present to connect it to a few folks out in the wider world. It’s just a case of having to reach those ears.
As we mature as makers, I think the threshold test for being satisfied gets higher and higher, so hopefully that reflects positively on the work as we move through our lives as makers.
I read your mention of a moment on your trip to Antarctica, where a glacier disintegrated, leaving you scrambling to collect your recording equipment. Are moments like these what make your creative process exciting? Challenging? Frustrating? Worthwhile? Are there other stories or bump-in-the-road moments of note like this that you can share?
I have to say, as far as life experiences go, that was one of the most unexpected ones.
Honestly, Antarctica was full of these moments. I swam in the waters there to rescue equipment after that glacier split off. I also got stuck in a whiteout blizzard one day, which is reflected in the title. I’d left very early one morning to record penguins leaving to fish for the day, after a couple of hours of recording, this snow storm blew in, and I’m from the tropics so it was something I didn’t realize was happening until it was quite close to me. It’d taken me 90 minutes to walk to the breeding colony and it took almost 6 hours to walk back only being able to see about a metre in front of me at all times. Thank the gods I had a GPS with me, without that I may not be talking about the situation now!
I tend to think of the world as this ongoing, chaotic flux and we are part of that flux, consumed by it, but also contributing to it. I think if field recording has taught me anything it’s to be patient and to remove control as one of the guiding desires, moment to moment.
Would you say that your personal “sound” is built exclusively on the surroundings that you put yourself in, or is it something deeper than that? Are there certain things you look for in your recordings that help you decide what makes/doesn’t make it on a project?
Listenership is at the heart of my practice and I think it’s not so much where you are, but how you anchor yourself there that makes the most difference to the work. There is wonder to be found in the familiar and even the mundane, we just have to allow ourselves to be curious and to be available to all the aspects of place. Newness is not always the best situation to find yourself in when it comes to creating work. Interrogation of the ordinary is a golden measure I feel.
Each of your EPs and LPs seems to follow a connective chain, whether it’s field recordings from a specific geographical region or a particular instrument you’re using. Has doing so given you more of an incentive to travel, or does it feel more like a limited vacuum where you have to stick to this routine of keeping albums consistent in one place or sound?
I am really not the kind of maker who can just create work. Music, and creative practice more generally, does not come easily or naturally to me. I am very interested in ideas and I am interested in exploring the poetics of those ideas, and creating a reading of them that opens some other perspective.
Art to me is a wonderful chance to ask questions and invite conversation. I am so very fortunate to have had the chance to learn so much from many peers and friends, and so much of that is a direct result of the work and what these projects open up for discussion.
I read that the call of a reed-warbler in the bushes of your childhood sparked an initial interest in experimental synth noises and more sporadic frequencies. Have there been any recent soundbites that you’ve encountered (naturally occurring or synthetic) that have struck a similar chord or reminded you why you do/love the type of work you create?
Interestingly I have been making a lot of field recordings on cassettes this past few years. It’s not so much a sonic focus, but a medium focus. The cassette recorder will never, and can never, actually capture anything of my listening in a given place and time. Rather it collects its own radical impression of those moments. I have found this disjuncture between what I experience and what is captured quite an enjoyable process. It’s obviously not for all situations, but I find there’s a certain ‘medium-determined’ distance which reveals other qualities in the recordings.
The other great thing about cassettes is the fact they allow such a hands on way of editing and colliding different times and places together. The hard cuts are like a fever dream of compressed, hazy memory.
You have a notoriously long catalogue of collaborative work with other ambient and sound moguls (Grouper, Merzbow, and Xiu Xiu, to name a few of note). Does proposing these collaborations to artists like these come with a preemptive idea or end goal, or do they tend to unfold in the moment during their creation and composition? Is the process the same for your solo work?
I’ve been so fortunate to be able to collaborate with many wonderful and generous artists over the years. I think each of these situations, in terms of how they arrive and what happens in the making of the work, is entirely its own story. Projects like HEXA, with Jamie Stewart were actually made possible by prompts from other curators, in the case of that project from José Da Silva who invited us to work on a project with David Lynch, soundtracking his Factory Photographs. Jamie and I had chatted about potential ways of approaching sound together, but that invitation was the clincher and allowed us a focus that has since become central to the way we work on HEXA.
By contrast a recent work with David Toop was very much something I instigated, and was the result of these curious field recordings I had been making across South East Queensland where I live. The recordings captured a certain quality I thought David would appreciate and I sent them over as a way of starting that idea for a duet recording. I think the beauty of collaboration is how porous it can be. There are no rules, if you don’t want to have them. It’s just a case of being generous with each other and maintaining a deep respect for the work.
Changing gears a bit, I’m dying to hear about your relationship with the pipe organ. “Observation of Breath” is, in my opinion, such an immense ambient triumph among your other organ recordings like “Wilderness of Mirrors.” Talk to me about those sessions, the setting, and your intentions with this music.
Strangely I am sitting here listening to some Philip Glass organ work as I reply to this, so a timely question. I’ve always been fascinated by organs, partly it is the mechanical design, the brilliance of a system to convey sound, but also I am in awe of the scale that a pipe organ has.
It’s an instrument that holds space and spills outward, but at the same time is capable of producing such intimate sounds. My favorite organs are those that have stops which allow large amounts of manipulation. That sense of the instrument breathing is such a powerful and intoxicating thing to explore.
“Observation Of Breath” is very much a love letter to the organ at The Old Museum, which is not too far from where I live. It is such a particular instrument, that record is almost impossible to reproduce on any other organ, and I admire that quality in the instrument. Its peculiarities are its greatest charm.
I think “Observation of Breath” could be classified as either a minimalist or maximalist body of work. What’s your take on this? Does it fall more into one category than the other for you?
I think Charlemagne Palestine nailed it best by referring to it as maximal minimalism. I share his admiration for this term.
For those who don’t know, you established your label “Room40” as a collective for sound and artists of the object to create an atmosphere of complete freedom. How rewarding is it to foster an environment for experimentalists like yourself to create, showcase, and perform according to their specific vision?
Room40 is absolutely a friends and family label. It’s interesting now, celebrating the 25th anniversary this year, to start to think about where it has come from and where it is heading. It’s also amazing to reflect on how artist’s works have developed over that time. The artists are the label, without them there’s just a husk, so for me it’s gratifying to have been able to support folks to make the work they feel strongly about.
Was there a point where running the label came with regrets, challenges, or perhaps a feeling of a burden? If so, was there a transformative moment that turned it into a beacon in your career?
Labels are work, that is for sure. I can say without any hesitation though that Room40 is something that has brought me great satisfaction and moreover has taught me so very much. Even when things are at their most challenging, I can say I have never felt regret over spending my time on Room40 and having the change to work with so many amazing folks.
Is there any rising talent in the world of music and/or visual/sound art that is especially exciting you at the moment? Who are they, and what makes their work so compelling for you?
There’s so much amazing work being made out there right now, it’s almost an impossible task to narrow things down. If I was thinking locally for a second, I’d say the rise of first nations artists here working with new approaches to sound is something I am absolutely excited about. Amby Downs, JW Paton, Hand To Earth, Liam Keenan and the list goes on…these people are making amazing work and opening new dialogues around how sound can feed practice, and more than that how sound factors into ways of knowing the world, and ourselves. It’s such a brilliant moment for this work in Australia just now, we’re finally starting to open our ears to country.
What type of work can we expect in the near future, either from yourself and those you are representing on a sonic and a visual side? Finish it off with a shameless plug of stuff you’ve got in the cards for us!
I just spent a few weeks in Tokyo and was doing a bunch of research on Metabolism, a Japanese architectural movement which is where bio-architecture stems from. I’m thinking a lot of about the idea of megastructure, both in a physical and in a virtual sense and I think these themes are likely the zone of entanglement for my next record. This period of research is always something that is a delight to deep dive into, even if it leads nowhere in terms of how it applies to future works, it fills me up in a way which I truly enjoy.
Pre-save “WhiteOut” on Bandcamp and stream “Observation Of Breath” on Bandcamp and Spotify.