Earlier this month, composer, artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English and interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser Lea Bertucci announced the release of their debut collaborative album, Chthonic. Following the bewildering first single, ‘Geology of Fire’, the pair have let loose a second track from the album called ‘Amorphic Foothills’. Give it a listen now and grab the album when it’s out on August 11th through American Dreams.
Photo: PWR
Composer, artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English and interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser Lea Bertucci are both prolific and gifted experimentalists. The pair met at a festival in Rio de Janeiro in 2019 and began to collaborate remotely, with the onset of the pandemic in 2020. A debut collaborative album titled Chthonic is now on the way. English has shared his thoughts about their collaboration:
“Lea and I met in Rio de Janeiro, we had both been invited to perform a special set of field recordings and site-specific sound on a small island in the middle of one of Rio’s larger public parks. I was very struck by Lea’s approaches to sound, specifically to her ways of contrasting particular qualities in sound she had collected across the city during her residency. Our billing together there seemed like a natural fit and I am positive some of the earliest ideas for a possible recording started there. Throughout the course of our long-distance exchange, I found myself always digging deeper into the sound world we were creating. It was a sense of excavation, seeking things that just sat underneath the first impression of the sounds. Between that and our conversations around sound pressure and density, I think this record took on a form of its own very quickly.”
Chthonic will see the light of day on August 11th through American Dreams and we can already get a bewildering taster of it with the first single ‘Geology of Fire’. Take a listen below.
Composer, artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English is gearing up to release a new album in the new year. Entitled Cruel Optimism, the record follows on from his 2014 Wilderness Of Mirrors and it will see the light of day on February 17th. Taking its name and origins from a book by American theorist Lauren Berlant also called Cruel Optimism, Lawrence’s upcoming album “meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility”, describes the press release. Lawrence outlined the book’s influence:
“In Cruel Optimism, I found a number of critical readings around the issues that have fuelled so much of the music I have been making recently…particularly her writing around trauma I found deeply affecting. It was a jumping point from which a plague of unsettling impressions of suffering, intolerance and ignorance could be unpacked and utilised as fuel over and above pointless frustration”
He elaborates further on the album’s themes:
“As I have worked through Cruel Optimism, what seemed an unimaginable future just a few years prior, began to present as actual. Over the course of creating the record, we collectively bore witness to a new wave of humanitarian and refugee crisis (captured so succinctly in the photograph of Alan Kurdi’s tiny body motionless on the shore), the black lives matter movement, the widespread use of sonic weapons on civilians, increased drone strikes in Waziristan, Syria and elsewhere, and record low numbers of voting around Brexit and the US election cycle, suggesting a wider sense of disillusionment and powerlessness. Acutely for me and other Australians, we’ve faced dire intolerance concerning race and continued inequalities related to gender and sexuality. The storm has broken and feels utterly visceral. Cruel Optimism is a meditation on these challenges and an encouragement to press forward towards more profound futures.”
To bring the record to life, Lawrence enlisted the help of several artists, including Mats Gustafsson, Norman Westberg and Thor Harris from the Swans, Tony Buck and Chris Abrahams from The Necks and the Australian Voices ensemble.
February seems like a long way away but we can already hear a first cut from the album, the otherworldly and ominously beautiful ‘Object Of Projection’.
The marvellous singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Benoît Pioulard has been on a roll of late. This year alone he released his magnificent fifth album, Sonnet, a couple of accompanying pieces, Stanza and Stanza II, and even more recently the glorious Noyaux EP. So we are lucky he found time to wrap up the year by putting together our December mixtape. And it looks like Christmas came early as a previously unreleased track by Benoît Pioulard himself made its way in the mix. Titled 'Kenopsia', it has a tremendous immersive beauty that takes us to a soothing, warm and gentle place of ambient dreaminess. Press play and drift away.