LAWRENCE ENGLISH - ShellType

A drone as dark as a starless night. A sinister wind that slowly builds and envelops the atmosphere. "I won't lie to you, the dive into these sound pieces started with an unremarkable failing of my body", candidly admits Lawrence English, for more than twenty years a beacon in the world of experimental music, thanks to his sprawling discography and, above all, to the work of his own label Room40.

The first drone on his Ep released last summer, the eponymous "ShellType", lasts a mere five minutes: just enough to set the neurons to sonorities bordering on silence, faint ripples of sine waves that come to life somewhere between the forests of the Siberian taiga and the glacial tundra painted by Thomas Köner in his masterpieces "Teimo" and "Permafrost" more than thirty years ago (Barooni, respectively, 1992 and 1993).

The following "Something About The Way You Film Me" barely alters the acoustic structure, though the drone takes on a liquid quality, as if suspended in the middle of an ocean: beneath the surface you can just make out modulated signals on different carriers, barely perceptible. It runs just under nine minutes, but the track could go on forever.

"The signals are not easy to read, something reflected in these pieces which I hope are the first in a series of shorter collected volumes", comments English in the notes accompanying the digital release of his work. Indeed, "ShellType" runs under twenty-five minutes: the length of a mini-album, or a generous Ep (assuming anyone still pays attention to such definitions), which, all things considered, costs less than a pint at the pub.

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07/12/2024