Sunday 18 March 2012

Lawrence English - extra quotes


Lawrence English - Brisbane, 2012


My interview with Lawrence English is online at the Quietus I've posted here two sections of unused quotes from the interview. The first has more detail on how Lawrence approached his version of the Peregrine. The second covers his approach to making recordings with Japanese artists, Tenniscoats.

LE on the Peregrine: 

"I never spent any time in East Anglia. So, it was all my impression of the landscape. It’s another stream that I’m developing which is based around the idea of wabi sabi. It’s a Japanese aesthetic philosophy. The whole idea is that you have perfection and imperfection. I’m interested in that idea of saturation and distortion - how you can take a very clean signal and transform it. Then in that process of the transformation, there’s an aesthetic quality that comes that you’re not going to get from the original source. I started working on that thinking, ‘I want to make a record based around this philosophy’, which will probably become one of the next records. 
It’s a perspective thing. For some people that appeal of ‘perfection and imperfection’ will never be of value. They’re looking for something that is pristine, that’s pure. Minimal techno is such a pure art form, there’s no room for artefact or anything that’s not pristine. Someone like Ritchie Hawtin - it’s really pure!
For me, I thought there’s an interesting correlation between that and this idea of having not been to this environment - using someone else’s view of that to envisage what that might be and then translating that into music. So the Peregrine stems out of that idea. It’s an imperfect view as I don’t have anything to call on except for this document, which is someone else’s transcription. It’s like Chinese Whispers, [where] each degree of separation from the actual landscape was a nice move down this wabi sabi thing. It’s slightly imperfect each time and then hopefully you end up with something that is your understanding of that space."


Lawrence English soundcloud



Tenniscoats - the Albert, Brighton, 2009

Lawrence has recorded two albums with Tenniscoats for release on his ROOM40 label. Here he describes his approach to recording and collaborating with them.
“You can give those guys a glass bowl, a bottle and a couple of tin cans and they’ll make this amazing piece. Literally anything they touch can become a musical object. I don’t have that... I can’t just touch something and it becomes instantly melodious! 
So when I work with those guys, it’s more an ‘arranging’ and ‘treatment’ thing. I might play some synthesiser or drums or have an idea that adds to that song. Often I’m taking the ‘core’ of what they’ve done and transforming it, almost like a producer role. With Totemo Aimasho, we improvised a lot of stuff together and I used that as source material. I sent that to them, they built songs out of that and it came back. It was a ‘process’ thing.
My best contributions were more in terms of the actual sonic character of the record and maybe the arrangements of the pieces. It’s more a ‘compositional-thing’, rather than a ‘performative-thing’. Tenniscoats have a very clear vision of what they want out of their work. I think they partly value that it’s a totally different way of considering how things might work. 
The other record we did, the Temporacha record... I think I played some stones and sticks on one piece. The rest of the time was literally setting up situations and positioning them to have particular kinds of qualities. We decided to do these recordings in unusual locations or in places that were outdoors [and] variable, like parks and rivers. We recorded [Ninichime] inside a huge drain pipe across this river. They were so far apart, there was this beautiful echo I could capture. That was winter time, so it was freezing. I waded across this river and stood in the water with the microphones basically recording them in this gigantic drain. It was a process, a conceptual thing that drove the collaboration. We treated it like a field recording, which is obviously something I’m super-interested in."

Hear Ninichime.

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