Australian sound artist Lawrence English has just dropped a haunting new work of textured field recordings, the kinds of amorphous sounds that feel submerged deep within a dream. Perhaps that dream is speculative, still forming, where the possibilities remain open. Entitled ShellType, English’s new work eschews drama and dynamics, working instead with distant swells of hushed indistinguishable tones and textures that offer a feeling of immersion, yet also a strange sense of distance.
This is what he has to say about it:
“So many of these narratives I consumed as a young person, stories of imagined futures laced with the promise of high tech/low life, seemed so very distant, if not unreachable. Yet here we are at this precipice, and we find ourselves perched over a place the detail and shape of which we cannot make out or perhaps, even imagine…My interest here, is in the poetics of this moment. There are other more invested, and far more knowledgeable minds out that who can engage and expand upon the practical and applied structures that comprise this verging revolution. I simply invite you to join me, leaning into these phantom whispers and speculative field recordings from a future “when”, that could be as soon as now. On this ledge, hovering over the blur of unknowns and unknowables, we can hear as deeply as our imaginations might permit us.”
ShellType will be released on the 16th of August 2024 via Politics is Noise/ Room40. You can find it here.
