Lawrence English Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds

Performed by Jim O'Rourke, Dean Hurley, Claire Rousay, Chris Abrahams (The Necks), Amby Downs, Stephen Vitiello, Norman Westberg (Swans), Madeleine Cocolas and many others, Room40 boss Lawrence English's latest album is a longform suite that pontificates on the poetics of space and the phenomenology of architecture.

Written as an "atmospheric tint" for the Naala Badu building at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 'Even the Horizon Knows its Bounds' is an ambitious project, even by English’s standards. Tasked with providing the space with "generosity and acoustic solidarity", English invited his collaborators to provide material based on two extended sound prompts he composed. There are contributions from The Necks' Chris Abrahams, pedal steel guitarist Chuck Johnson, Swans' Norman Westberg, lowercase specialist Claire Rousay, lynch cohort Dean Hurley, Room40's Amby Downs, Aussie ambient producer JW Paton, producer and researcher Madeleine Cocolas, long term collaborator Stephen Vitiello, percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson and, of course, Jim O'Rourke, with everything arranged by English into a blur of weightless tonalities.

The ornate piano phrases, presumably provided by The Necks’ Chris Abrahams, punctuate the dense, harmonic blanket that underpins the 45 minute piece. The players sound beautifully unmoored, gliding toward indeterminate coordinates with padded subs and fragments of instruments appearing for a moment before vanishing into English's sonic aether. English explains that the motivation for the piece was the ephemeral quality of the space itself and the notion that while a building remains a fixed constant, it's always in a state of flux thanks to the various bodies and objects that pass through it, leaving a vapour trail of blurred memories.