LAWRENCE ENGLISH – THE REST IS MY GHOST
You can of course listen to this album without taking notice of the context in which it is written, and imagine your own story behind it. One thing that is immediately clear from the first minutes, is that it is a dark and foreboding album. It is also beautifully immersive – the kind of sound you can fully lose yourself in. Throughout the entire 50 minutes (40 if you leave out the two recurring ‘(alone)’ – tracks) it feels as if there is a distant storm raging outside.
But the background of this album may not be wat you would expect.
In his extensive liner notes, Lawrence English explains the theme behind this album. It is a socio-politically charged reflection on what he calls ‘acid nostalgia’ – the kind of nostalgia that can be exploited for political and cultural purposes, aiming to simplify and to forget details from that past.
“Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times.
Acid Nostalgia describes the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flatten rendering of the preceding times. It is, in part, a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail.”
The titles of the different tracks refer to Lawrence‘s sources of inspiration: Japan’s Metabolist movement, Hong Kong’s ‘one line sky’, Los Angeles’ vanished Sodium Vapour lights, and text from various authors. So if you want to know more about the theory behind this album you’ll probably have to do some serious investigation.
Personally, I generally find it difficult to link such a detailed theoretical background to abstract – and, above all, instrumental – music like this. What associations would I have with this music without having read the accompanying explanation?
What is clear anyway, is that the music radiates impending doom. Only if you listen very closely you’ll hear fragments of hope you’ll need to cling on to for a better future.
Lawrence English describes The Rest Is My Ghost as ‘a record that accepts the fragility of failure as a source of ultimate potential, and a position from which the deepest freedom of imagination might be sought and summoned forth to conjure even the most unimaginable, (but) possible futures.’
There’s an impressive list of artists contributing to this album. I’ll name only a few here: Chris Abrahams, Madeleine Cocolas, Mats Gustafsson, Peter Knight, Vanessa Tomlinson, Norman Westberg. Stephan Mathieu’s brilliant mastering work should not go unmentioned here either.
Interestingly, their individual contributions completely merge into the overall soundscape. This, in itself, feels like relating to the theme of ‘acid nostalgia’ – where some details may have faded from memory.
The Rest Is My Ghost is available in various editions (some of which are already sold out on pre-release)
