Even the Horizon Knows It’s Bound Captures Japanese Metabolist Architecture

Transmission 157: Interview with Lawrence English

Lawrence English is an Australian sound artist, composer, and curator. Through his work with field recordings, experimental music, and sound art installations, he examines how sound affects human perception and memory. His compositions often deal with themes of architecture, place, and listening practices. English founded Room 40 in 2000, an independent record label known for releasing work by experimental and avant-garde musicians.

Title: Even the Horizon Knows Its Bound
Artist: Lawrence English
Release Date: 2025-03-10
Genres: Ambient, Drone, Electronica, Experimental Music
Label: Room 40
Description: Lawrence English discusses Even the Horizon Knows Its Bound, out on Room 40 March 10, 2025.

He has collaborated with musicians like Jamie Stewart, Alessandro Cortini, Jim O’Rourke, Norman Westberg, and Chris Abrahams. His commissioned piece “Even the Horizon Knows It’s Bound” (2023) was created for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, incorporating contributions from multiple artists to reflect the building’s architectural spaces – the album will ship out on or around March 10, 2025. Beyond his own music, English works as a curator organizing festivals and performance series, including programs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This interview is also published in issue no. 01 of our free digital magazine Retrofuturista.

Featured photo by T Pakioufakis

What’s your initial fascination with sound as a medium for expression? Was there a particular experience or moment that planted the seed of your interest?

I often tell this story about my father. When I was a kid, I lived in Brisbane, and Brisbane in the 80s had this very big, derelict port area, like a kind of abandoned port. At the far end, which was basically as far as you could go on the road, we’d often go and just sort of play, my brother and I, on this enormous mineral sand hill. While we were there, we’d also do things like bird watching. I became really fascinated with this one bird called the reed warbler, which is a very small brown bird. It’s always in reeds and Ii likes swampy areas. There was an area next to this big sand hill that was always swampy, so there were always these reed warblers calling from there. You could hear them, they have the most amazing voices. Basically, it sounds like if you stuck a knob in their back, you’d have the best handheld synthesizer you can imagine, just incredible.

I was really interested in them. And I could hear them all the time, but I could never see them. So one time, I was with my father and we were trying to look for them. He gave me a pair of binoculars. And I think, you know, giving binoculars to a seven or eight year old is a kind of cruel twist, because you barely know your own eyes. Binoculars are so powerful, they give you this whole other vision, you can never really find anything. So I was looking for the bird and I couldn’t see it and looked again and again. And after a while, I probably started crying like, why can’t I see this bird? I just want to see it.

My father said to me, look, put the binoculars down and just close your eyes and listen for where the bird is. So I closed my eyes and I listened. And I know it sounds stupid to say, but for the first time, I recognized that I had these things attached to the side of my head, were not just big lumps of flesh. They also served a purpose. They gave you a sense of the world that wasn’t available to your eyes. So I listened for it and I could sort of sense where the bird was. And then I put up the binoculars and I didn’t see it the first time, so there was probably some more tears. Then I listened some more and I put the binoculars up and then of course I saw the bird.

So I realized that there’s this way of knowing the world that isn’t through my eyes. And it was that moment that I think, as incidental as it was, totally made me recognize the role that sound can play in your life for orientation, and for knowing the world in a very particular way that is different to the other senses that we have. And that’s not to say it’s better or worse than any of the other senses, but it gives you a sense of spatiality and dimension that is beyond that of the horizon of vision. The horizon of audition stretches in all directions and is always in this state of flux, but the horizon of vision is generally for us very linear. We sort of look at something and we can look away and look back and it’s there or it’s not there, but it’s still a very point to point sort of expression, whereas sound operates in a sort of sphere all around us and we can orient ourselves accordingly with that appreciation of sound.

In the early days of Room 40, how did you navigate creating projects while pushing your own creative vision?

Well, actually, in the early days, it was easier, maybe. I think it’s more complicated now. Since COVID, and I see COVID as this very dramatic marker things have been different. Strangely, even at the end of 2019, I was having a really serious think about the label because it was the 20th anniversary in 2020. I realized that we were doing somewhere between 16 and 20 releases a year at that stage. And because we’d been going for 20 years, we’d kind of accumulated this group of people that we were releasing their material. But I was receiving a lot of music and I still do. We receive an average of 7 to 15 demos for Room 40 each day.

So I apologize if anyone has sent one and I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet. I’m really behind. But I started to realize that even if all of the artists that we were working with at that time, if they each made a record once every year or every 18 months, there’d never be space for someone else to come in. And strangely, then COVID arrived in March 2020. And it meant that I was going to be home for an extended period of time. So I just started actually being available to the label more fully. In 2020 and 2021, we put out 170 releases. And a lot of them were new artists. It’s crazy thinking about it now.

This year, and last year, we’ve done more than 65, which honestly, this year, feels like too much. Because I think the space and time that we had to listen to has reduced. COVID was this wonderful window where there was so much time available to be where you could really dive deep into music or into film or comics or whatever it is, books, whatever it is that gets you excited. I think coming out the other side of it, I can see that time shrinking. In some ways, I’m very disappointed by it. I think there’s a real value in that luxury of time and we’re poorer for that somehow.

COVID was terrible. It took a good number of my friends, and it affected a lot of my friends really deeply. But what it also did, and I’m trying to think about it in an optimistic way, is that it showed us that there are other ways that we can spend our time. It’s really easy to forget that there are those ways available to us and get tangled up in all the other stuff that comes with everyday life.

This year, we’re going to try and find a different balance for what the label does. In terms of how it fits together with my own practice, it’s always a give and a take. To be honest, my creative practice probably occupies about 10% of my life. Beyond that, there’s the label, of course, but I also dedicate a significant amount of time to curatorial work, both in a gallery setting and for performance work. In fact, over the last three years, that’s taken up a huge portion of my time. For example, we organize a festival and collaborate with the Art Gallery of New South Wales on a program within their Volume series. Last year, I believe we had at least 25 artists, maybe more, come to Australia for tours and performances. 2023 has been similar, with quite a lot of artists participating. So, it’s a constant balancing act between these different aspects of my work.

But I actually derive a lot of pleasure from Room 40 and from supporting other people’s work. I find it a really interesting process, because you’re dealing with artists, dealing with the questions that they have about their work. And I think that, selfishly, also helps me, because I’m thinking about how I approach these things too. And I think there’s a huge value in that as a process and as a kind of interaction in a communal way with your peers.

Were there specific artists’ movements or records that drew you toward creating your immersive soundscapes?

I think definitely there were. In the early days, like when Room 40 started, one of the first people that I reached out to—this is actually before Room 40 started in the kind of late 90s—I had the great opportunity to meet Robin Rimbaud, who is Scanner. He came, I think he was actually maybe the second person I ever organised a concert for in Brisbane in 1998. I think the first could have been David Shea, who I still work with—both David and Robin. I also reached out to DJ Olive and to David Toop.

That late 90s period, the Illbient movement in New York, really inspired me by because of the community aspect of it, this group of people that were interested in similar ideas and problems. In fact, the name Room 40 refers to this code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom. It was active during the First and Second World Wars. And what I found interesting about it as a proposition was that it brought together people from lots of different backgrounds. So crossword puzzlers, bakers, scientists, physicians, whoever else, people that were interested in solving problems trying to crack codes. And even though their backgrounds were totally different and their everyday lives were totally different, they applied themselves to the same problem of this idea of code.

For me, Room 40 was the same thing. I love that the label is really eclectic. It brings together lots of different kinds of backgrounds and practices. You know, at one end, you’ve got something like Merzbow, whose work is completely singular and dense and this entire universe in itself. And at the other end, you’ve got Gabriella Smart, who’s a pianist playing five hours of Alvin Curran’s compositions. It’s a completely wide open spectrum.

And what ties it together, I feel, is the intensity of practice that these artists maintain in the work that they do. It might be aesthetically different, but it’s tied together by this deep sense of interrogation and a kind of deepening of practice over a very long, in some cases, a very long period of time, a lifetime of work. I look at people like Akio Suzuki or David Toop. We’ve been working with Annea Lockwood this last decade. Those are artists that have spent their entire lives developing this thing, and I feel a great deal of inspiration from what they do, that deepening of process. And I hope that Room 40 maintains some of that idea of deepening and has that way about it that means that you can, even if you don’t, even if you’re not aesthetically interested in the work, there is always something there that you can find that engages you or that you can respect.

I mean, that’s what I love about labels. My favourite labels all have quite diverse output, and I don’t always necessarily love everything that they release, but I always respect it. And that, for me, is the kind of marker of a great label, something that you can be not necessarily personally interested in, but you can understand the curatorial process that leads to that thing being part of the catalogue.

You mentioned the idea of sound haunting architecture. How does this concept influence the way you approach creating site-specific compositions?

It’s an interesting one. I think sound generally haunts. What I find fascinating, and I think what is really poetic about sound, is that it is only here in this instant. The conversation we’re having now, as we hear it, those words accumulate in time, even though they’re immaterial. And we’re only really understanding the conversation in time. So it’s like we’re accumulating this understanding in our mind’s ear. It’s not in our ears itself, because the words are spoken, and as the sentence continues, the words before it are already gone, they’re extinct. And I love this idea that you kind of have to exhume meaning and sense from this sort of shallow grave of memory. You’re constantly digging it up to make it make sense.

And for me, the kind of quality of sound is something that haunts. For me, it operates in a couple of different ways. It operates in this idea of around memory. So when you hear a particular sound, it allows that reconnection, and it allows that sense of connection to something that is outside of time, in a way. The experience that you’re calling on to make sense of that sound is outside of the time that you’re in now. I think that’s one of the qualities of sound that I really like.

In terms of its relationship to architecture, it has a very direct relationship. As we move through a space, even though we’re not necessarily conscious of it, we are always drawing on that acoustic information. So the way that our feet hit the ground tells us about the material underneath us. It tells us about the shape of the room that we’re in. As you and I speak now, we probably are in similar-sized rooms, and you can hear the reflection of our voice, even through the microphone, as it’s transmitted between us. We can hear that exchange, which tells us something about the physical dimension of the space that we’re in.

So there’s a tangible, phenomenological way of thinking about sound. I think from a poetic sense as well, sound has this capacity to draw us through the unknowability of certain situations that we find ourselves in, that eeriness. Mark Fisher talked a lot about this idea of the eeriness of sound. I think that’s really powerful. I’ve had some experiences where I have encountered sounds that I can’t necessarily associate with anything, and the power that that has really does haunt the mind. You’re constantly revising and revisiting these things, trying to understand what it was that you encountered.

I’m in Japan at the moment, and what I find really great about the soundscape here is that even something as simple as—I’m living quite close to a shinkansen track, so I can hear the shinkansen traveling at 300 kilometers an hour down along the track—what’s really amazing about it is you can sense the way it enters and exits, and it tells you something about the space as it travels across this neighborhood. It tells you something about how cold it is, how warm it is, what time of the day it is, whether it’s very clear. In the evenings, it’s incredibly clear. It almost feels like you can hear the steel on the track, but during the day, because of the ambient noise, it’s a completely different kind of sound field. I think that idea of the way that sound occupies space, but at the same time is really porous.

Because of that immateriality, it means that there is this way of being consumed by sound, but not necessarily being smothered by it. There’s always more detail to find, something, a change or a dynamic shift that you can follow. I think that, if you’re available to it—I think quite often we’re not. We’re filtering out a lot of the sounds that we come in contact with. Even now, probably people that are reading this are potentially blocking out the sound of the neighbor talking next door, or whatever the case might be, that they’re on a train and they’re focused on this text. If they stop for a second and just listen, I think they’ll discover there’s this whole range of things that suddenly flood into consciousness.

I think when you’re available to that process, and obviously you turn it on and off, it can’t always be consistent. It’s fatiguing to really listen, but when you do, there is such an immense pleasure in recognizing the totality of the sound that’s around you.

How do you see the relationship between memory and sound? Does this connection guide your work?

I think there’s a really strong connection between the two. Like I was saying before, I think that, fundamentally, sound unlocks memory in a way, perhaps similar to smell. There are sometimes things that you encounter, like sounds that you encounter, that produce a certain kind of affective relation. That’s why the eeriness and the kind of ontological quality of sound comes into it, that you’re not quite sure why you feel something, but you do. There’s so much music you put on, and as you’re listening to it, it allows you to feel a certain thing. That can be linguistic, it can be lyrics in a song, but sometimes it’s as simple as listening to… you put on a John Coltrane record, and that first note, that first blast out of his lungs, opens up this emotional landscape or affective landscape that is so powerful and so immediate. But also, why do we feel that? What is it about these kinds of combinations of sounds that make us feel a certain thing?

I think the way that memory operates there’s a certain kind of conditioning, particularly with music that happens, where we start to feel certain ways with certain kinds of harmonic shifts in music. But environmentally, too, I think the kinds of encounters that we have in places, the way that sound can unlock certain sensings of a place is really powerful to me. With field recording particularly, I’ve found quite often that it’s never going to directly replicate. I don’t believe you can document an environment. When we go somewhere and we make a field recording, what we’re doing is presenting, ideally, in its best situation, our listening as the recordist, our listening that we are trying to capture. Our interests and preoccupations in those moments and then be able to share those with other people.

I did a PhD half a decade ago and it was called “The Listener’s Listening.” It was talking about this question of what it means if we’re going to have sound art embrace the idea of field recording. Where’s the creativity? Where’s the art in something like field recording? My argument was that it’s in the listener’s listening and your capacity to transmit your interests and the things that you’re fascinated with in a particular environment, in a particular time, are the things that make field recordings really powerful and also creative. When I listen to someone like Chris Watson or Jana Winderen, I feel their fascination with the places and the situations that they’re in. It’s like they’re sharing their listening with me. I think, for me, that also opens up a connection to memory there. Memory, obviously, can operate independent of each other, but there’s something about that shared memory of things that is really powerful and you build different connections, different memory structures and systems. I think through that idea of sharing and sound is a great way for that to take place.

Can you describe the process of working with Jim O’Rourke or Norman Westberg on Even the Horizon Knows It’s Bound? How did their contribution shape the final piece and did any specific contribution from the collaborators shift the direction or tone of the album?

I have to say I was incredibly fortunate to work with all of the folks on that record. The reason that those musicians were involved was because they’ve all had a kind of connection to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, who commissioned the piece. It was interesting. Basically, the way that it worked is I built these two sort of structures, I guess you could say, and they had like a tonal core and they had some detail and some other materials, but I left them quite open, and everyone received these two sort of 20-minute slabs of sound. I left it really open to people.

I said you can respond however it is that you want. You might want to respond to one piece or the other, to both. You might find a section in the piece that you want to respond to, and everyone did it actually really differently. So, someone like Norman found one section that he really became interested in. He kind of recorded this eight- or ten-minute improvisation against that, and Jim, on the other hand, sent me this very long piece that he performed with the work. What was great about it was you got a sense of how, in some respects, how people were listening to the material.

You could hear that they would find an element in there and then that became the thing that they worked against or worked with. So, when it came to the time of sort of layering together the elements, instantly there was a kind of connection. But if things were to slide or move, and I did move the kind of contributions around, you’d find these other interesting counterpoints that would occur between things.

I guess as well as each artist kind of contributed to it, J.W. Patton, for instance, made these really dense, beautiful, low-energy sections, and combining those together with some of the other elements that existed in the piece already and then the contributions from others, suddenly I’ve got this whole other potential. So, I actually added a lot of other material once all the contributions were in to kind of shape it. My idea was that everyone’s work should be obviously represented, but it should be kind of weighted in a way that everyone is traveling together.

There’s certainly moments where, for instance, Chris Abrahams’s piano playing is very present. And that’s a tonal thing in some respects, because the piano is really—it’s the way that he plays, has such a character. And I love Chris’s playing. I think he’s a phenomenal musician. And what he played on this record, I think particularly, I’m so grateful to him for doing it. He just opened up a whole other way of thinking about the harmonic relationships that were in the piece.

So, it was a really interesting process of just allowing the musical contributions themselves to find the points where they naturally resonated in the piece. And once they were all in, it probably took about a month and a half to find the final shape of the record. And it was also designed in a way that as you move through the building—because it was obviously this commission for the people that were going to visit the building—I’d gone before the building was open to kind of inspect it and see the kinds of spaces and, in some respects, to listen to what the architecture had to say.

And it’s an incredibly beautiful building, an incredibly resonant building in certain spaces. I wanted to find a way that spoke to that sense of scale and the kind of openness that exists in the gallery. And also the kind of intimacy that exists, because I think the thing we tend to forget about architecture is that it’s of a vast scale, but that scale is understood subjectively through us. So, we have very intimate relationships in elevators or in a gallery, for instance, as you approach a wall to look at an artwork, there suddenly becomes this very tight focus. And actually, the image on the cover is this one of these points where these walls would meet in the gallery. And you can see this kind of line, which is just the way that the light was cast, the natural light was cast against one wall and not the other.

So, for me, I was really interested in trying to understand how you create that sense of push and pull that you experience when you walk through a space, like when you walk through the door, it’s this huge atrium. And then as you walk into some of the other galleries, they become much more contained. And I wanted to try and find a way to make the sound world emulate those transitions and be able to kind of create, I guess, in some respects, like the artists become the spaces. And it’s about that dialogue between the spaces, about the dialogue between the artists within the kind of context of the composition.

Are there any new collaborations or concepts you’re currently exploring for your upcoming work?

I am working on—actually, I’ve been in Japan this last month and, strangely enough, working on another project about architecture, sort of. I’ve become really interested in this movement called Metabolism, which was an architectural movement in the late 1960s and 1970s here in Japan that was about understanding cities or structures as a kind of living environment. It was a really radical proposition. And it’s also tied into a kind of vision of Tokyo, particularly Tokyo, that for me, I find really fascinating, this idea about a kind of reclamation project, like they were reclaiming part of Tokyo Bay. And it’s something that’s actually echoed through the last sort of 50 years here in Japan. But also, I think internationally, we’ve started to see more of this approach.

And I’m very interested in thinking about the relationship between ourselves and the cities that we exist in. And I think that probably this is going to be a record at some point in the next year. I’m going to try and come back to Japan. And I made some recordings, this trip, in some of these spaces. I visited one of the reclaimed islands, Yumenoshima, in Tokyo Bay, this trip, which actually is an island that’s completely constructed on waste. So all of the rubbish in Tokyo was sent to this area. And they gradually used it as the foundation for this giant reclaimed island. And in fact, one of the main incineration facilities, the place where they burn rubbish and then use it for this landfill, is still on that island. And the heat from the incinerator is used to fuel two tropical biodomes on the island. They basically have a giant vent that goes under the ground. And there are these two tropical biodomes that are basically calling on the heat of this incinerator. So it’s a really interesting history.

And right now I’m in the early stages of thinking about what that could mean in terms of like, how would you respond to that sonically. This is my question at the moment.

Photo courtesy of Lawrence English

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others