De-Contouring History Through Sound With Lawrence English

Transmission 420: Interview with Lawrence English

Lawrence English released The Rest Is My Ghost on 7 August 2026 via Room40, an album built around the concept of “Acid Nostalgia,” a term he uses to describe the flattening of the past into empty visual signals. The idea took shape after English came across a series of AI-generated clips set in the 1990s, footage that carried the aesthetic markers of the decade without any of its lived texture; an echo of Simulacra, as he calls it, an advertisement for a product that never existed.

Title: The Rest Is My Ghost
Artist: Lawrence English
Release Date: 2026-08-07
Genres: Ambient, Electronica, Experimental Music
Description: Lawrence English discusses Acid Nostalgia, Adam Curtis, and architectural ruins behind his Room40 LP The Rest Is My Ghost.

The record draws on architecture and folklore as much as critical theory, pulling in references from Gunkanjima to Kenzo Tange’s Metabolist vision for Tokyo Bay, alongside a set of writers and thinkers who have shaped English’s thinking over the years. The title itself nods to Yūrei, the restless spirit of Japanese folklore. A conversation with Adam Curtis about the opacity of the future gave the project its first push.

To explore earlier chapters of his sonic evolution, check out our previous interview with Lawrence English on Even the Horizon Knows Its Bound, where he discussed Japanese Metabolist architecture and his early listening practices.

You coined the term “Acid Nostalgia” for this record. What was the moment that idea first crystallized? 

This all started a couple of years ago, when I got fed a series of these AI videos about the 1990s through one of my social feeds. I was really struck by the way these pieces of content played with the ideas of memory and the ways in which they presented themselves as a type of, for want of a better word, legitimate viewing. The clips had aesthetic and temporal cues that propertied to capture a certain essence of that time, but in the same moment they were entirely hollow. They were, to reference Baudrillard, an echo of Simulacra, sought to sell a version of a time that whilst containing some references and visuality of that period, presented a completely empty version of the lived experience of then. 

It struck me that, unlike, say, found videos from the time or other materials that we often come across, these were like a commercial for a product that never existed. Their purpose of course was to connect through to the narrative that is being pressed by most right wing movements in the west right now – this idea of ‘great’ and ‘great again’, and I understood that for some they could be sucked into that empty vision. It’s easier to forget than to remember, and I believe more than ever the idea of cultural amnesia is a pressing concern.

To me, the videos and others like them portray a kind of projection, a photocopy of thing that collects the texture of a page, but not its words. I started to think about this idea of how the past has been weaponised through being de-contoured, smoothed out and flattened, and through this process that the complexities of those times, the ambiguities, the uncertainties and ultimately the failings of them, were being eroded to a point of generating a visual logic akin to being on lithium. The dynamics, the pressures, confusions, the joys and also the boredom of the past are all equally rich sources for us to take imagination from and to have those reduced through projections such as this gave birth to the ideas that eventually became Acid Nostalgia.

You describe nostalgia shifting from a tool of remembering to one of forgetting. When did you first notice that shift happening? 

I don’t think this is a new idea or phenomenon. 

We have always liked to forget, and to be fair, forgetting is an important function of dealing with some of the challenges and traumas of the everyday. I think what we are witnessing now though, thanks to changes in the tools we have to hand technologically and also culturally, is a kind of directed shaping of ideas such as nostalgia. 

There’s always been an element of extraction around nostalgia, an economy that mines it, but I’d argue the extraction and the related cultural ‘climate change’ we are experiencing right now has never been so intense and acute. 

How do you distinguish genuine, personal nostalgia from the “weaponised” version you critique on this record? 

I like this idea of personal nostalgia you mention. I think it recognises the subjective pleasure that we can all have when recalling lived experience of a time through that nostalgic lens. It forms an important bridge sometimes to places that are no longer accessible for whatever reasons. Nostalgia and memory can travel together in ways that are really productive and pleasurable, but at their best I think they embrace a kind of recondition of the chaotic energies of our day to day lives. They embrace the messiness of experience, often in very internal ways only known to us, rather than rubbing them out.  

I recently watched Jeremy Deller’s beautiful artwork ‘Everybody In The Place’, for me this absolutely speaks to this distinction you are asking about. The work essentially traces a series of histories of the UK, to which I have an interest, but no real tangible connection, and through doing so it highlighting the complexities of that time – social, politically, interpersonally, economically – but it also celebrates a very particular sense of nostalgia built around the arrival of acid house and the cultures that spilled forth from that. For me, this film holds a version of Nostalgia which expands rather than flattens, and I think that is perhaps one of the ways we can think about how nostalgia can function not just on a personal level, but also perhaps something even broader. We don’t have to accept this de-contouring that is happening right now, we reject that projection.

The album is called “The Rest Is My Ghost.” What does that title mean to you, and how does it relate to Acid Nostalgia? 

That’s a good question. I stumbled on it truth be told, so I’m not sure if there’s a straight forward answer to this question. In some very simple way, the title plays with the idea of ghost, and draws breath from more specific readings of the idea of ghosts like Yūrei (the kanji for it roughly translates as faint spirit, which I like), a specific type of Japanese ghost from folklore who is restless and sometimes remain without rest due to the circumstances of their life. 

I find a resonance with this idea of restlessness. 

My work, and I think parts of my life’s interest, carry a similar weight. For me the title recognises that I have travelled a path, and at this point I need to accept the terrain I am in. 

It’s an invitation to celebrate what has been and deepen what will come.

What drew you to architecture and vanishing infrastructure as ways of thinking through this record? 

The past few years I have been on a deep dive around architecture and civic infrastructure as a way of understanding how we choose to form the places in which we live. I got very interested in the more extreme places of dense habitation. Gunkanjima as the most densely populated place on the globe in the late 1950s and Kowloon’s Walled City and Hong Kong’s monster mansions such as the Parkler Estate in Quarry Bay as two other examples. I visited both Gunkanjima and the Mansions in Quarry Bay during the making of these recordings and tried to pull in some very material impressions of those places into the pieces. 

I also got very interested in more radical proposals for how we might live into this century we’re now in. Somehow, so much of what we were promised in the 20C has not materialised, and the things that have seem quite frankly the lowest order of what might be possible. David Graeber has an excellent section of an essay about this in his book The Utopia Of Rules, but I digress. 

Metabolist architecture was something I spent a lot of time exploring, as those ideas were amongst the most radical rethinking of architecture and living spaces in the 20th century. Kenzo Tange’s masterplan for Tokyo Bay, which was presented as a means to address the rapid population growth in the city was a point of wildly visionary thinking. It didn’t happen of course, but it did spark a lot of thought. That theme, of what might be and the importance of failure, is something that has also guided this record, and my life more generally. 

We learn so much by trying and failing. Failure is a central part of the dynamism of ideas.

Of the writers you cite, Mark Fisher, Franco Berardi, J.G. Ballard, Kate Crawford, Katsuhiro Otomo, Alexei Yurchak, which most directly shaped a specific track? 

Honestly they all did it their way. I think each of them threads very directly into parts of my life. 

Katsuhiro Otomo completely cracked my head open when I was 13. Fisher and Berardi have both guided and shaped so many of my investigations over the past decade and a bit. Lauren Berlant sits in the same boat there too, a huge influence. 

I am fortunate to have known Kate for a few decades now and she very kindly fields my stupid questions and bubbling obsessions. Most recently she has patiently talked with me about cerebral organoids and their place in the ecosystem of AI. 

I am kinda like Werner Herzog when he says ‘read, reAD, READ!’. I was just thinking about that provocation this morning and I think there’s something about the written word and its chain reaction in the imagination that is so volatile and powerful. 

Was there a particular artwork or piece of writing that first ruptured your own sense of the present? 

There’s likely quite a few books, films and artworks that have ruptured and re-ruptured my sense of the present. For instance, in recent years, conversations with Rana Adhikari about gravitational waves and black holes totally got me thinking about the problematic nature of ‘the present’. But if we’re talking about a first rupture, well, during Covid I re-read Grey, a manga by Yoshihisa Tagami which I first started reading in 1988. I think that manga, alongside Appleseed by Masamune Shirow and Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo which I started to read that same year, absolutely blew my little child’s mind open. I am so grateful for those arriving in my life when they did. 

You credit a conversation with Adam Curtis as the spark for this edition. What did he say that stayed with you? 

Adam is another person I have been very grateful to have encountered in the past decade. I think he is a brilliant film maker and also an incredibly evocative storyteller. What he has done with his practice is truly inspirational, and more than that very provocative. A couple of years ago we were talking about a project and during the conversation we got onto the idea of how opaque the future was. That it seems even more unclear or unpredictable than it did even half a decade ago. 

Adam suggested that one path to understand it might be to look back and retrace how it is we arrived where we are. I’d already been thinking about nostalgia at this point so his comments really helped solidify how this relationship of the past, the present and the future might be brought into a different orbit where the influence of one time on another is more porous and unsteady than we might have been led to believe.

Do you see Acid Nostalgia as an idea you’ll keep exploring, or is this record its complete statement? 

I like to think of this term as a spark. I love when things spill over and end up elsewhere. 

I hope that it can have a life of its own and prompt other folks to dive further into the possibilities of it as a term of reference for what we are collectively facing in these coming years, and perhaps decades.

Are you already working on what’s next?

Always. Restlessness is real and an imagination untended is a dereliction of duty. That said, I don’t have the idea of a new solo recording in my mind’s ear just yet. It’s perhaps just time to let the mind roam wider. 

Photos courtesy of Lawrence English

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