In only a scant few years but across a gradually widening range of releases and labels, Australian sound artist Lawrence English is one of the electronic music community's secret treasures; a modern renaissance man and hyphenate (artist, composer, writer, label leader), he's not only founded the much-acclaimed Room40 imprint, but has left his mark as a creator of finely-jeweled sonic works realized via both digital and live installation media. His collaborations have borne prestigious fruit as well, most notably with like-minded extrapolators such as Francisco Lopez and John Chantler, two other artists for whom the granular properties of sound and texture are but malleable elements with which to manipulate, re-contextualize, and expurgate from any recognizable categorical moorings.
Though erected atop the similarly lush foundations that buttressed his solo outing for Baskaru, A Colour for Autumn is nevertheless his most immersive, née sumptuous, record yet, a high water mark for both English and Taylor Deupree's enigmatic 12k concern. Working with what feels like a mere handful of sounds and imagistic patterns, English so elongates his sonic minutiae to reveal deep striations within their physical make-ups; the concept of "drones" hardly do these often fragile haikus justice, as simply too many emotional barriers are breached at any given time, too many to simply paint the resulting music as anything like mere academic laptop minimalism. The opening "Droplet" sets the stage for what is to come, English taking us through a variety of supple moods and phrases: these opening seven minutes, with its amassing heavenly "choirs", building like a cleansing summertime rainstorm, is one of the most instantly gratifying and beautiful pieces English has set to disc. The following (and aptly coined) "Watching It Unfold" brings thing back to the stark earth, as forlorn snatches of guitar and softly trilling tones speak abject volumes of melancholy; in marked contrast to its predecessor in temperament, small silences poking out between the hallowed, higher sine waves and subtle distortions become urgent, pregnant pauses.
Later on, "Galaxies of Dust" is practically isolationist, English using almost "typical" kosmische tone clusters in his portrayal of expanding, interstellar voids. The ellipsis that precedes "...And Clouds for Company" captures the essence of this disc in a nutshell, English's strangely affecting pulses, shimmering, elusive, fragmentary, evaporating into their humid environs to become mere phantasms, manage to live on in memory long after A Colour for Autumn comes to a methodical close. At only 37 minutes, you respect English's economy of means but yearn for these seven superb works to ebb on forever.
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