The Australian artist specialises in maximal minimalism, crafting soundscapes in which granular details have room to resonate.
Long famous for the geographic diversity and technical facility of his field recordings, English finds a way here to transcend the subgenre, creating music that doesn’t capture reality so much as conjure it, an auditory blueprint.
If you listened to The Rest Is My Ghost without having any background information, not even who made the album, you probably wouldn’t perceive it as a collage of field recordings.
Each track is slow and stately, carrying us forward on waves of abstraction. There are no vocals, no conventional instruments, or even melody to speak of. Yet the effect is still keenly musical, as if we were hearing an echo-drenched dub plate played back at a quarter of its normal speed.
Although we float on the surface, a sense of profound depths below keeps us from fully relaxing. The effect is similar to the one Angelo Badalamenti achieves in his soundtrack to David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive or Wolfgang Voigt on his stunning 2017 GAS album Narkopop.
When I’m writing about a record, I listen to it in a variety of ways. Sometimes I sit in the dark, concentrating on the sounds with as few distractions as possible. I also make sure to hear it absent-mindedly, treating it as a soundtrack for my daily routine.
The contrast between these modes of consumption is the starting point for my analysis. But The Rest Is My Ghost gave me pause.
When I was devoting my full attention to the album, it eluded my grasp. Although I could tell how good it was, I found it hard to stay locked in.
Surprisingly, the opposite happened when I passively absorbed it at a low volume through my inexpensive “sports-style” headphones.
From a logical standpoint, I know that The Rest Is My Ghost shouldn’t have sounded more intense when it was being played at a low decibel level and competing with ambient noises. That was my perception, though.
Indeed, the album hit me hardest when it wasn’t even playing.
For over a decade now, my daughter has been running at the nearby middle school’s track. Because we live in the desert and she worries the punishing sun will damage her skin, she prefers to run late at night. And I go with her, sitting on a bench while she does her laps, making sure she stays safe.
Last night, I decided to listen to The Rest Is My Ghost one more time before I finished my draft. I was taking time exposures of clouds in the night sky, trying to ward off intrusive thoughts about how badly things are going geopolitically, when I heard something new in the mix.
At least, I thought I heard something new: first the sound of a coiled rattlesnake shaking its tail angrily—not a sound to take lightly where I live—and then a faint chiming, as if someone were tapping a metal pipe over and over with a teaspoon. How could I have missed these details?
It wasn’t until the hooting of an owl and my daughter’s fast-moving footsteps entered this soundscape that I realised what had happened. My phone battery had died. I wasn’t hearing The Rest Is My Ghost anymore, but noises coming from my physical environment.
That rattlesnake sound was the automated sprinkler system turning on, and the pipe sound was coming from the spray of water hitting the aluminium risers behind me.
I had heard these sounds many times before on other trips to the track with my daughter. But I had clearly learned to tune them out. Now The Rest Is My Ghost had primed my ears to once again give them their proper due.
This probably wasn’t the response Lawrence English had in mind when he made the album. Nevertheless, I have a feeling he would approve.
In the long, thoughtful liner notes he wrote for The Rest Is My Ghost, he draws attention to the flattening of our experience. He set out to combat what he describes as “acid nostalgia”, which “erases the texture of histories and decontours the past, and in doing so dematerialises the horizon of possibility, which by its very nature marks the beginning point for any (and all) imaginable futures”.
Following in the footsteps of Mark Fisher, English focuses on how a hollowing out of the past makes it impossible to imagine a future different from the present. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch, though, to perceive this critique in spatial as well as temporal terms, alerting us to the numbing effect of relentless overstimulation, the surfeit of sensory input that leads us to disregard most of what we see and hear.
Part of the reason English can make this argument is that he has lived long enough to witness the impact of personal technology on our world.
He belongs to Generation X, the first one to reach maturity in the digital age but forever haunted by a feeling of being born too late.
Not surprisingly, the tracks on The Rest Is My Ghost call to mind the dark speculative fiction of English’s childhood, such as Ridley Scott’s enormously influential film Blade Runner and the novels of William Gibson.
The future they imagined was defined more by continuity than rupture, extrapolating from technological and social changes already coming into focus.
Instead of conjecturing radically different creatures, with radically different problems, these narratives concentrated on depressingly plausible outcomes.
Blade Runner, set in a 2019 both more and less advanced than the actual one that preceded the pandemic, probes the distinction between natural and artificial intelligence dominating technology headlines today. Human beings created androids to serve them, but find them increasingly difficult to control.
One of the film’s most striking qualities is the tension between sweeping overhead shots of futuristic Los Angeles and gritty street life visible only from the ground. Vangelis’s iconic score bridges the gap between them, finding menace in outwardly soothing synthesiser chords.
The Rest Is My Ghost does something similar. But whereas Blade Runner invoked the hard-boiled Los Angeles of the 1940s, English transports us back to the era when Blade Runner itself was made, when an optimism fueled by the rise of consumer electronic devices crashed headlong into the atavistic nihilism of punk aesthetics.
While the album can certainly be enjoyed by someone ignorant of those cultural reference points, truly appreciating its ominous grandeur demands a listener willing to travel back in time to save the future.
Lawrence English has made many fine records over the past quarter century. The Rest Is My Ghost may just be his best.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
