Sound installation; sound art; experimental, minimal, ambience: all of these are ways to describe the works of Lawrence English, Australian audio/visual artist.

There is a high learning curve for enjoying this type of music. I'm not talking about being amicable towards it, but really getting in there and loving it to pieces -- many can't stomach it and never will be able to. We're brought up to recognize and appreciate conventional forms and structures, and those who so readily discard them are rebellious and surely up to no good. The first thing that's necessary to do before listening to For Varying Degrees of Winter is to throw away what you thought you knew about music. There's a general understanding that calling any kind of music 'background music' is a highly offensive and demoralizing attack against the artist in question. But, what happens when the intent is to make background music from the onset? Then all the rules begin to change. 

The catch-22 of experimental music has always been that if you don't like it then you're not appreciating the subtleties, but, if you appreciate the subtleties and like it, then the artist isn't trying hard enough and has created an album which is too accessible and thus invaluable (ergo not experimental). Circular logic for the indie elitist -- you gotta love it. Contemporary soundsculptors seek to eradicate this illogical trap. Sound exists all around us as a continual byproduct of the processes of life, and there is no way to stop it. How many times have you been listening to your favorite albums and someone comes into the room and begins talking so loudly they disrupt the flow of the album? Or how about trying to listen to an album on a noisy bus or train? How do cookie-cutter albums stand up to those pressures?

Then, it may come as no surprise, given the setup, that the current goal is to resolve this issue: to create music that is universally complementary and fits any occasion. Many of these sound installations originally appear accompanying other forms of art (visual, art exhibits, etcetera), but they need not be limited to these circumstances. Every location where these pieces are installed is an entirely new and rewarding performance where this music sinks into the background and augments the normal flow of sounds. It's utterly ambitious, but many of these pioneering artists have become so proficient at their skill that they're churning out upwards of five or more CDs a year. That would be an insane expectation of studio artists, but these guys barely break a sweat and are constantly raising the bar and keeping the quality level high enough to keep critics at bay.   

Lawrence English's new disc strikes me as particularly adept at moving in and out of the scenery. The passive sounds dissipate into the air and control the general audible space which is then filled in with other noises. I'd recommend not listening to this in a quiet setting, as it only minimizes its potential effect. Take it out like a brand new car, discover it discovering the nuances of your neighborhood, house, local traffic, and more. It might even be more appropriate to treat it as if it were a child, slowly growing with each listen while you become more and more attached to it with each passing second. It almost doesn't even matter what English puts down on record, if he does it right, it's all up to the listener anyway.

-Jordan Volz