back to
Room40
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Material Interstices

by HEXA

supported by
Danica Swanson
Danica Swanson thumbnail
Danica Swanson Do you yearn - as I do - for deep-earth seismic rumbles, rough-hewn howling echoes, and densely packed scraping slabs of darker-than-vantablack drone ambient? If so, Material Interstices is pure bliss. Uneasy listening writ large! Prepare for a harrowing slow-mo odyssey unearthing ever-deeper layers of the shadow self. Each track blends seamlessly into the next. Calibrate your subwoofer properly, kill the lights, and let this delicious release sink into your bone marrow. Favorite track: The Exquisite Crushing Of Atlas.
icyhot
icyhot thumbnail
icyhot I can't really explain how important this record is to me in a short comment. Find what Lawrence English had to say about it in an interview with Tone Glow if you haven't. It's encouraging how music is continually being made about the strange phenomena of how where you live and where you've grown up changes you, how there seems to be some sort of understanding that exists beyond yourself, and generally being alive. I'll keep this very close to me.
more...
/
  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Matte laminate monochrome printed sleeve, printed inner sleeve plus 32 page artist book containing text and collages from Jamie Stewart and Lawrence English

    Includes unlimited streaming of Material Interstices via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 7 days
    2 remaining
    Purchasable with gift card

      $32 USD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $9 USD  or more

     

  • Limited Edition Black LP
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Matte laminate monochrome printed sleeve, printed inner sleeve, black vinyl

    Includes unlimited streaming of Material Interstices via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • Limited Edition Smoke LP
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Matte laminate monochrome printed sleeve, printed inner sleeve, smoke vinyl

    Includes unlimited streaming of Material Interstices via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • Limited Edition Smoke LP + Artist Book + Original Artwork (edition of 20)
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Matte laminate monochrome printed sleeve, printed inner sleeve, 32 page artist book containing text and collages from Jamie Stewart and Lawrence English, signed original polaroid used during the research and development of the artist book.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Material Interstices via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • Limited Edition Smoke LP + Artist Book
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Matte laminate monochrome printed sleeve, printed inner sleeve plus 32 page artist book containing text and collages from Jamie Stewart and Lawrence English

    Includes unlimited streaming of Material Interstices via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
Aperture 01:08
2.
3.
Elastic Body 04:58
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

about

A note from Lawrence English
When I was child I had two recurring dreams. Both these dreams were tethered to the house I lived in. It was a rambling home which was high set but underneath it was largely unfinished. The underside of the house was a labyrinth of small rooms, concrete pits and a collection of building materials, piping and leftover furniture sat alongside beds of dirt that had a consistency of lunar dust.

The first recurring dream was of a burning bird, falling from the sky past the kitchen window in the early hours of the morning. The bird I’m pretty sure was some devolved version of a tabernacle candle, that shape of the twisted eternal flame often symbolised with twitching wings. This dream has never returned to me as an adult, though I can vividly recount it.

The second dream has recently emerged, albeit a distant hazy reference to the tangible intensity that I experienced when I was younger. This dream was one buried deep within the labyrinthian, unfinished features that existed under my house. The dream usually started with me playing on the lunar dirt and gradually a sound would emerge from a large concrete pit that was in the centre of the space. The sound would get louder and eventually I would have to go and inspect it. It called me in, there’s no other way to describe it. As I looked into the pit, there was always some kind of hatch, often resembling a pressure door, the type you might see in a Submarine film, and the sound would emanate from underneath that hatch. It was also a throbbing, hammering type of sound, deeply diminished and buried, like hearing bass music from a car parked up the block.

Inevitably, I would twist open the hatch and inside it was a mechanical world that today brings to mind the interior psyche of Tetsuo The Iron Man. It was dark, almost entirely duotone, shaded in heavy grey and black, and wet with a thick, humid, oil like moisture. As I climbed into the hatch and down the ladder (there was always a ladder too) the pressure of the sound increased and it was as if my whole body was being consumed by this monolithic subterranean machine. I never got to understand what the machine did, or if in fact it was a machine at all, the system was never revealed, but what I was made to feel was that there was something beyond my usual understanding that forged away night and day and was infinitely more powerful and commanding than I ever could comprehend.

I was surprised that, over the past year, this dream has returned to me. Perhaps it’s a result of the general quietening of the world and that innate way our ears can open up to even the most subtle acoustic shifts when we are sleeping. Remote sounds, usually hidden in the din of the urban nightscape, were filtering into my dreams and triggering some kind of speculative consciousness. This post-hypnogogic state ushered in a return to that imagined place from my childhood dreams, but simultaneously I was never allowed full access to that place, rather it felt more reserved. I could not enter it in the same way, even if the hatch was there, I was not the same mind and could not unlock it in the same way.

Last year, I mentioned this dream to Jamie, and he too reported unsteady sleep patterns. This got us to thinking about how the dynamics of the world have recently shifted towards the emergence of the natural world. Equally though it has shifted in favour of its shadow; those ongoing industrial, mechanical and other acoustic by-products of human (and unhuman) labour reach out from the hushed ambient noise floor. What is usually soaked up in the everyday (sub)urbanscape has been exhumed and in these particular moments it haunts us from a distance, an exterior force that unlocks interior uncertainties. This music is transposed of this experience and is written for those moments were consciousness is arguably speculative.

credits

released October 15, 2021

Written and produced by Lawrence English and Jamie Stewart
Mixed at Negative Space 2020-2021

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Lawrence English Brisbane, Australia

Lawrence English. Philosopher of listening. Room40 Honcho. Generally questioning living, dying and everything else in-between.

shows

contact / help

Contact Lawrence English

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Material Interstices, you may also like: