Lawrence English

Lawrence English is media artist, composer and critic based in Brisbane, Australia. It's Up To Us To Live has seen a prolonged birth. It's commencement in 2004 began around the same moments as the final touches were being put to the album Happiness Will Befall (issued originally by Cronica). In some ways these two records pair one another - they form a spiraling coil of echo location and feedback. Whereas 'Happiness...' might be considered a lush and evocatively melodic affair, It's Up To Us To Live is profoundly more dense and compressed, only offering the occasionally moment to surface for air. Much of this LPs sound textures emanate from distant calls of guitar, sharply cracked electronics, alien field recordings and a variety of other less identifiable sources. The cover art by renowned Australian photographer Marian Drew, from her 'Still Lives' series is a telling indication of exactly where this album draws breath. Following time spent in Tasmania and other locations within Australia where human habitation often breeds a bleak graveyard for native inhabitants along many highways (and also via increasingly intrusive housing projects), as well as the concerning demise of the Baiji (amongst so many others), It's Up To Us To Live is a distorted sonic distress beacon. It suggests a possible mapping of the increasingly cluttered sound spaces that find themselves associated with human habitation and expansion.