(2020) Lawrence English - Lassitude


Review:
Let’s invert and modify Gertrude Stein’s infamous dictum: a drone is not a drone is not a drone, especially in the hands of . The appellation is often carelessly but conveniently applied, never more so than in Lassitude, comprising two pieces for pipe organ. These are not the triadically driven investigations of “End Game” or “Hard Rain,” though, of course, they share an essential approach to the sustained fundamental. There is a stark subtlety, something delicate etched in brass, in the way these two 20-minute pieces unfold, and “Saccade”’s dedication to Eliane Radigue is certainly reflected in its approach to melody and rhythm. As in Radigue’s stunningly intricate and glacially malleable forms, English grants access to pitch and rhythmic space over dizzyingly slow tracts of evolving time. Even the fundamental swirls through constant flux, a self-sufficiently symbiotic octave, complete with pulse, that journeys from overtone to microtone, engendering polyrhythm from inside as it inches along. Ironically, miniscule moments are granted exquisite infusion, like the pure tritone emerging at 17:00 and slowly receding until reabsorbed a minute and a half later. Chord, tone and melody merge to become meaningless, a kind of topographic counterpoint in which even the fundamental disappears at the end. Again ironically, the magic is in what comes off as a sort of recurrence, a sense in which even that sustain is and is not what it was in the previous five minutes. While this contradiction has imbued English’s music for decades, the organ, its stops under English’s masterful manipulation, allows its light to emanate with particular strength and beauty. The title track walks a similar line between fundamental and overtone, again generating internal rhythms as it ebbs and flows in slowly morphing waves, but, like the snowflake that we know is a snowflake despite an entirely different structure, the turning tides of tone and timbre unfurl in a different space. Here we’re dealing with a fundamental, and it’s dominant; think of that sound that makes “Star Wars” so heroic but as a non-moving sublimated center around which pitch constellations are breezily born and decay under the calm gaze of eons. All this has been an attempt to come to terms with what has always been at the heart of English’s work but which, quite obviously, is difficult to render concrete. It has to do with feeling, or is it closer to what is known as affect? At the heart of it all, there is a sense of vast space and depth. Like Radigue, or AMM and so many others, English creates an effective music of states, an oceanic expanse in which the relationships between drop, river and sea emerge with stunning clarity and on a huge scale. To posit this as his best work would be to sell it or his others short, but it is a defining statement in terms of economy and execution. If peace is not, or not exactly, what this music brings, it opens the introspective space in which it can occur.





Tracklist:
01 - Saccade (for Éliane Radigue)
02 - Lassitude


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, experimental
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits