With »The Rest Is My Ghost«, Lawrence English creates a musical space between memory, decay and the future. His immersive live performances turn sound into an immediate experience: they transform our perception of space, time and our own bodies, continually opening up new perspectives on how we hear and experience the world around us.
At the heart of his new album is a form of nostalgia that does not remember the past as a complex, contradictory experience – English calls this form »Acid Nostalgia« – but smooths it over, simplifies it and instrumentalises it for contemporary political and cultural ideas. The past becomes a projection surface. »The Rest Is My Ghost« resists this narrowing of perspective and asks what happens when we understand memory not as a fixed image, but as an open, living and contradictory process.
English combines personal experiences with architectural and urban images from Japan, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. The album is a single hypnotic flow of sound into which new thoughts, worlds and emotions continually emerge. The result is music that moves constantly between the familiar and the new, raising new ideas as it goes: familiar structures dissolve, creating space for new connections, new ways of thinking and unforeseen futures. Live, this becomes an intense, physically immersive musical journey.
English repeatedly draws on his surroundings for his sounds, recording noises and sounds from all regions of the world. The artist offers an insight into his work in a workshop on 11 April at the Elbphilharmonie.
PERFORMERS
Lawrence English live electronics
PROGRAM
»The Rest Is My Ghost«
The concert takes place without an interval.
