Lawrence English - For Varying Degrees of Winter [Baskaru - 2007]For his new album Australian sound artist and ambient electronic sound painter Lawrence English has looked to more wintry and freezing tones for inspiration. Building six often barely there tracks of slowly moving ice bergs of melodic wonder and freezing tuneful soundworlds. It brings to mind perfectly the solitude and wonder of wintertime and endless white desert of vast ice & snow . Thoughout English manageds to evoke this feeling of icy isolation and wonder, using chilled and slowly cooling ambient/electronic snow drifts of sound cracking and gentle ice plate shifting of glichty electronics. He creates intimate ground-level cooling haze, making one feeing like there watching the world around them freezing into sparkling beauty. But he also manageds to give the feeling of sailing slowly across 100 miles of iced deserts and snow heavy forest giving a wonderful feeling of panoramic and rich sound pictures. Some tracks murmur of darker places hidden away in lightless ice caves or floating in the cold arctic darkness under several feet of dark ice where theres barely any light. The paces seems to become more active towards the end of the album feeling like spring or maybe uneatreal heat is suddenly speeding of the ice movement and it’s melting and cracking rapidly.
All in all a very rewarding and cooling collection of sound worlds, that shows English has the ability to create both beautiful, ominous and vast sound pictures, that sparkly and glint with noise element and melodic richness.    Roger Batty
| 
