Text by CLOT Magazine
Australian composer Lawrence English is announcing his immersive new album A Mirror Holds The Sky, created entirely from field recordings taken deep in the Amazon rainforest, with the launch of a new video teaser created from images taken during the time spent there.
The album offers a direct conduit to the farthest reaches of the Amazon but does not run as an unadorned field recording. Rather, it’s a distillation from over 50 recordings, deftly assembled into a stunning, singular album that honours this luscious ecosystem’s complexity, majesty and diversity.
English himself shares: in the late months of 2008, I had the great fortune to spend some weeks in the Amazon. The visit, facilitated through Francisco Lopez’s Mamori Artlab residency, remains one of my most deeply affecting experiences. Each time I hear a Screaming Piha, which many would identify thanks instantly to their prevalence in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo, I am transported back into a place that, to this day, regularly features in my daydreams.
This place made such an impression; the Amazon dwarfs us (and if anyone has any doubts about it, watch Burden of Dreams, the making-of/documentary of the aforementioned Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo). In the video, the haunting and evoking sounds of the jungle take a visual dimension with images portraying exuberant flora, stormy skies, and watercourses.
It’s almost as if we can smell the wet soil and feel a shy, warm ray of sun through the thick foliage while shiny drops of water percolating through the leaves after the morning dew. The album will be released on Room40, September 3 2021, and will be accompanied by a book of photographs taken on location.
