adapted from the press release by Ben Hogwood. Photo (c) F. English
Lawrence English announces a new album The Rest Is My Ghost, which is, to some extent, the conclusion of a trilogy including Wilderness of Mirrors (2014) and Cruel Optimism (2016). The album arrives on Room40 on 7th August and is preceded by the single Sodium Vapour Halo, which you can watch below:
The Rest Is My Ghost is an expression of iteration told through a kind of sedimentary layering and then erosion, a methodology which Lawrence describes as “almost geological”.
“Over the months and years, the pieces would go through massive moments of expansion and compression.” Lawrence comments. “Sometimes they’d crack wide open and something else would erupt through. I’m not always in control, and that’s what keeps me seeking in these sound worlds.”
He continues, “The players on this record are absolutely critical. In some moments, their performances were a catalyst for how a piece might evolve. In other moments, their contributions opened more subtle qualities and suggested new ways the pieces might breath. I am in awe of how people like Chris Abrahams, Madeleine Cocolas or Norman Westberg can add so much to this record through their given instruments.”
Taking in the record as a whole, the music evolves like a storm cloud – at times, it’s heavy like a downpour; sometimes lightning strikes, and sometimes there is a beam of sunlight when the storm passes. The album provides an environment in which to be consumed, one which invites us to find our own path or narrative through it.
A note from Lawrence English:
Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times. It’s this projection that sees it playing a mounting role in a social pathology associated with reducing the imagined possibilities of future.
The Rest Is My Ghost is a record that interrogates the manifestations of this reductive futuring and celebrates those that have tried (and failed), and those who continue to push back against decayed and revisionist positions. It’s a record that considers the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures.
In recent times, I’ve proposed a term for this weaponised use of nostalgia, something I have called Acid Nostalgia. I offer it as a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flatten rendering of the preceding times. It is, in part, a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail. Acid Nostalgia describes an increasingly common political projection of nostalgia that exists without any subjective connection to the memory surrounding and contained within it. Like acid poured onto a surface, this use of nostalgia seeks to erodes and smooth out the complexity and texture of lived connection and longing, which has until recently guided contemplations of nostalgia.
Acid Nostalgia instead erases the texture of histories and de-contours the past, and in doing so dematerialises the horizon of possibility, which by its very nature marks the beginning point for any (and all) imaginable futures. Acid Nostalgia is a dreamless screen, where uncertainty, restlessness and aspiration are subjected to corrosion, breaking down and neutralising the wellspring of futures which are birthed from within the ambiguously charged, complex and at times chaotic atmospheres of the present.
The Rest Is My Ghost is not however some universal reading of these things and happenings. Rather it draws its breath from a very personal pathway carved through my own fraught experiences of nostalgia and framed through a disparate collage of chance encounters, situations, places and provocations. It takes oblique notes from civic and architectural references such as Japan’s Metabolist movement, Hong Kong’s ‘one line sky’ and Los Angeles’s vanished Sodium Vapour lights. It interpolates texts – factual and fictional – by authors such as Franco Berardi, Kate Crawford, JG Ballard, Katsuhiro Otomo, Mark Fisher and Alexei Yurchak who have each so wonderfully sought to rupture the familiarity of now, and push us towards other ways of imaging ourselves, our surroundings and our very ways of being in this world.
I also owe a debt of thanks to Adam Curtis in helping launch what has become this edition. It was his provocation, in a conversation we shared about an overwhelming and profound sense of uncertainty around being able to predict the immediate future and how to respond to that, which sparked the earliest inklings of this edition.
The Rest Is My Ghost is ultimately a record about the promise of constructions and connections to come, material, social and political. It’s a record that accepts the fragility of failure as a source of ultimate potential, and a position from which the deepest freedom of imagination might be sought and summoned forth to conjure even the most unimaginable, (but) possible futures.
Published post no.2,880 – Thursday 7 May 2026
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source arcana.fm ’
