Futureproofing #9: Lawrence English on 25 years of Room40

The experimental music artist discusses music consumption habits, releasing 200 records in five years and the impact of the pandemic in a very long interview.

Hello friends and readers, and welcome to 2025. For my first post of the year, I’m sharing an interview I conducted late last year with Lawrence English, a giant of the global experimental music scene. An imposing figure both physically and culturally, he’s also extremely pleasant. It felt like we were already great friends the first time I met him, which was at a tiny ambient-oriented music festival in Vancouver many years ago, in one of the most uncomfortable performance rooms I’ve ever been in. He instructed everyone to lay on the floor so they could really feel the vibrations and the physicality of the music, something they wouldn’t be able to sense if they were standing or seated.

This holistic approach encompasses English’s worldview: he wants to experience, see, hear and feel everything he possibly can. It’s why his label, Room40, has released over 500 recordings, with over 200 of those coming in just the past five years alone. (He says he’s going to slow down.) The first thing I think of when I think of Lawrence is how nice he is—and he really is nice—but that friendliness comes from his innate curiosity. If you’ve got a point to make, or art to share, he’ll happily listen to it, tell you what he thinks of it, and probably offer to help you realize your project in whatever format you’re trying to do.

His label Room40 operates with this same open-arms philosophy. Where else can you find books by David Toop, Merzbow and Keiji Haino reissues, works by avant-garde titans like Alvin Curran, and nightmare-world exotica? There’s no logic to Room40 other than what English himself is interested in (though I’m sure he would argue this point), and his interest and attention is generous enough that there’s quite literally something for everyone. Here’s a fun exercise: go on the Room40 Bandcamp page, scroll wildly and then pick something at random. I guarantee it will at least be intriguing, even if it’s not your cup of tea.

In the interview below, conducted over Zoom when he was back home in Australia after a trip to Los Angeles helping put on concerts for William Basinski and Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong, we spoke about the label’s prolific output, how to responsibly consume (and release) art, how experimental artis financed, and many more topics. If you stick around till after the interview, I’ve also selected five of my favorite Room40 releases.

The interview

Edited by Tom Gledhill

You said the back of your house is all record label storage. That looks like a big storage space. Why don't we start with the label?

It's not as much space as you would think because we drop ship a lot of stuff to the distributors directly. I wouldn't have ever thought it possible, but the size of the label, in terms of its catalog of editions, is twice what it was five years ago. That's a bit of a problem because it’s expanded enough to a point where I'm trying to figure out, "how much of a thing do I have here?" You never know how each record is gonna connect to people as much as it has connected to me. It's always a bit of a gamble. But there's also just ultimately a limitation to what I can actually physically manage. And I'm at the bottom of the world here—there are so many logistical considerations that need to be negotiated.

How many releases are you at now on Room40?

I would say more than 500 for the label family. The thing about the label is it's 25 years [old] now—a significant marker that I didn't necessarily know I would get to. Let me pull up my Excel spreadsheet… okay, it's definitely more than 500. 255 in the physical format, 220-something digital-only. Not all of these are out yet. This year alone we're dipping into about 60 releases, which is a lot. Honestly, probably too much. 

There was this affordability of time that Covid-19 gave us that has evaporated. We can't enjoy as much material as before, because we're back out in the world. There was time to sit with and really listen to and be captured by this kind of music.

I'm curious about your music consumption schedule or habits, because I don't understand how you can possibly put out that much music and also have time to discover new music on top of that.

If I'm really honest, it's a time question. Some of these releases are not brand new—Alvin Curran's record, which [came out] at the end of the year, is a conversation that's five years old. Often these things start with a discussion where I'm just a fan of someone's art, that's a good position to be in. Alvin's a good example. I'm a huge fan of what he's managed to do in his life, and I recognize that there are big chunks of his life that don't have enough of a spotlight on them. We had a discussion about his practices from the late '60s into the early '70s, a conversation that lasted almost two years, and then manifested these incredible recordings. He was really nonchalant about them, he took his time getting them to me and then I mastered them and we then did some revisions and then sat with them for 18 months. So, some projects take a little while to wrap.

But it's a big question: how do you actually consume sound? My intake of music is greatly reduced after the pandemic, and I would say my cultural intake as a whole is greatly reduced. I'm much more in a delivery mode than I am in a kind of consumption mode. There are moments where I feel like I really need to absorb more stuff, because that's what keeps me invigorated and interested, and alive, and hopefully intellectually connected to the work.

What do you mean by delivery mode?

A lot of the time it feels like I'm just delivering something, whether it's a new record, artwork, whatever. A lot of output. It goes back to Covid-19, which was not a great time for so many reasons, but there was a lot of input. We had extra hours each day because maybe you weren't doing anything else. You could fill up on culture. I loved Bandcamp Fridays during that time—every month someone would have discovered something out of their archives, or make something brand new. There was this tidal wave of activity and you could actually absorb the tidal wave, you were porous enough to just take it in. Now it's very much returned to how it was before, where there are fewer hours free each day. Room40 was the happy beneficiary, of course, during covid. But I'm traveling a lot again, which means that I'm physically not here, so I can't do some things with the label I normally would. It's a constant trade-off.

So are you going to slow down at all after this current rush of releases?

I think it needs to find a better equilibrium. It's not sustainable, I can't connect to the work in the way it ought to be connected to. If someone gives you their [musical] baby, you want to deliver that baby in the best way you can. And it's increasingly harder to reach and connect new work to audiences. It's unreasonable to expect people to have the same space to connect to work now that we are back to this sense of busyness. So I think there needs to be fewer releases from us. I've been gently slowing down—it probably doesn't look like it—but in comparison to 2020 or 2021 the slowdown is significant. I want people to feel like they can actually engage with what the label is making available.

In dance music, a lot of labels talk about pressing plant delays, how they can't get stuff out. And releasing stuff like crazy. How does that happen, and how can you afford it?

The economic question is becoming increasingly complicated. Time lags were particularly bad during Covid, but I would say the delays are mostly done. It still takes a while for test pressings and stuff to move around—I'm not in Europe or North America. But then again, what is the right timeline for the music? It’s important to think about what the reasoning is for the timelines we place on our work. Do you want to have a record ready for a show where you can sell, say 20 copies? Is that the critical thing? Or is it about situating a piece of music at a time when it's going to connect to hundreds or ideally thousands of people, if you're willing to pace things differently. That's one of the challenges about working as an artist. You see these markers in your schedule and you want to land things around those markers.

But I think that even though you're in a touring cycle, or whatever, for a lot of us in this part of the world, we don't have to maintain those timescales. It's not really reasonable to expect that we can do that, even the most successful folks doing work in this zone of entanglement. The opportunity for touring is not the months-long juggernaut approach. 

The main factor for me is creating a situation where the work can actually connect to both the right audience and to new audiences. This is important especially 25 years in—if I had not attracted new people to the label, all the audiences would be in their late middle ages now. I look around at other labels and see that their artists and their audiences have aged, and I'm grateful that I've had lots of younger artists and listeners coming to the label. That's what I want. You have to reach in both directions. It can't be just one. 

With so many releases, are you breaking even, or is it just a money pit?

I like to be honest about it. Some things do really well. Some things don't. And if I was doing this for economic reasons I would have stopped it a long time ago. I derive an intense amount of satisfaction and pleasure from sharing people's work and from helping other folks realize parts of their projects. Sometimes that's in really tangible ways. Some of the best conversations we've had at Room40 were about the structure of a record, or about how I hear a record in a different way than an artist does. And I say, well, have you thought about it like this? And they're like, "Oh my god, that totally solves this problem that I'm having," etc. That stuff I find really satisfying.

The economic side, it's a very dynamic thing. Some years are really great, especially the last few years, and a lot of that is down to platforms like Bandcamp, where there's a sense of connection to a community of people who are engaged with the work. When the label started, around 2000, we printed like 500 CDs in a gatefold, die cut-style thing. We worked with this guy Steve Alexander, from Rinzen, who said that we only needed a couple of things visually, one of which was the Room40 logo—"ta,"if you want to think about it in the Japanese sense, like a field. He also suggested having this monochromatic design aesthetic, which we've maintained. That has made me comfortable with progressing through what is a pretty long view now. But anyway, back then we would make 500 copies, we only had one distributor, in Japan. So 300 would go there and then the other 200 copies would just kind of filter out—that was the extent and the scope of the work.

Now, between streaming platforms and Bandcamp and whatever else you're talking about, we're connecting to tens of thousands, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of people. It's absolutely unthinkable to have gone from this modest reach informed by geography and material conditions to this other thing, which is completely immaterial and disparate, and much more opaque. What is the relationship to music now? I love having this conversation with people, about how they found their way into something.

When I bought a CD or LP 25 years ago, there was an economic exchange that was pretty hard and fast. If you bought it and you didn't like it, you kind of had to sit with it, because you didn't have enough money to buy another one. Now you have this thing in your pocket, and you pull it out, and the entire history of music is available at any one moment. But then you've got to figure out how you're going to pierce into that vast mass of sound, because it's difficult to negotiate unless you're one of these people who are really good at prompts or researching. There's an agency that has to exist there, otherwise you're sort of beholden to these ever present algorithmic gatekeepers.

What do you think makes Room40 stand out in this streaming apocalypse?

I don't know if it stands out. Room40 creates what I call a zone of entanglement. The word ambient comes up a lot, which maybe is a reflection on part of my practice. But if you look at, even just the last couple of years, we've had records from artists like Tenniscoats—basically a Japanese post-pop band—and piano records from Chris Abrahams. Noise records. There's a whole acoustic vista that Room40 looks out onto.

The name Room40 comes from the history of codebreaking in the First and Second World War. And the thing that appealed to me about it as a name was the story that, during this period where they were looking to break these codes, they brought together whole groups of people who were crossword puzzlers, and physicists, and scientists, and a baker, got them all together because they kind of shared this common interest—and then they applied those people to that common interest. To me, that's what Room40 does. It's about prioritizing a kind of listening experience and a way of making. It's aesthetically divergent, but united by an interest in a deepness of practice maintained by the artists we work with. 

There's a porousness or a pliability that means the music can come in a more open way, rather than because it fits a genre or style. For me, recently, seeing the news of the passing of Achim from Mille Plateaux, I was thinking about my engagement with those labels—what I love is that even if I don't enjoy the work, necessarily, if it's not to my taste, I know that there is something that that person has heard, or that group of people have heard, that they feel is valuable or is appealing or is interesting. I respect that approach, even if I don't enjoy the work itself. I respect the decision making process, and it makes me listen intently to seek out the value that person has heard in the pieces. I would like to think that that's something I maintained through Room40. That's for other people to decide, but for me I want to maintain that curiosity and interest, and in some cases, go somewhere uncomfortable. 

I really like it when it takes me a while to discover what I'm drawn to in a work. And that's happening a bit more now, because things have become even more broad in the last five years. There are more and more moments where I'm like, even if I don't always agree with the choices that artist makes, I'm fascinated by those choices, and I respect them, and I want to understand and support that. If they feel it deeply, I want to share that sense of deepening.

You've mentioned the last five years a couple times—what happened in these five years?

One part of it is that I became aware in 2019 that, in a purely numerical sense, if the artists we had been working with over 20 years each continued to release an album every 12-18 months, if I didn't expand the scope of the label’s schedule, there would be almost no way for anyone new to come in. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't want to be closed off. I was very aware of that potential being realised. It's almost like I would be waiting for someone to pass on, so there could be a slot for someone else to come in. That's a terrible way to think about it, but it happens a lot to labels. Even before 2020, I was pursuing new avenues, but the excuse of being stuck in Australia for two years, not traveling and being able to focus on the label, I could achieve things I was never able to do before.

2020 was also the 20th anniversary of the label. It was the most satisfied I'd ever been with working on this thing—something as simple as making the edition, Field Recording and Fox Spirits, for David Toop. It was a personal document that would have been impossible in 2019—I would not have had the kind of headspace or the time to sit there and work with him on the text and do that interview, to even think that something like that could be possible. And then to spend the time in a material sense, figuring out how I could package these things together so they can travel as a unit that can get to a record store and be usable. And it was so satisfying. 

When I look at other labels and other publications, you can come back to that stuff in ten years time, and it holds a certain kind of history—sometimes it’s just circumstantial, or it becomes a wider part of a social history. In any case those things are really valuable because often a lot of the history that we kind of occupy ourselves with only exists as an informal structure. It’s stories that are shared, but perhaps not usually documented. 

That's what's so valuable about the period of music blogging and music sharing a while back. Those blogs filled some of the gaps that existed in very small social groups or geographical locations. It's so easy for those things to be lost. I feel very attached to the idea that you will never capture the full story, but that's also not the point—it's just about capturing a story of that time, each part contributing to other connections to come. That's what I'm trying to find space for now. There's another book with David Toop that we're working on right now, and there's one with Alan Lamb, we've been working on a lot of his archival recordings. He's nearing the end of his life and he's keen to make that work available again, because it has been out of print for 20 or 25 years.

It's also important, in terms of time, because people aren't going to be here forever. It has been pretty tough this year alone, losing a lot of friends and people I respect greatly. I'm aware there's only going to be a lot more coming because a lot of the fantastic artists I've had the great privilege to work with are entering their senior years. I want to celebrate them while they're here, because when they're gone they don't get to share in that kind of recognition. That's a shame.

As the roster shifts and grows, how do you go about bringing new artists in? 

Room40 has always been and will always be a friends-and-family label. I'm not seeking people out because they're successful. My interest is in the work. It goes back to the economic question. If I work with people, everyone holds their own rights. If one day they decide they want everything back, then they get it back. No conversation needed. I'm a true believer in mutual respect, and one of my slogans in life is no jerks. I have a no jerks policy. It sounds flippant, but I'm very serious about it—no jerks. That's how it has to be.

I take this very seriously, because it's a fraught environment even in what is a very small puddle on the side of the music industry. There are still bad actors, and that's really disappointing, because the stakes are so low in a way. There should be nothing but communal solidarity and a desire for people to thrive. I do honestly believe there is room for everyone, and there should only be more room made available, instead of this sort of territorialism. Territorial pissing is a thing of the 20th century. If we're all going to exist under these conditions, how can we persist together? What does that sound solidarity actually look and feel like?

Do you think the way that music technology has evolved, the fact that everyone has access to everything and can listen to anything anytime, does that actually create more room, or is it oppressive?

I would say it's never been easier to make music available, and in the same breath it's never been harder to get people to listen to it. That is the greatest blessing, and curse, at the same time. It raises a whole bunch of other questions around our expectations of an audience, and even what an audience actually is, because a lot of us are makers and audiences at the same time. In certain cities you can sense that—you go to a show and many folks are people who create their own work, and that's part of solidarity, that shared interest. It pays to think—what is the audience and who are they? What do you want your relationship to be with them? 

An example I can give you is around ten years ago, everyone was making field recordings and that's awesome. Room40 would get something like 20-30 submissions per day and I do try and listen to them, but it's hard to give everything the attention it deserves. And the thing about the field recordings was that suddenly it was very easy to do, which is a good thing. But what it meant was that a lot of people made recordings that were just of a place and time. It was special to them, but it offered no way for others to step into their interests in that place they were recording. Sometimes, you couldn’t sense that person, their creativity, in the recording.  

What's most interesting about field recordings is this opportunity that you get to have an extrasensory experience, listening through someone else's ear—so you can hear them extracting a particular thing out of their environment, they're fascinated by it and so should you be. But I think on the flipside, there were a lot of people just saying, "I went to this place and it looked really beautiful. Here's ten minutes of me being there, and here's some photos of the place." That's cool, but also unnecessary to share with everyone perhaps? It’s that question of the audience—who is this for? There has to be some greater imperative or interrogation of something, rather than just documentation in and of itself. It has to be an offering to an audience, offering something more than your subjective experience at that time and place. 

That's one challenge around this idea of everything being propagated so easily. I think there's a greater responsibility on us, as artists and also as publishers, to think about what we ask of the audience. I mean, if you want to get dramatic about it, think about it like this—you make a record, and you give that record to someone and you ask them earnestly to sit down and listen to it. That's 40 minutes of their life they are never going to get back. You've killed them just a little bit. They can’t reclaim that time. So, that time that they give you, you have to offer something that is in excess of that time. If they give you 40 minutes and they never think about that time again, except maybe begrudgingly—why did I listen to that album—then they don't have any greater relation to it. That's a shame, because what they should be doing is thinking, a week from then, "Wow, that thing I heard made me feel a certain way." That recurring value is a huge part of what makes music so special, when you return to it at different times in your life, it holds a different weight and place for you. It's like it's a living, breathing thing. Music is such a powerful art form because it attaches itself to us in an unsteady and pliable way, and that unsteadiness is its pleasure.

So do you think context and framing is important when listening to something new, or do you like just going in blind?

I love when you can discover something and just be drawn to it. I went to see Atarashii Gakko!, a Japanese idol band, at the Hollywood Palladium last week. I didn't really know them, but it was brilliant, and now I absolutely love that band. I have listened to their records more extensively after that show, and this is what I mean by that idea of time. I came out of that one-hour concert thinking that I need to spend more time with these people, to have a relationship with them. Their work is really curious and fun, actually, and that pleasure is something I don't always get from my encounters with sound work. It stimulates me in other ways.

So that's something I'm always keeping at the front of my mind—that question around how the work connects. But I also love context. I love a record with a story, and I personally cannot make work without that. I need a tight framework, I want to be bound, I can't sit down at a keyboard or with a guitar and just make something. I'm trying to interrogate a problem or a question or an idea, and also I see the music as a means to have a conversation about that idea. Like the ShellType piece I made earlier in the year—that was totally a chance for me to talk about cerebral organoids and the questions raised by the application of neural cells to bioprocessing—I'm fascinated by it. It also raises huge ethical considerations. Music is a great medium to start these conversations. 

When you're releasing this kind of abstract music, a lot of which does come with an interesting story, or has a concept, at what level does marketing come into it?

I think about this a lot actually. Because not everything needs to fit everywhere. I would say the pool of people willing to dedicate their lives to being culturally engaged and writing about it has shrunk so dramatically, even just in the last five years. When I think about when I released Kiri No Oto in 2008, compared to now, it's shocking how much of an erosion and degradation there has been in terms of the capacity to have really engaged and dynamic conversation around music like that. Not to be too cynical about it, but there was a sense that criticism and writing about music had a place. And I mean that in terms of a cultural critique of something. 

I would say that now, you're right to use the word "marketing." People are thinking about that as the kind of primary driver for what is important. But critique is valuable. Once I got a review in The Wire, I think it was Clive Bell, and it was quite critical. I read it and I could totally hear what he was saying—and I found that valuable. I don't think it's valuable if someone just says "go out and buy it." 

The role of critique and criticality is so important, just as other people's research, interests, and their passions are valuable. Those critical texts can reveal something deep about a work—that's the relationship that someone like Mark Fisher fostered during the blog period, but also generally the way he applied cultural events in his philosophy. It's a difficult way to operate in the world, but there's so much value in it—that's what I'm interested in. The conversations have to be about more than just the music itself, because the music itself doesn't just manifest out of nothing. We're in this increasingly complex environment, and all of those factors feed into why and how music is made. We need to embrace and celebrate that connectivity.

Sometimes we need people who are traveling in parallel with us to be able to recognize and talk about, and formalize some of those ideas. Because maybe people don't have the time to do that themselves now, and I mean that as makers and as audience—many of us are now working three jobs to maintain the practice and interests that we have. 

When you're putting out more than one release a week, how do you turn the music from a listing on a streaming platform into a conversation, or something bigger? 

A lot of that has to be artist-led, but some people don't want to start that kind of conversation, and I respect that—for them, the work is paramount and exists on its own. I personally like the ideas that float around the music, they offer a different tint, another perspective, that you wouldn't get from just the work itself. From a label perspective I'm very interested in how the work can operate in different ways in your life. 

I try to offer people some context when they listen, because chances are they're going to give it one listen—maybe not even one full listen, so if there are other tools to help link people into the work, then I welcome that. It's important to situate it in something bigger than "Here's some bass and drums and someone singing." Sure, that's great. But if somehow the relationship between those things is given a different reading, then it opens up ways of thinking about the music that's much more useful.

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I associate Room40 with a very international sort of lifestyle—your connection to Japan, and even now, you coming to LA to put on a few shows. And normally you're in what you see as a remote corner of the world. How does being based in Australia affect the way you approach the label? Is there some level of overcompensating for coming from a geographically "far" place?

You mean with frequent flyer points? [laughs] I've always thought about Room40 as part of a network. In the late '90s, when I started it—that was a really long time ago—Australia felt very removed. There were festivals, or special one-off events, like seeing Boredoms play in 1996, which I still hold very dearly, but those were singular events. I had a strong interest in music from Japan, so I resolved to just go there and be part of that thing. Recognizing that the world was bigger than what I could see in front of me was important, and I was fortunate to have some interactions with artists who affirmed that. 

People like David Toop, who was incredibly instrumental to me—first through his writing, but then meeting him and seeing that he was genuinely enthusiastic about the conversations that I wanted to have. Interactions with people like Toop and Robin Rimbaud made me think that Room40 was something I needed to pursue further. It's always been a process of reaching out, or maybe reaching in. A big part of what I've done over the last 25 years has been bringing people to Australia—partly in a purely selfish way, just so I can enjoy their work. I might never be able to see them otherwise. So I'll do whatever I can to create a situation where I can go enjoy what they do, and hopefully 100 or 200 other people can enjoy it at the same time.

So much of the work you make is experiential. I remember the first time I saw you perform, you told everyone to lie on the floor to feel the vibrations. You can't get that with headphones on Spotify. But you've also done work about climate change, and travel is a big part of what you, and the larger scene, rely on. If the world travel system collapsed, or if you couldn't travel anymore, could this ecosystem still exist? How important is traveling to this small industry that you're a part of?

It's a massive question. Even before the pandemic, I had taken a backward step—I haven't played a solo electronic show since 2018, which is a huge gap for me. I've done some collaborative tours, but from 2020 on, I've hardly done any performance. Those connections could have easily all fallen apart… well, we know what could have happened, because of Covid. At that time though I made excuses to jump on Zoom calls with people more often, or reach out in a more social context. I've noticed that I don't do that much anymore, which is a shame—everyone's back to being too busy, or however you want to describe it, to take that and make it part of our everyday life. 

That connection is so important, and can lead to all kinds of projects or connections. Sometimes it doesn't have to lead anywhere, it can just be a great food recommendation. That's enough. That's the part of life that is really valuable, and when I talk about Room40 being a friends-and-family enterprise, that's what I mean. Even if nothing work-wise took seed, you're incredibly privileged to get to share people's interests and ideas, and get inspired by what they do. And you never know where those little flippant comments or conversations will lead you. They could open up a new area you go to investigate. That's the pleasure of being alive. I want to be curious, and know the challenges that we all share, and the ones we don't share. 

But overall when I travel I'm trying not to make it a one-off. If I go somewhere, I want to have ten things to do, because I recognize that getting on a plane and going to the other side of the world is a huge situation of both privilege and damage, and there's no two ways about it. Even running a label, there's an environmental cost that comes with it, and we've not really been able to address that. Most of the solutions are just making yourself feel better about it. Hopefully there is some tangible transformation that allows some sort of recovery, even if it's geographically localized. But that's still not enough. We operate in a compromised place. That doesn't make it right or wrong—but we need to think about how much of it we actually need to participate in. 

It also costs a lot of money. One thing that struck me is during the introduction for the Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong show, is that you thanked some organizations in Australia for funding it, as well as some local orgs. How dependent is this area of music and art dependent on institutional or government funding? 

I think there are two tiers. For a lot of people, there's zero engagement with government funding. Room40, in its entire history, has been funded three times, and that would be considered peanuts anyway. I do feel that there is an imperative from government to recognize the impact that culture has as a part of people's wellbeing in the world—you don't have to look very far, just a couple of minutes ago we were talking about how music can connect with hundreds of people, and when you add to this number, it's valuable because that is a lot of people. Music can get people through a difficult situation, or just give them pleasure. That's just one part of the value. 

The reason that I do shows now is because of how things recur in time. For me, like when I went to see Boredoms for the first time, I thought, "What the hell is this?" A week later I'm looking for more of their music, a month later I'm trying to figure out who or what else they're connected to, and then a month after that maybe I'm trying to book them or bring them to Australia. The world is open to everyone. When I put on a show, if one person walks out and thinks about it a week later, that's so very valuable. The idea that things need to get bigger is something I reject, and I reject it from a label perspective as well. Big is not always better.

What music needs is to get deeper. There's a kind of verticality to that engagement with work that's underexplained in the same way as qualitative reading of art often is overlooked. From a policy standpoint, if we're talking about government funding or philanthropic funding, there needs to be a deepening of the cultural languages that we want to see persist—not just throwing money at it to make it get bigger. It's never been easier to make a record available, and availability is not the only important thing. The quality of connection is paramount. And I think we tend to forget about that, because it's not easily replicated or demonstrated in a quantitative framework. 

Almost all of our lives we've existed in a neoliberal structure that is absolutely about quantification, and not about qualification in any way. We're starting to move further away from that, I hope, and it might change with the next generation. Because there's a lot more concern even with things as simple as self-care. That's a qualitative question. The drive towards quantification over qualification is something we need to spend more time thinking about as makers, or just as people who are invested in a cultural framework.

So how does quantification come into running the label, either intentionally or not—are you ever forced to do something for funding or support?

It's easy because you have all these statistics that platforms like Apple Music just spit out for you. Here's your 25,000 plays for the week. Those numbers look impressive, but what do they actually mean? I certainly don't know. You're on a playlist somewhere. Congratulations. But did someone actually feel something listening to the music? That's not revealed in the 25,000 plays. It's so easy to present numeral arguments, but the lived experience of work, the meaningful point-to-point connection, is almost never spoken about. There's a deficiency. You can frame an argument easily around the quantity of information, and you can bamboozle people with it. The actual meaningful engagement of a person in a community, in a culture, doesn't seem to be something people are considering. 

So how do we address that in a practical way? Starting with conversations. I spent a lot of time as part of the music board in something now called Creative Australia—our government's arm's-length funding agency that gives out grants. That's why I could never really apply for Room40—because I was working on the other side as a volunteer. What I saw during that time was a lot of very poor management of the cultural sector. We have to find ways to start  discussions that speak to the social and cultural values of the work rather than the purely economic ones. 

That's not to say that they're mutually exclusive, but if we just spend all our time dwelling on things like tourism, or the economic output of the arts sector, that's not the be-all end-all of this work. The irony is that if you look at the kind of aggregation of funding in this country, the cultural industries in Australia are a huge part of the GDP, and a huge employer. And yet because of quantitative arguments, something like mineral resources, extractive resourcing, are considered more deserving even though it doesn't employ as many people, and its contributions are… questionable. The economic argument does not always give an accurate idea of what is actually happening, and it denies humanity. We're so obsessed with the economy doing well—but how are people actually doing? 

It comes out of Thatcher and Reagan, we're seeing the last echoes of Reaganomics now, because people don't have a simple, easy way of just existing in a comfortable situation. For most people, it's very difficult right now. That means there will be a change, because that generation of people that were above us are leaving the planet, and there is a large generation underneath us that is going to re-contour the way that we think about things going forward. It's not sustainable in any kind of meaningful way as a human being to exist under these structures. It’s this simple: we deserve better.

Five Excellent Room40 Releases

Black Rain - Neuromancer

At its best, Room40 is just cool. This record collects music that Stuart Argabright and Shinichi Shimokawa recorded for the William Gibson-approved (and narrated) audiobook that celebrated the 10th anniversary of his cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer. Catching the long-running post-punk project Black Rain in a transitional period, the album blends atmospheric scene setting and industrial clank wonderfully, capturing the seedy cold-steel-slicked-with-rain-and-sweat feel of the novel so well.

Lawrence English - Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds

Out at the end of the month, this makes for an approachable introduction to Lawrence English’s own work. With its origins in an installation at the Art Gallery of NSW, it’s essentially a piano-based ambient record with loose, liquid contributions from artists who have some sort of connection to the museum, ranging from Jim O’Rourke to claire rousay. Each was invited to respond to two sonic prompts, which were then incorporated into an extended album-length composition that moves with the stillness of the surface of an undisturbed lake at one point, and the roaring majesty of a waterfall in another.

Mike Cooper - Slow Motion Lightning

British guitarist Mike Cooper has been a regular on Room40 almost since the label’s inception, blending blues, folk, jazz, anthropology and avant-garde practice into music that’s both beguiling but innately understandable. Inspired by a sweltering summer and Guyanese literature, and moving along the same wavelength as his 2018 album Tropical Gothic, Slow Motion Lightning mixes Cooper’s distinct guitar playing with eerie landscapes made out of samples he recorded from sources including an empty rum bottle and a ukulele, plus field recordings from Martinique. The result is an unsettling but often beautiful collection of pieces that make me imagine a guitar-wielding hero hacking through the nightmarish jungle of his own imagination.

Merzbow - StereoAkuma

A recording of Merzbow’s performances at Room40’s 2019 festival Open Frame in Australio, StereoAkuma—presented in two versions—is abrasive even by the Japanese noise legend’s standards. But the quality of the live recording frames the music from a distance, which offers a whole new way to experience it. It’s face-melting, eardrum-shedding, all those good adjectives, though it feels different when you can hear the room it’s reverberating through, instead of those brutal frequencies delivered directly from the source to your own speakers. It’s an endurance test, but a fascinating one.

Loscil // Lawrence English - Chroma

My best of 2024 list had plenty of talk of pipe organ, but here’s more. Chroma is something of an off-shoot of the duo’s 2023 Kranky album Colours Of Air, built around a commission in Vancouver that asked the duo to use a pipe organ in a live performance (instead of just sampling or manipulating a recording of one). The album that came out of those experiments, much like StereoAkuma, offers new ways and scenarios to hear the tones of the pipe organ—alternately exalted, suppressed, obscured. Each track is like walking into a different climate controlled chamber, which feels appropriate, since English loves a site-specific artwork.