Room40 label head Lawrence English labors under the weight of his imprint’s history—literally. He works from his Brisbane home studio, which he built beneath a storage room that’s full of the label’s releases. “There’s a ton of records—literally a ton of records—that sits directly above my head,” he says, adding with a wry smile: “It does add a certain kind of existential weight to the experience of being here.” This year, Room40 celebrates 25 years spent filling that room with music.
English’s obsession with physical media began when he was a teenager. He started releasing cassettes in high school, printing his own covers at the public library. He joined tape trading networks and began sending his music and fanzines internationally. The work slowly became more sophisticated, with 3-inch CD-Rs replacing the cassettes, and a stamped logo replacing Dymo labels. Even in those early days, the primary motivation behind Room40 was finding like-minded people. “Particularly here [in Australia], you’re a long way away from everything else,” English says, “so you’ve got to find a way to make those connections. You have to find a way to be excited, to find the things that are going to be your way in the world.”
In the late ‘90s, English began organizing concerts for artists he admired—among them David Toop, Scanner, David Shea, and DJ Olive. He soon found a niche as the Brisbane arm of arts and music projects like Liquid Architecture and the What Is Music? Festival. “I could see our shared interest in the same questions or problems or ideas,” he explains. “I wanted to have this community of people that are coming together that are all interested. This was a chance to celebrate that sense of solidarity that was there.”
Room40 proper began in 2000. Its first releases were in editions of 500, with 300 distributed through Japan and the rest sent from English’s home. “The work was really limited in a way,” he says. “If you wanted to listen to it, you either had to send cash in the mail, which feels so beautifully old school, or happen across it in a record store in Japan.” The label grew organically. Room40’s roster gradually expanded, and its visual identity cohered around monochrome covers by designer Steve Alexander. People started to take notice. English’s first inkling that his labor of love was turning into a viable business came in 2007, when Room40 was listed as one of XLR8R magazine’s labels of the year alongside heavy hitters like Domino, Kompakt, and Planet Mu. “There were all these labels that I saw as actual, real things. Like, they had a staff! They had a staff, and I had a shitty laptop and a cupboard,” English remembers. “Now I’ve got a better laptop and a few cupboards,” he laughs.
English calls Room40 a “friends and family” label, dedicated to releasing only the work that he truly believes in. Still, the growth of the label over the years has meant confronting serious questions about which projects to devote his limited resources toward. Before Covid-19, he did some grim math: “We had built up a group of people that we worked with, and we were doing 12 to 16 releases a year. If everyone makes one record every 18 months, that’s it. The whole program is full.” This idea was anathema for a project dedicated to exploration and discovery. But during lockdowns, English suddenly had unlimited time to pour into the label. Room40 released 140 albums in those two years. In fact, over 40% of the label’s output has been released in the last five years alone.
It was an exhilarating pace, but not a sustainable one. Now, English is at least attempting to scale back. But all these years later, he’s still in love with records. For him, Room40 is synonymous with that ton of vinyl that sits above his head. More importantly, it exists in all of the relationships and experiences that weight represents. “I still think about that sometimes with record shopping, where you would have those moments—you find a John Zorn record and then you find some weird Finnish metal band or whatever the case is. And the world gets bigger somehow,” he muses. “And I like to think that’s part of the methodology for Room40. It’s like a gateway to making the world a bit bigger.”
In its first 25 years of existence, Room40 has released over 500 albums. Below is a guide into the label’s world, featuring some of its most important connections, collaborations, and encounters as selected by Lawrence English. Hopefully, it will make your world a bit bigger, too.
David Toop, Scanner & I/O3
A Picturesque View, Ignored
Compact Disc (CD)
One of English’s early organizing efforts was a showcase featuring concerts by Scanner and David Toop. At the end of the night, they played together with English’s group I/O3. “We did this performance in this place called the Spark Bar, which had this beautiful vista window, which of course we completely ignored—hence the title,” he says. A Picturesque View, Ignored is the recording of that show, and its gentle yet dramatic transformations place it among the best albums in each artist’s repertoire. For English, it’s more notable because the experience augured well for Room40. The turnout surprised him, revealing an audience of like-minded sonic adventurers in Brisbane. The support of Scanner, Toop, and others convinced him that his label had an important role to play in that scene. “Those two and DJ Olive and David Shea, it was like they were saying ‘You know, we’ll participate in this because this is actually a worthwhile endeavor,’” he explains. “So for me, that record, creatively and from the label perspective, is this moment of ushering in something bigger than what was directly in front of me.”
Chris Abrahams
Thrown
Compact Disc (CD)
When describing Thrown, English uses a word not often applied to the Necks’s pianist Chris Abrahams: Scary. “I remember sitting in his house in Randwick and the lights being really low and him putting on this record and just being completely frightened,” he laughs. “Oh my God, it was scary. It is still a scary record—he finds a way to make the organ so unsettled but so compelling.” After 20 years of working together, English still describes Abrahams’s music as a universe that is beyond human reckoning. He has released many albums on the label, each one expanding the limits of that universe; but Thrown set the standard and indicated the direction that Room40 should go. “I just thought it was brilliant, and it was one of those records that is early enough in the timeline of Room40 where I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is the music we have to be a part of,” says English. “I don’t really necessarily even understand it fully, but whatever it is, I have to be a part of this.”
Marina Rosenfeld
Index
Compact Disc (CD)
Marina Rosenfeld makes dubplates—one-off, hand-cut records—and performs music by manipulating those dubplates on turntables. “She’s really just working with the raw material of the turntable, with the dubplate as the holder of the music,” English says. “As [each dubplate] gets performed, it accumulates dust and fingerprints. So when Marina’s playing, quite often there’s all of that surface noise—for want of a better word—that becomes part of the timbre of the music.” Index collects a series of live recordings with these dubplates from across Rosenfeld’s career, and it represents an important impetus for Room40: To make sure that those fleeting performances, and the social context that surrounded them, are preserved for posterity. The album itself is only one part of the story; it also comes with a book of archival documents, photographs, and an interview between English and Rosenfeld. “For Index, I wanted to try and capture some of that material that’s usually in excess of what is published,” he explains. “I think this old-school paper book holds something that, ideally, someone can excavate in 70 years out of someone’s library. I just think that’s really valuable.”
Akio Suzuki
Zeitstudie
Vinyl LP
One of Room40’s missions is to keep groundbreaking work in circulation via reissues. Akio Suzuki’s Zeitstudie, originally released on cassette in 1984, is a case in point. “Akio is an example of one of these people whose work I’ve discovered sometimes more than 25 years ago,” English explains. “But it’s carried with me, and now I’m able to go back and say, ‘This hasn’t existed on someone’s radar for the last decade and a half; we need to get it back on the radar.’” Zeitstudie features the analapos—which is two cans connected by a coiled spring—and the glass harmonica, which consists of five glass tubes suspended horizontally. “I just remember being so struck by what are incredibly simple tools, ultimately. He is so enmeshed with them that he’s able to pull something out of them that’s just unthinkable from anyone else.” It’s been more than 50 years since Suzuki first invented these instruments, and his relationship to them has evolved considerably over that time. Documenting that evolution for new generations of listeners is a key motivator for English: “That’s the kind of stuff I want to celebrate.”
HEXA (Lawrence English + Jamie Stewart)
Factory Photographs
Vinyl LP
Sometimes, you should meet your heroes. In 2015, Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art presented a retrospective of David Lynch’s work; curator José da Silva invited HEXA, English’s band with Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, to respond to Lynch’s Factory Photographs series. English met the man himself and expressed his admiration for his work. Lynch responded, of course, by coolly smoking a cigarette. Ultimately, Lynch was encouraging of HEXA’s musical interpretation of his foreboding black-and-white photos. “He was curious about why we were doing it and what our relationship was to them, and he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about it,” English says.
“If you had said to me when I was 15, ‘You’ll eventually be soundtracking this guy’s Factory Photographs’—unthinkable. But you know, it’s because of this stuff [Room40’s activities] that those opportunities present themselves, and we can celebrate that.” After Lynch’s recent passing, this album has become a memorial for the filmmaker and one of many, many entrances into his inimitable artistic universe.
John Chantler
Which Way to Leave?
Vinyl LP
John Chantler has been associated with Room40 since the beginning, and was a key player in its early success. His organizational skills were crucial for getting the unglamorous parts of running the label underway: designing a website, assisting with distribution, and scheduling gigs. But Chantler’s contributions to the label as an artist are just as notable. “His music is unbelievable, and he’s constantly surprising me,” English says. He points to Which Way to Leave? as an example of Chantler’s brash, bracing, richly textured synth work. “I can’t even imagine how he’s got the sounds that he’s made, and how he’s able to sustain the timbre of those sounds compositionally, across this album.” Chantler’s work is also a prime example of Room40’s ability to evolve along with an artist across their career. “His music has developed so much. It really is amazing to see how those very early ideas that he had have carried through, but the expression of them is so much more profound than what it was,” English attests. “The more I go down this pathway, I realize that this label is about celebrating people’s commitment to their practice and the deepening of that practice in time.”
Eugene Carchesio + Adam Betts
Circle Drum Music
Vinyl LP
As the label head of Room40, one of English’s primary tasks is guiding artists through the final stages of their work, suggesting additions or edits, or simply confirming that a piece is finished. When Eugene Carchesio took his Circle Drum Music to the label, he knew that it was missing some percussion. English suggested Adam Betts, drummer for Jarvis Cocker, Goldie, and Squarepusher, among others. It was a connection that never would have occurred without his intervention. “He totally opened up a whole other rhythmical counterpoint to Eugene’s pieces,” says English. Betts’s dynamic drumming transformed Carchesio’s minimalist miniatures, expanding them in unanticipated but welcome new directions. “It captures the essence of what Room40 can be. Two people have no connection and then there’s a thoroughfare, which is me in this case,” English says. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been the happy beneficiary of those thoroughfares, so to be able to do that now and to see Eugene’s satisfaction with what Adam brought to that work was unbelievable.”
JWPaton
Structures
Compact Disc (CD)
Room40 continues to add younger artists to its roster after its scaling up of operations post-Covid. JWPaton is an example of an act that may not have fit into the release schedule before 2020. “He has a way of coming at environmental sound that is really particular,” says English. “You can have a field recording in a track, but what he does is somehow have the track in the field recording, all reversed.” As a First Nations artist, JWPaton is part of an important new contingent on the experimental scene that Room40 is eager to support. “His generation of Indigenous Australians are totally opening up new ways of thinking about field recording and experimental music practice and the kinds of histories that can be tied into those things,” English explains. “It’s really exciting because a decade ago, I would have said this would be impossible, but now there’s four or five artists that we’re working with that are at the very vanguard of that kind of practice. It’s just amazing to see the depth of rigor that’s there.”
Lawrence English
Even the Horizon Knows Its Bounds
Vinyl LP
Even the Horizon Knows Its Bounds began as a sound installation commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Curator Jonathan Wilson invited English to create a piece for the opening of a new building and suggested that he collaborate with people who have been associated with the museum. “This was particularly great, because I got to bring together people who I have known and listened to for many, many years, like Jim O’Rourke, with people that I’ve come to know recently, like Tahlia [Palmer, aka Amby Downs] and Josh [Paton, aka JWPaton]” English says. “There’s a real mix of voices and ideas in there, and the generosity of the offerings from people was extraordinary.” English sent the same basic tracks to all of his collaborators and let them respond to them as they wished. He found that all 11 artists’ contributions fit together seamlessly, as if they were all working intuitively on the same wavelength. After the museum event, English returned to the piece and discovered that it worked wonderfully as a stand-alone album. His description of the record could just as well be a description of Room40 as a whole: “It’s just people traveling together. Maybe the lines we travel are different, but there is a sense of motion together, in solidarity and sound.”