Featuring a couple of Lawrence English songs, first in his collaboration with Loscil in the luscious 2023 release Colors of Air and the powerful Cruel Optimism, which as Lawrence puts it is “a record of protest against the immediate threat of abhorrent possible futures”.
Cruel Optimism is a record that considers power (present and absent). It meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility. This pyramid is an affective ecology of the (ever)present moment. This edition owes its title and its origins to the wonderful text of the same name by American theorist Lauren Berlant… read it here. “it was particularly her writing around trauma I found deeply affecting. It was a jumping off point from which a plague of unsettling impressions of suffering, intolerance and ignorance could be unpacked and utilised as fuel over and above pointless frustration.”