Drowning In Mirrors

“I came across that term in a few different places. I’m pretty sure it’s in one of (British documentarian) Adam Curtis’ films where someone is talking about that period, the CIA/KGB period, and I was then drawn to that phrase in another couple of places. I started to think about what implications such a phrase might hold, and how a phrase can be so provocative when you read, but also be wide and varied. And that is something I am interested in – a collation of information that is also a feedback loop into nothing. Such an approach was really useful for me and was the root of what the album was, this idea of something I wanted to erase through the duration of the record.”

This slow erasure of one thing by another may feel heavy-handed in other hands, but with English he explores such thoughts through the manipulation of noise and how moods undulate through the strong guidance of another.

“There is that idea that once an album is completed, it is actually abandoned. I think a lot of people abandon things too soon. With Wilderness Of Mirrors I feel I abandoned it at the right time; I see it as a fully realised work. Yet music, apart from being multi-representational, the beauty is that anyone that comes to it brings all their social baggage with them, they are going to relate to that material in a way that their socio-political experience allows them to. Even the physiology – how it is that they hear and listen, whether or not they have heard anything like it before, their ability to listen, whether they can lend themselves for five minutes or 40 minutes – all of that comes into the deal. To be honest, the more you invest in anything, the more you get out of it.”

English may be trying to expand on notions of creating music, but he admits he sees music as being an experiential prospect in which anyone can engage.

“You should be able to listen to songs, but what I wanted is for people to feel good in the same way that someone surviving a drowning feels good. They have to work and take it inside them, be choking for a little bit, then have that euphoric moment of everything rushing out, and to me that’s good. That’s exciting, this idea that somehow you have worked for it. Mystery in music is what makes it so sexy, and I think people have forgotten that you don’t just fuck, there is foreplay. There is much more to music than just saying, ‘Here’s a big dick, deal with it.’ That’s super, that’s fantastic, I’m really happy for you – but that is just another big dick, and there are plenty of big dicks out there.”