Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello - With Chris (Room40) [Ambient Music]

The Slow Music Movement
Sep 26
2 min read

The cover for Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello's Trinity album, showing a wooden chair with a curved back, dimly lit in a shadowy corner, creating a moody and mysterious atmosphere with warm brown tones.

Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello will need no introduction to anyone with even a passing interest in ambient music. Lawrence English is the time served, uncompromising, prolific and boundary nudging boss of the similarly minded Room40 label that he masterminds from the other side of the world. Stephen Vitiello is a similarly storied transmitter of pleasingly eclectic, usually softer edged ambient works than English, hence he's received more TSMM coverage.

They're also serial collaborators, both with others and together, having underwater cable enabled history dating back ten years, covering a broad swathes of the ambient spectrum in the process. Fable from 2014 alternated between reimagined Asiatic temple ritualism and edgier, frostier electronics with the lads mellowing a bit on 2020's Acute Inbetweens, which mined dronier and easier listening machine sounds. To keep things fresh on Trinity, their new album which is due out in November, they've invited some fellow musical misfit to throw spanners into the works, just to see what happens.

The first spanner thrower to help tease the album is the piano playing Chris Abrahams of The Necks fame. The creative process isn't detailed in the liner notes; whether English's and Vitiello's soundscape was presented to the artist, vice versa, or whether the track was more of a collaborative affair from the off, there's no denying the synergy.

The main protagonists are at their most serene, providing a simple yet supremely satisfying bed of low frequency adjacent drones, sound elongations & minor sonic detailing that radiates a low lit warmth. Abrahms for his part adopts minimal, higher frequency range piano that lightly showers the shadows with smouldering notes that drift down into the atmospheric depths, until their fading lights lack sufficient energy to be heard.

It's a supremely crafted and surprisingly relaxing slice of ambient piano music from the crew, that should appeal to lean back and forward listeners alike, although I can't imagine the album will follow suit all the way through.