Trinity by Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello

Trinity, the third collaborative album between Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, continues the pair’s patient, pliable musical explorations while marrying them with a unique collaborator—one per track—to map new territories. Trinity presents five collaborations with acclaimed artists who work at the edges of sound and genre: Chris Abrahams (The Necks), improvising turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics), multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late contemporary artist and lowercase musician Steve Roden. The results deepen the music’s immediacy and directness, while pushing it in directions neither English nor Vitiello could have foreseen.

Trinity has a trick up its sleeve, a surprise. In English’s words, “this record’s surprise was the invitation of a third player.” Its opening track, which features Australian iconoclast Chris Abrahams on piano, drops us right in the middle of the action. His piano, Vitiello says, “floats in and above our bed of sounds,” structuring their warp and weft. But as “With Chris" unfurls, Abrahams’ piano takes a darker hue and moves beneath the lead artists’ bed of sounds, which whispers and gnashes, grasping yet withholding. It’s a microcosm for the album, like looking at a Pointillist painting: pellucid as a whole.

The flip side of the coin is the album’s second single, “With Brendan,” featuring legendary punk drummer Brendan Canty. Here, we hear English and Vitiello's gifts for treating music as a sculptural material, and drawing chameleonic permutations from their collaborators. Mixed amidst soft layers of drones that hover just above, Canty’s formidable backbeat teeters on the edge, as if, responding to his collaborators, he might disintegrate the beat or pull it out of phase.

“With each of our collaborations,” English says, “Stephen and I have tried to unlock something unexpected, and for us at least, new.” As individual artists, English and Vitiello each use sound as an artistic medium, making site-specific installations and multi-channel works. And, working remotely between Australia and America, English and Vitiello have a long history of playful experimentation. On their past albums—2011’s Acute Inbetweens and 2014’s Fable—English and Vitiello have reveled in modular synthesis, field recordings, and the porous boundaries between a given sound and its distance from the source. Across Trinity’s five pieces, the pair and their collaborators plunge the listener into dynamic, floral worlds that are warm, enigmatic and spacious.

Steve Roden, credited on Trinity's final track as playing electronics and “mystery sounds,” died of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2023. His contributions are delicate and soft, yet among the album’s most vigorous: we hear guitar harmonics, gentle notes, strokes like a violin bow. It's a fitting coda to an open-minded album, which invites us to lean in close to the mystery and listen for what we might each find.

Lawrence English. Philosopher of listening. Room40 Honcho. Generally questioning living, dying and everything else in-between.

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