For Lawrence English, Vancouver New Music’s Nomadic Streams festival is not only a celebration of ambient music in all its puzzling diversity: it’s also a 15th-birthday party for Room40, the record label he runs from his Queensland, Australia, home.

“I think about 80 percent of the artists that are performing at the festival are kind of friends and family of the label,” he says in a telephone call from Stockholm, Sweden. Indeed, sound sculptor Marina Rosenfeld, drone specialist Rafael Anton Irisarri, audio collagist Steve Roden, and avant-garde turntablist DJ Olive have all released music on English’s imprint—but this doesn’t mean that either the festival or the record company has an easily definable aesthetic.

“Maybe the easiest way I can explain that is just through the name itself,” says the composer, audio artist, and producer. “I mean, ‘Room40’ is borrowed from the facility at Bletchley Park, in England, that was used as a code-breaking facility during the first and second world wars. It was the place where they broke the Enigma code; Alan Turing was working there. But what was interesting for me in terms of it being a metaphor for what the label could become is that it brought all of these directions together. They brought in scientists and military strategists and crossword puzzlers and general office workers—a whole range of people that were all interested in or concerned with the same problem. And that was what I wanted Room40 to be: a whole range of people coming from different backgrounds or aesthetic worlds, but they’re all interested in creating opportunities for really focused listening.”

Their one shared characteristic, he continues, is “being attentive to sound”, and the same can be said of the artists VNM artistic director Giorgio Magnanensi has assembled for Nomadic Streams. These range from the FLUX Quartet, performing Morton Feldman’s hushed and hypnotic String Quartet No. 1, to English himself, whose Wilderness of Mirrors took its inspiration from music of an entirely different complexion.

“I had this particularly good experience halfway through making this record,” he says of the disc, which he’ll draw on during his Vancouver performance. “In 11 days, I had the pleasure of hearing Swans and My Bloody Valentine and Einstürzende Neubauten.…And, seeing these groups, what I realized was that there was this very strong physical affect, this connection with sound in performance. Obviously, with Swans there’s another element, in that I think they are actually an incredible band—and by that I mean a group of musicians playing together. But what really stuck out for me was this kind of affective, physical experience that I had: this kind of bodily experience of sound.”

In other words, while English can talk eloquently and at considerable length about aesthetic theory, his preoccupations at the moment are more visceral—which doesn’t necessarily mean that his Vancouver performance will reach the punishing sound-pressure levels of your typical My Bloody Valentine show.

“Volume is only part of the equation,” he says, laughing. “What I’ll be doing for the festival, in terms of the solo performance, is very much about this idea of the body as an ear.”

Nomadic Streams runs at VIVO Media Arts from Thursday to Saturday (October 22 to 24).