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RM 4240CD
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A note from Lawrence English: "Time is a strange and elusive companion. Listening to Alan Lamb's Primal Image/Beauty, the traces of time are deep, and forever deepening. Recorded in 1981 and 1983 respectively, and then revised and refined across the coming half decade, each of these pieces traces Lamb's personal history through materiality and harmony. 'Primal Image' was the first composition Alan Lamb completed. Recorded on the Faraway Wind Organ, a long stretch of abandoned telephone line located on his family's farm close by the Fitzgerald National Park in Western Australia, this piece resolved an interest in the sonification of wires which had started many decades before. Lamb recounts pressing his ears to a telephone pole as a child, encouraged by his nanny to 'hear the sound the world made.' 'Primal Image' is a work of intense dynamism, a climatic sonic environment within which a complexity of harmony, timbre and texture intermingle, inviting us to lean in. Similarly, 'Beauty' maintains this offer of harmonic complexity. Recorded across some 20 hours, the piece is a condensation of vibration, a folding of time and listenership that speaks both to Lamb's passion for his instrument and the instrument itself as a source of unbounded, and evolving sonics. Lamb's music is one of both attentiveness and patience. It is a music that comes forth from the world, but is simultaneously hidden from most of us. It is a music of the moment, but also one of recurrence as vibrations travel along the material that is the metal wires. It is also a music which, by its very nature, is eternally in the present. Alan Lamb, as a conduit to this material music invites us to share his listening in these moments. He asks us to cast our ears outward into the world and in doing so unlock an interiority of the mind which remains forever compelling and more so fascinating."
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RM 4239CD
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Originally recorded and edited between 1983-1997. From Lawrence English: "I'll take a guess and say I first heard Alan Lamb's Night Passage in 1999. Released by Darrin Verhagen's seminal Dorobo label, the record birthed an approach that wove together themes of materialism, field recording and a reimagining of the abandoned utilities of human habitation. Night Passage is one of those recordings I feel has always been with me, it's that foundational. It completely re-shaped the way a generation of audio explorers thought about how sound and music might exist in the orbit of each other. On my first listen I'm confident I was unable to place exactly how these sounds were created, even knowing the source materials, but one thing I can say without reservation is their resonance has lingered with me these past couple of decades. The sound world Lamb captured, waves rippling along wires, was exquisitely simple, and effortlessly deep. Here, right before us, was a sound world locked within materials we pass by everyday. In tapping into these materials, Alan Lamb unlocked a parallel dimension of sense, one guided by interactions of objects and the environments surrounding them. An inorganic, living music the likes of which had not been readily available until the publication of his recordings. Alan Lamb's work with long wires, undertaken in situ across Western Australia, are quite frankly the stuff of legend. To revisit them in such a focused way almost four decades on from their initial recording I'm struck by how other worldly and evocative they continue to be. It's with great pleasure we share Night Passage, completely remastered under the guidance of Alan himself."
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