Alan Lamb - Archival Recordings: Primal Image / Beauty

After his passing in April this year at the age of 81, two of Alan Lamb’s earliest recordings - released in 1981 and 1983 - appear on a new edition for Room 40, newly remastered by Lawrence English and available for the first time in 30 years. Recorded using miles of abandoned telephone wire shivering in the wind, they’re a perfect, heady introduction to Lamb’s deeply moving and highly influential sound art, highly recommended if you’re into Ellen Fullman, Richard Harrison’s Drone Hill, Harry Bertoia’s Sonambient pieces. After buying a plot of land in Perth in 1976 that included miles of telephone wires that were no longer in use, Alan Lamb famously started experimenting with different recording techniques to try and capture sounds he had first encountered as a child in Scotland. 'Primal Image' was recorded in 1981 and was the first composition Lamb finished, his first using the Faraway Wind Organ, a resonant aeolian harp assembled from that abandoned telephone wire. Lamb's goal was to recreate a sound memory that was lodged in his mind; pressing his ears against a telephone pole as a toddler in Scotland and hearing its eerie vibrations, opening a window into “a climatic sonic environment within which a complexity of harmony, timbre and texture intermingled….”. What’s most astonishing about these pieces is that - bar some equalisation - there's no overdubs or sound manipulation here whatsoever. ‘Beauty’ was assembled two years later, plucked from over 20 hours of recordings, condensing the vibrations of his instrument into a shorter-form display of seismic, metallic shimmers and howling wails. Reminding of both Ellen Fullman’s ‘Long String Instrument’ and Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures, Lamb’s work here feels to harness a more elemental energy, capturing the scale and might of nature in a way that encourages us to cock an ear to the world around us with more intention. Last year saw a reissue of ‘Night Passage' - Lamb's best-known album - but these two earlier works provide an important insight into the development of a foundational process and rarefied craft.  RIP maestro.

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