Alan Lamb

Archival Recordings: Primal Image / Beauty

RM4240

June 27, 2025

CD/Digital

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 families 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…  more

credits

released June 27, 2025

Recorded and edited by Alan Lamb between 1981 and 1988. With the exception of slight equalisation, no additional processing was used during these sessions.

Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space
Design by Traianos Pakioufakis
Very special thanks to Darrin Verhagen

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