GRAHAM LAMBKIN - Community

Especially in film, the close bond between documentary and narrative has always existed, and over the decades it has allowed small and large slices of lived experience, historical events and scientific analyses to become the main subject and object of the work, thus going beyond the original function of entertaining the masses.

With music the discussion becomes far more complex, and the audience's appeal seems to move in inverse proportion. For both the maker and the listener, it is an exercise in "reading" reality that demands a very particular attention in gathering and holding together the many stimuli that populate the acoustic space — at times sparse and microscopic, at others catching the nearest fraction of an inextricable chaos.

For an uncompromising label like Erstwhile, for more than fifteen years, the latter has been the only possible mode of listening, whether the recordings are naturalistic or consist solely of artificial input. On repeated occasions, solo or in collaboration, Graham Lambkin has resolutely pursued a path of sensitive (in the sentimental sense) alteration of the outer world, selectively projected into a corpus of sound with a subtle and hypnotic appeal. After the sinister compositional minimalism of "Schwarze Riesenfalter" as a duo with Michael Pisaro, one of the gurus of the Wandelweiser circle, the double "Community" (or single LP on Kye Records) moves closer to a form of patchwork that embraces field recordings, electroacoustic improvisation and fragments of recited poetry.

By aggregating these different sources, Lambkin does not seem to wrench them from their context in order to relocate them at will; rather, he forges a free synthesis of them with the aim of assembling a wholly imaginary yet familiar space, within which the wash of the sea mingles with pure tones and electroacoustic jolts ("The Saver"), bucolic violins ("Spectrums"), mischievous harmonicas ("The Harmocia") and a cello that, echoing the words Graham spoke, intones the Scottish folk melody "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean".

Personalities may not show themselves on the first or on the second meeting: will eventually bloom, perhaps in the back of a taxi cab passing through town, perharps on an airplane 10.000 miles over the ocean.

Life intrudes on the creative process, taking on the sharp contrasts of a Kurt Schwitters-style collage (the reference on the cover is obvious), a device that restores the coexistence of the similar and the opposite, an intrinsic trait of sensory experience. But if the first CD is the true work, presented in all its elaborateness, the long "bonus" on the second appears as a marginal note grazing the surface of everyday life: as in the "Photographs" compiled together with Jason Lescalleet, the immediate event and the memory of the senses, while carrying the same value, become almost indistinguishable.

Lambkin himself, moreover, considers the album more a study of the space occupied by the individual within the community than of the community itself — which nonetheless shapes the way we look at and listen to the world, and alters our perception with sounds that lie outside our range of action.

Among various possible readings, "Community" could be a work about the creation of art well before it manifests, when it still crowds the mind as formless matter and it seems impossible that it will ever find a coherent outlet. Yet it exists, stirring in the most remote sensing and waiting for its moment, if it ever comes.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

15/11/2016