LAMB, ALAN - Archival Recordings: Primal Image/Beauty

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' ma