"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 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 it’s 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." - Lawrence English