Graham Lambkin – Aphorisms All Night Flight Records

Label: Blank Forms Editions – BF 022LP
Format: Vinyl, 2LP, Gatefolk
Country: US
Released: 2023
Genre: Electronic
Style: Experimental, Musique Concrete

British sound artist Graham Lambkin makes his eagerly anticipated solo return after some seven years with this properly immersive 2LP suite on Blank Forms.

On Aphorisms his signature sense of domestic psychedelia is at its most captivating and profound, the sonic banalities of everyday life expanded into their own hermetic symphonies.  It captures Lambkin transitioning from a life spent living the US and repatriating back to the UK – post-pandemic, post-brexit – the stage is set.  Has there ever been less of a reason to leave the house?  Recordings are captured in both countries, snapshots of the everyday spaces and places before being meshed, superimposed, projected onto each other to create a displaced collage of sound.  It’s essentially a piano record, bolstered by fragments of common noise, operational clatter and his own impulsive barks and murmurs.  The sense of immersion though comes from the depth of field – we’re listening to a cohesive space as opposed to the individual elements within it, where does the music start?  When did it end?  It’s this ephemeral nature that re-renders familiar sounds into a hallucinogenic aural montage.  I am sitting in a room, not different from the one you are in now.  (Mint / New).

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” —Pascal

Graham Lambkin (of Shadow Ring fame) returns with a long awaited epic double LP, Aphorisms, his first major solo outing since Community (Kye, 2016). Recorded mostly during the early winter months of 2022, in post-pandemic New York and post-Brexit London, Aphorisms assembles the sonic detritus of daily life into hauntingly intimate aural soundscapes. Made between Lambkin’s residence in East London and Blank Forms in New York, Aphorisms superimposes the two spaces onto one another creating an imaginary stage where his musical dramas unfold. A transatlantic mediation on the rooms where Lambkin has lived and worked, Aphorisms summons up hallucinatory vistas by way of the composer’s collage technique, layering field recordings, piano, guitar, percussion, vocal fragments, and repurposed elements on top of one another in double, triple, and quadruple exposures. Like the Shadow Ring’s Lindus (Swill Radio, 2001)—recorded between Folkestone and Miami—Aphorisms ruminates on estrangement and displacement, catching Lambkin as he returns to London after two decades of living in the States, in his words, “leaving home to return home.”

Aphorisms continues Lambkin’s synthetic-naturalist approach to sound-making, twisting disparate and unique elements together to create the sensation of a coherent sonic space. At the heart of his practice is the illusion of form, whereby Lambkin combines sonic elements, documenting the moment that they coalesce into music only to disintegrate back into incidental sound. The album is centered around two pianos, one in New York and one in London, sounding together as if through the ether, creating a spectral atmosphere that Lambkin fills with melodic snippets, fragments of songs, spoken-word musings, and guttural barks or “the animal purity of voice,” as he has it. The superimposition of the two spaces is maximized in the album’s closing titular track, where, much like on earlier works such as Salmon Run (Kye, 2007) and Softly Softly Copy Copy (Kye, 2009) fragments of familiar melodies float through the mix as though being played from afar. Aphorisms is Lambkin at his best, extending methodologies only hinted at previously and taking his now-idiosyncratic mission statement to a new chapter. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Tracklist

1. Samplehurst
2. Limp Test 03:26
3. Gibbus
4. Needlemuff
5. Slave Painting
6. Corpsicus
7. Trilogy of Embers
8. Porpitus
9. Cannon Hill
10. The Wind Imp
11. Aphorisms