Graham Lambkin

★★★★ Solos BLANK FORMS. LP

Remastered LP boxset of the first four releases from the English experimental sound artist, plus glossy art book. As a former member of the unsettling Folkestone art trio The Shadow Ring, Graham Lambkin never traded in beauty. Those records were dank works of claustrophobic black comedy, the kind of scrabbling hermit poetry one might hear issuing from the locked room in a haunted seaside B&B. With these, his first four solo releases, Lambkin reinterpreted Alvin Lucier’s ideas of room resonance, recording himself listening to albums by other artists while simultaneously capturing the noise of his surroundings and his own huffing presence. Likening it to “trespassing on someone else’s property”, the effect is simultaneously intrusive and beautiful, especially on Amateur Doubles (included here), which is literally the warped tape sound of Lambkin and family in a cramped Honda Civic listening to CDs of ’70s French prog-folk, swirling flute and synth sounds “remixed” with the hiss of passing cars, muttering children, and Lambkin’s own creaking presence. Andrew Male