English duo Shadow Ring (guitarist Graham Lambkin and percussionist Darren Harris) resurrected
the noise-folk tradition of Half Japanese
with the
EP Don't Open The Window (1993), whose Don't Open The Window
sounds like a mental-asylum version of a Scottish folk song,
and the album City Lights (Dry Leaf Discs, 1993), where an
atonal guitar destroys simple folk tunes, which are either
half-sung (City Lights)
or not sung at all (Cape of Seaweed and Here Come The Candles).
The core of the ten-minute Faithful Calls is a childish instrumental jam with a saxophone that intones a county-fair sort of melody, and that ends in a dissonant mayhem.
Keyboardist Tim Goss joined the duo for
Put The Music In It's Coffin (Siltbreeze, 1994), but the difference
in sound is negligible. Put The Music In Its Coffin offers again
recitation with an amateurish musical accompaniment, except that this time it is a vaguely bluesy thing,
and Horse Meat Cakes is six minutes of instrumental torture coupled
with some deranged mumbling.
The noise evokes psychedelic music in the single Some Of Us (1994),
which ends with one of their most deranged jams.
The single Tiny Creatures/ Harlequin (1995) collects two more declamations with demented music.
Poetry is still the focus of pieces like Gloved Up and
Wallet Of Wasps
on Wax-Work Echoes (Corpus Hermeticum, 1996), but
Apricot Rat has more intricate music, and the
seven-minute You're Holding All Your Feathered Stock opens with
similar jamming for four minutes.
A theatrical or cinematic feeling emanates from the spare but electronic
dissonance of the
nine-minute single Mouth On Mouse/ Mouse In Mouth (1997), a sign
that there was still hope of musical progress.
Hold Onto I.D. (Siltbreeze, 1997) offers a little more electronics.
In fact, The Way Of The World borders on musique concrete.
Wash What You Eat balances recitation and sound effects.
The seven-minute Like When succumbs to Dadaism.
Poetry prevails in the other seven-minute piece,
Hold Onto I.D., and it's not good news.
The double-LP Lighthouse (Swill Radio, 1999) is a colossal mess of
ideas, from the expressionist theater of I Am Lloyd Lyson and
She's A Cracker
to the parodistic harpsichord sonata I Am A Lighthouse
and the grotesque ballet Egg Mombassa
and the rusty carillon motif of Oyster Shell
via the ear-splitting electronics of If It's A Boy and X-Ray My Mind.
The last twenty minutes are particularly verbose and irrelevant.
The project feels like a rock opera by the Residents but without the musical skills and with a less funny sense of humor.
The structure of their "recitations" didn't change on
Lindus (2001) either, and
We're Complex Piss, The Riverside and
Mind Blocks Crack are stories hanging from a feeble electronic signal.
I'm Some Songs (2005), recorded in 2001-02, offers more musical and
fewer words, but the chirping synth lines of Man On The Land and the burping synth lines of Start Repeating don't amount to much more than a child playing with the knobs of the instrument.
Life Review (2009) is a career retrospective that also contains rarities.
After relocating to New York state,
Graham Lambkin launched a prolific solo career at the border between musique concrete and free improvisation:
Poem For Voice & Tape (2001),
Unfocused Hands (2004),
Draining The Vats (2006),
Salmon Run (2007),
Softly Softly Copy Copy (2009),
Amateur Doubles (2011),
Millows (2012),
Swan Song (2014),
Community (2016),
Two Points On The Angle (2017),
two volumes of No Better No Worse (2018),
etc.
There were also several collaborations with
Jason Lescalleet:
The Breadwinner (2008),
Air Supply (2010)
and the double-disc Photographs (2013).
Other collaborations include
Making A (2013) with
Keith Rowe,
Chance Meeting (2015) with
Joe McPhee,
Schwarze Riesenfalter (2015) with Michael Pisaro,
the double-disc The Whistler (2017) with Japanese laptop improviser Taku Unami,
Green Ways (2018) with Irish harpist Aine O'Dwyer,
The Dishwashers (2020) with guitar improviser Bill Nace,
etc.
In the 2010s Lambkin was also active as a visual artist (from his website: "Lambkin's visual art explores the metamorphic properties of the drawing medium in which the abstract and the figurative perpetually shape-shift across contrasting visual planes, thereby undermining the expected categories of image content" - whatever that means).
