See also: Graham Lambkin - The Cat & Bells Club
DOUBLE LAMBKIN! Which is to say we get a new Lambkin and some very old Lambkin, all of which i'd presume is an intentional precursor to the Shadow Ring boxset Blank Forms have been teasing for a while now. Let's start with the here and now - Aphorisms is the first Lambkin solo album since 2016, recorded in the early part of 2022 between London and New York. It's a substantial offering at 75 minutes in length, playing with the typical Lambkin concerns of space and atonality, superimposing and collaging in haunting and hallucinatory ways (for the latter, see in particular the mammoth album centre point Trilogy of Embers). Given its purpose as a rumination on displacement - that feeling of being between places, and how the room or the city shifts our understandings - might we consider it psychogeographic? The people releasing it certainly aren't using that word, but it makes sense to these ears, struck as it is by a purgatorial eeriness and the overriding question of what is home. On that point, we turn to The Cat and Bells Club, a Lambkin and Darren Harris collaboration made as 18 year olds in 1992, which for all intents and purposes we might as read as the start of the journey which leads to the subjects explored on Aphorisms. Recorded in Lambkin's bedroom in his parents house, this literally is the sound of the room and of home, and teenagers indulging and exploring imaginations that stretch way beyond it. It's said that beyond a select few insiders, very few have heard these songs before, though plenty have heard where they led - this is effectively proto Shadow Ring (the final track even contains that very phrase) in all its rudimentary, primitive glory, the clang, the off-centre idioms, the distinct vernacular. Blank Forms are lifting the veil a little here, but don't expect what you find underneath to make a great deal of sense. If this is teenage dreaming, fuck knows what those kids were eating before they went to sleep. Truly, though, there's not a single Shadow Ring fan out there that isn't gonna wanna hear these 16 perverse ruminations. Now, where's that boxset...
