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Earshots!

UK label from London started by Edward Lucas and Daniel Kordik and created alongside an ongoing concert series that focuses on improvised music and field recording works.

In October 2018 we took several recordings in and around Eddie Prévost’s home village of Matching Tye in Essex, where he has been living for the past fifty years. The majority of the pieces that made it to this LP took place in All Saints Church, High Laver, the burial site of John Locke. This fact was notable in the choice of title for this set of recordings, and it seemed necessary to put forward Eddie’s own take on Locke that he offered in our correspondences: “Scholars of Locke’s philosophy will be familiar with the idea of mixing labour with materials as a fore-running notion of possessive individualism and basis for private property. Such ‘mixing’ is a persuasive description of a creative act. But the theory is more worthy of a social dimension.” As for the individual titles for each of the studies on the LP, each takes ideas and elements from music past. For example, MaxPlus makes a nod towards bebop pioneering drummer Max Roach who offered an earlier hit-hat study. Eddie utilises such examples, offering further creative insights which can then be woven back into the common wealth of sound. The final track, returning to the bowed cymbal method of the first, was recorded outdoors on a breezy green, and is pictured on the back cover of the sleeve. It was an attempt to capture the playing in its ‘metamusical’ relationship with the untempered sounds of the external environment. Eddie has written about Metamusic in his book The First Concert (Copula, 2011): invoking childlike ‘protomusical’ behaviour, or the sense of music that a person might possess before the inevitable influences come to play any role in their productive, and appreciative, musical development.* Ross Lambert provided a few words along side his cover drawing entitled ‘The Metamusician’: “The eyes would symbolise for me things like searching, examining, closeness or friendship I think; engagement with the world. Decisions in making the image were completely intuitive, this is just me looking for the meaning, post-analysing, post rationalising.” - Daniel Kordik & Edward Lucas, March 2019 A set of solo percussion studies played in locations near Eddie's home in Matching Tye. Artwork by Ross Lambert. 

Eddie Prévost – Matching Mix

A collection of solo recordings made on (24 March 2018) at the Cafe Oto Project Space, and from the back seat of a car in three South London locations. Available from 27 July as a CD and download. "Just as American Primitive is a recognised and recognisable genre of music played by guitarists in thrall to John Fahey, so there is an equally distinct, though unnamed, school of guitarists dedicated to perfecting and developing the innovations of Derek Bailey. Northern Irish guitarist Ross Lambert is one such acolyte – the improvisations on this CD are even mostly performed on an axe that previously belonged to John Russell, perhaps Bailey’s best known student. Certainly, you can hear the great man’s influence in Lambert’s glancing harmonics and jagged runs, but there are other, more personal imperatives at work, too. The opening piece, ‘Floating Blossoms,’ begins with what sounds like tuning forks being struck and then vibrated against the guitar’s body, before Lambert heads into a dense and thorny deconstruction of the blues with echoes of Bill Orcutt’s admittedly more gnarled approach. Elsewhere, Lambert talks to himself and absent-mindedly hums along with his own melodic fragments, creating the sense that we’re eavesdropping on a private daydream. It’s an intimate affair, well worth waiting for from the conspicuously under-recorded Lambert." – Daniel Spicer, Jazzwise, October 2018 -- Ross Lambert / solo guitars and objects --  recorded, mixed and mastered by Daniel Kordikand Edward Lucascover illustration: detail from a drawing byRoss Lambert; ‘3 oligarchs visit Cafe Oto’;ink on paper.back cover photograph by Samantha Hayley notes by Ross Lambert and Eddie Prévost design by Earshots/dept2

Ross Lambert – MAGNIT-IZ-DAT