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
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Ross Lambert / solo guitars and objects
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recorded, mixed and mastered by Daniel Kordik
and Edward Lucas
cover illustration: detail from a drawing by
Ross 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
Available as 320k MP3 or 16bit FLAC
Tracklisting:
1. Floating blossoms - 12.04
2. Nightclub wife - 11.18
3. The melody that moves me - 05.04
4. Lure of a lowbrow engineer - 08.01
5. Sometime receptionist - 10.12
6. Hamish Imlach - 05.03
7. Easily influenced with a sense of doubt - 04.58
Northern Irish (and London-based) guitarist and ‘magnetic and vibrating sources’ player Ross Lambert, has in his own words, the following fundamental and simultaneous approaches to live performance: to play as though it was both the first time and also the last; and to able to differentiate between what is good and worth conserving and what is not. Ross has been involved in, initiated and been a connector between a very wide variety of improvisatory music since his first exposure and (immediate) commitment to it, in Sheffield via Derek Bailey during the mid-1980s. Although under-recorded (he claims ‘by choice’), Ross has worked with a huge number of musicians from around the world, including Tetuzi Akiyama, Ami Yoshida, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Paul Hession, Rhodri Davies, John Butcher and Evan Parker, as well as his close friends Eddie Prevost, Seymour Wright, and Sebastian Lexer.
