Ok this is big.
One of the most unique and innovative pieces of field recording/ sound art that Australia has ever produced was recorded deep in the Western Australian outback on an abandoned stretch of land populated only with scrub and disused power lines. When he purchased the half-a-mile piece of land for $10 in 1976, Edinburgh-born, Fremantle-based, biomedical researcher Alan Lamb knew exactly what he was doing. He had first heard the magical sounds of wire music on the side of a road in Scotland and was keen to pursue this wondrous symphony of natural sound in Australia – though was discouraged to find that power lines in Perth were coated to avoid rust and general wear and tear. Luckily the lines on his outback property had been stripped by Telecom and as a result were primed for experimentation.
Referring to the power lines as the ‘Faraway Wind Organ’, when he first began recording at the property, the lines and poles had already began to decay and when he returned in 1984 to record Night Passage (Dorobo, 1998) they were in pretty bad shape. A subsequent visit revealed the wires vaporised by lightning and termites devouring the poles. Night Passage is incredible. If you weren’t already aware, you could never discern it’s source. It’s deep, compelling and all encompassing – an incredible at times aggressive, other times tender sonic world. It was released on Darrin Verhagen‘s excellent Dorobo label back in 1998, which is how I first discovered it, alongside the remix album that features Ryoji Ikeda, Thomas Koner, Lustmord and Bernhard Gunter. It was my first experience of an Aeolian harp and I still find myself drawn to its otherworldliness.
If you don’t believe me, then maybe you’ll believe Lawrence English who remastered the album and is re releasing it some 40 years later on his Room 40 label. This is what he has to say about it:
“Night Passage is one of those recordings I feel has always been with me, it’s that foundational. It completely reshaped the way a generation of audio explorers thought about how sound and music might exist in the orbit of each other…The sound world Lamb captured, waves rippling along wires, was exquisitely simple, and effortlessly deep. Here, right before us, was a sound world locked within materials we pass by everyday. In tapping into these materials, Alan Lamb unlocked a parallel dimension of sense, one guided by interactions of objects and the environments surrounding them. An inorganic, living music the likes of which had not been readily available until the publication of his recordings.”
Night Passage will be released on the 1st of November 2024. You can find it here.
