Night Passage by Alan Lamb

A note from Lawrence English
I’ll take a guess and say I first heard Alan Lamb’s Night Passage in 1999. Released by Darrin Verhagen’s seminal Dorobo label, the record birthed an approach that wove together themes of materialism, field recording and a reimagining of the abandoned utilities of human habitation.

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.

On my first listen I’m confident I was unable to place exactly how these sounds were created, even knowing the source materials, but one thing I can say without reservation is their resonance has lingered with me these past couple of decades. 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.

Alan Lamb's work with long wires, undertaken in situ across Western Australia, are quite frankly the stuff of legend. To revisit them in such a focused way almost four decades on from their initial recording I’m struck by how other worldly and evocative they continue to be.

It’s with great pleasure we share Night Passage, completely remastered under the guidance of Alan himself.

Room40, a beacon of sound...ringing out from the deepest south. Also home to our sibling labels Someone Good and A Guide To Saints.

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