It’s interesting to note the way that The Shadow Ring – in common with Whitehouse – became increasingly obsessed and – yes – perverted by language as their careers progressed. By the time of the strange, melancholy later Shadow Ring albums – Lighthouse, Lindus, I’m Some Songs - the earlier surrealist narratives were gradually being replaced by a discomfited Sebaldian grey and a focus more on word as sound and sound beyond meaning. Like Whitehouse they began to deliberately manipulate syntax and sense, corrupting words and smearing tones in order to illicit less defined reactions in the listener while moving further away from ‘vocals’ altogether. In many ways Elklink – the duo of The Shadow Ring’s Graham Lambkin and Adris Hoyos of Harry Pussy – take this tendency to its very extreme.
Last time I encountered Elklink they were being introduced by Heather Leigh at the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, with Lambkin and Hoyos accompanied by Matt Krefting of Son Of Earth and Scott Foust of Idea Fire Company et al. It’s not often remembered or remarked upon that Elklink played the fest but then their performance was so confusing, so defiantly arch – Foust grated carrots for most of the performance while wearing a trademark orange jump suit, Krefting sat on the floor and played cassettes, Adris faced away from the audience and played a single cymbal – that it doesn’t quite fit the overarching free folk aesthetic that was the festival’s main conceptual thrust. Now, this, a vinyl reissue in an edition of only 500 copies – inevitably immediately sold out at source – that restores their elusive cassette on Polyamory (James Toth’s aka Wand’s great early imprint) from 1999 alongside their contribution to the Colour In Absence Sound compilation from the same year. Recorded at the same time as The Shadow Ring’s Lindus, The Rise Of Elklink magnifies and implodes the early narrative style of The Shadow Ring with a heavy air of suburban ennui somehow transformed into a series of ghostly transports that move well beyond simple sound poetry and into a form of composition that is intimately tied up with the body and the space around it, forsaking the formal satisfaction of poetry and ‘sense’ for a sound with endless subliminal depth, rich with an almost occult sense of implication, suggestion and otherworldly power. Recorded at home straight to four track the songs are accumulations of variously treated monologues and sounds that dissolve into rich miasmic fields of chatter and non-specific drone/environments in a way that owes as much to the work of Robert Ashley and Walter Marchetti as it does to Michigan noise. Indeed, the degree of acoustic/electric confusion is immediately disorientating, as body sounds break down into machine patterns, extraneous domestic sounds take on the form of voices and microphones record the speech of empty rooms. The atmosphere is similar to Whitehouse at points, though paradoxically enough it’s the early Come Org recordings that it most resembles, where Bennett’s vocals were almost impossible to fully decode. The generally malevolent air – which the deliberate breakdown of sense inevitably seems to conjure – also brings to mind the darker Nurse With Wound material like “I Was No Longer His Dominant” or “Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree” although a more contemporary reference might be the amazingly disquieting series of recordings released by Relay For Death over the past year or so. And of course it has an umbilical straight to the profoundly alienated lost-in-the-fog aspect of the last few Shadow Ring recordings. With a guest appearance from The Shadow Ring’s Tim Goss and some absolutely gripping performances from Adris and Graham, trading vocals, blurring roles until each seem to be a degraded reflection of each other, this is one of the most remarkable, disturbing, impenetrably deep broadcasts from some of the key figures in contemporary underground music. File it alongside Lindus, Put My Dream On This Planet, Total Sex, Automatic Writing, Let’s Build A Pussy, Crowley’s cylinder recordings and Coil’s ELpH workings in the part of your collection reserved for modern classics. Highly recommended!

Debut LP from the trio of Scott Foust, Karla Borecky and Graham Lambkin (The Shadow Ring) consists of radically hand-sculpted home recordings broadcast straight to tape between the years 1999 and 2000. Moves from concrete miniatures to full-blown drone/throat rituals. Recommended.

More “I Am Driving In A Car” than “I Am Sitting In A Room”, Graham Lambkin of The Shadow Ring et al’s much-anticipated new solo album is as head-scratchingly brilliant and as confoundingly beautiful as anything he has released to date. First, the specifics: broken down to its basics, Amateur Doubles consists ‘simply’ of Lambkin driving around in a car with his family while playing some classic French oddball/prog from the legendary Pole cabal, namely Philippe Grancher’s 1976 album 3000 Miles Away and Besombes-Rizet’s classic 1975 Pole LP. So fucking what, you might ask? Well, uh, okay: if you know these records well it’s like hearing them in some kind of strange reverie, like a memory of hearing them, as the sonic space of the car gives them a weird, boxy distance, especially with the more floaty, melancholy flute and reed passages and the zoned organ sections. Indeed, Lambkin has radically re-thought the original recordings, remixing and re-editing them while adding details from other sources – the vocals of free improviser Amy Sheffer for one. Then there’s the environmental sounds, not chosen for their beauty or according to any aesthetic agenda - no fuggin’ fountains or bubbling water or expiring sheep - but the sounds of Graham and Adris Hoyos’s children in the back seat, the zoom of traffic, sometimes very apparent, sometimes engulfed by the Industrial scale confusion of the music, but always coming back to the quiet, protected space of the car, travelling through a particular moment in space/time. There’s something unmistakably melancholy about it, something nostalgic even, the quality of a family holiday remembered, complete with its own soundtrack and of course it also raises question about notions of listening and of listening to listening and whether, like Schrodinger’s Cat, the presence of someone else listening on a recording that you are listening to somehow changes or affects the recording or the relationship between ‘performer’ or ‘consumer’ or at least makes you hear it differently. But much more than any conceptual yucks that the piece may or may not have it’s uncannily powerful, very affecting and – in a way – the ultimate realisation of Lambkin’s long-running project to relocate mundanity, pointlessness and the everyday into a magical once-removed zone where it is re-presented in all its surreal and momentary beauty. Who would have thought that something so seemingly conceptual could be so intimately affecting? I know I’ll be living in this beautifully presented LP for a long time to come. Comes in a high gloss gatefold sleeve with a nice snap of Graham, Adris and their kids, pressed on clear vinyl in an edition of 500 copies, already completely sold out at source. Highly recommended!