thursday 2 april – 11 pm (spoken-word)
friday3 april – 11 pm (sound performance)
saturday 4 april – 11 pm (environment)
Palazzo Vizzani
Graham Lambkin (GB)
Tradewinds
spoken-word, sound performance, environment, italian première, production Xing/Live Arts Week
Tradewinds is the title of a three-days session that Graham Lambkin presents during his stay at Palazzo Vizzani, between field recordings, electro-acoustic improvisation and spoken-word. Lambkin looks at an everyday object and sees an ocean of possibility, Like the winds evoked by the title, he transports the sound debris of the mundane world distilling them into a musical corpus with a subtle and hypnotic charm. Unsettling and ambivalent signs for an artist (we would say a sound organizer rather than a music maker) who seeks to reach the ‘bottom’ of music. Lambkin choses to embrace the unexpected and naturally occurring in the sound composition,I ntuition and chance are vital. “You have to let the vocabulary of the space have its say rather that try and control it”. It’s about capturing a moment, amplifying every aspect outside of the music itself, the act of listening, your psyche at the time, the natural sounds which intrude upon the music. Late in the evening, the rooms of the Palazzo – which was a historic home – host the sounds and moods of Tradewinds, projected into the silence of an empty house and recreating the intimacy of chamber music. We will have the opportunity to share small and large sections of a life lived, oscillatiIng between documentation and prismatic narration, characterized in certain moments, by a sinister compositional minimalism, almost the sign of an omen.
Graham Lambkin born in Dover, England, is a New York based multidisciplinary artist/publisher whose work embraces audio, visual and text-based concerns. Lambkin first came to prominence in the early 90’s through the formation of his amateur music group The Shadow Ring, who fused a D.I.Y. post-punk aesthetic with folk music, cracked electronics, and surreal wordplay, to create a unique hybrid sound that set it apart from its peers, and continues to exert an influence today. After the dissolution of The Shadow Ring Lambkin embarked on a series of striking and highly original solo releases, including the critically acclaimed No Better No Worse, Salmon Run, Amateur Doubles, and Community, as well as undertaking a string of collaborative projects with the likes of Joe McPhee, Keith Rowe, Moniek Darge, Jason Lescalleet, Michael Pisaro, and most recently Áine O’Dwyer. Lambkin’s visual art is by turns sombre and celebratory and explores themes of environment, ecology and decay with a poetic nuance that betrays the weight of its subject matter. His five solo exhibitions to date have been in New York, Los Angeles, Stuttgart and Köln, and have been documented across five hardback volumes, chiefly via Penultimate Press, London. A similar spirit of collision between the familiar and uncanny informs Lambkin’s spoken word/text-based performances and publications. The prosaic facets of life yield to mordant dream-like reflections that are at once banal and bizarre. Lambkin has performed these works internationally at such venues as The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, The Kitchen, NYC, The Sibelius Museum, Turku, Vassar College, NY, Café OTO, London, CALarts, CA, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY, Fylkingen, Stockholm, and has seen three volumes of text-based work published to date. In 2001 Lambkin founded the Kye label, which published over 60 audio editions by such artists as Philip Corner, Gabi Losoncy, Malcolm Goldstein, Joe McPhee and Matthew Revert, as well as significant archival collections from Anton Heyboer, Moniek Darge, Henning Christiansen, and Lambkin’s own Shadow Ring.