Premasters Premasters

Black Truffle celebrates its 150th release with Premasters, a collaborative project from Emmett Kelly and Graham Lambkin. Kelly is a guitar-slinger and songwriter active in the underground rock supergroup The Hard Quartet and hypnotic boogie duo The Double with Jim White, with a trail of one-man-band power pop snaking behind him as The Cairo Gang; Lambkin, a founding member of the Shadow Ring and proponent of a radically quotidian audio art. It might not seem a likely pairing, but on Premasters they mark out a secluded tract of common ground, where ruminative finger picking and flashes of sputtering psych rock sit within a tape-collaged architecture of looped fragments, natural sounds and mystery interjections. After all, the spirit of Steve Peregrin Took always haunted the Shadow Ring and, like all one-man-bands, The Cairo Gang always had a touch of cabin fever.

Beginning with a repeated, resonant rubbing, opener ‘Christopher Robin Comes Closer’ abruptly cuts into a lumbering jam, Kelly’s twin electric guitars channelling prime Jerry Donahue over an over-kilter looped riff. The tracks that follow stray into a wayward take on British folk pastorale, with layered voices singing gently surreal, non-rhyming lyrics over intricate acoustic guitar patterns. By the time we reach ‘When Breezes Blew Smiles’, Premasters has stumbled through the looking glass: delicate acoustic guitars weave through back-masked crowds and dissonant piano chords, while voices repeatedly intone the title phrase, periodically interrupted by thunderous applause. The flipside works a similar movement from song-length nuggets to collaged sprawl, though with a more frazzled edge. ‘Cosmoses’ is derailed by a drum cameo from Jim White, while ‘Arkling’ scrambles another slice of finger picking into crooked loops. When twelve-string guitars fade into outdoor sounds and spectral smears at the beginning of the long ‘Stream of What Ifs’, the effect is like listening to an obscure film soundtrack rip complete with the diegetic sound.

Like Lambkin’s Aphorisms, Premasters occupies a unique space of what is essentially musique concrète but primarily working with recognisably musical materials. Even at its most song-like, it retains a sense of tape construction but in a vein stemming less from any high-brow academic experimentalism than to the unhinged edits of early Daevid Allen or Nascita Della Sfera. As the title suggests, Premasters captures the energy of music not-quite-finished: Ievels shift unexpectedly, overdubs sit starkly over their backgrounds, borrowings from favourite records fill in gaps like placeholders for a finished version that never came. Lambkin and Kelly pay their respects to beloved private press records of the 1970s not through aping them, but by channelling the unpolished, obsessive yet ad hoc quality that makes them so alive. Arriving in a handsome sleeve designed by Lambkin and Kathryn Pell, Premasters is undoubtedly the year’s finest slice of absurdist psych-folk concrète.