Catherine Lamb - Point/Wave [Another Timbre - 2019]Point/Wave is a recently released work from US composer Catherine Lamb- who creates often tonally blurring modern compositions. This thirty seven-minute work is for solo guitar & electronics, and it’s a both oddly stern-yet- wavering sour bit of composition- with a pitch altering guitar moving with subtle electro simmer. This release appears in the form of a CD on Another Timbre- with the thirty-minute piece been offered up as a single track The piece was originally written in 2015 and is here played by Chilean Guitarist Cristián Alvear- who is known for his playing in experimental music and modern compositional circles.
The piece is built around a series of picked & ringing guitar tones- these drift out as angular and stark sound ripples of tonally waving pattern-nation. Around these mid-paced flow of sparse twangs and plucks, the electronics stay mostly as a faint simmer haze- but from time to time these raise up to slightly more buzzing/ pressing background peaks. The whole thing has an effective feeling of numbing stark-ness, slowly crawling uncertainty, and glum resolve- sure it’s not for everyone, but if you're in a sorted awkward/ strung out/ bleakly delicate mood I think it might well click with you.
In summing Point/Wave- what we have here is highly sparse & spare example of Lamb’s tonally blurring take on modern composition- maybe it's not the most involving or replayable of Ms. Lambs works I’ve heard, but certainly I can see if your in the mood starkly set solo guitar composition with very subtle effective electro elements in place- then you could well get something from it’s bitter & glum circling.    Roger Batty
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