City Lights, by The Shadow Ring

City Lights

by The Shadow Ring

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Record pressed at Memphis Record Press, metalwork by RTI, jacket by Dorado.

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1.	Double Standard 05:20	buy track
2.	City Lights 03:36	buy track
3.	Oooh Ahh 03:48	buy track
4.	Cape of Seaweed 04:50	buy track
5.	Lyin' Eyes 01:00	buy track
6.	Cold Coffee 02:26	buy track
7.	Here Come the Candles 03:50	buy track
8.	Faithful Calls 09:50	buy track
9.	White Eyes 02:48	buy track
10.	The Visitor 06:22	buy track
11.	Snowbirds of Alkatraz 02:52	buy track

about

Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this year with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions is conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group, including a multi-year LP reissue effort and a forthcoming comprehensive CD box set and an over five hundred page book.

Recorded and self-released by the group’s own Dry Leaf Discs in 1993, City Lights is the debut record of the then duo Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris—an assured arrival statement teeming with stripling angst and ambition. Lifelong chums Lambkin and Harris were barely nineteen and living at home in the seaside town of Folkestone, Kent, with few overhead expenses. The two were freshly employed as a forklift operator at a hardware store and an aide at a home for children with disabilities, respectively, affording them the time and funds to commit to a proper full-length release. Frontman Lambkin describes the album as a “microscopic examination of leisure activities, this time centered around a nightclub,” a conceit surging through its lyrics, song titles, cover art (depicting an audience of cats and mice at the Leas Club, a Folkestone fixture), and flip side (replete with fictional bandmates and pseudonymous liner notes).

On a recently-acquired secondhand guitar, Lambkin plays repetitive, brooding licks that form the record’s backbone, weaving in and out of sync with Harris’s free-form percussion and the pair’s sing-song poetry. Tracks range from unraveling nursery-rhyme ditties to extended jams awash with Casiotone and toy piano noodling. The duo’s musical hobby-horses work themselves in: the influence of Mark E. Smith’s breathless deadpan, the headless outer-edges of ESP-Disk’s back catalog, the eerie atmospherics of Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, and the deconstructed rock tunes of the Dunedin scene are all detectable, although there is a sui generis quality to the Shadow Ring’s artless temerity. “I’ve got to see and taste those city lights,” intones Lambkin on the album’s title track—indeed, this is a record of naked drive and pent-up desperation, and a shimmering glimpse of what’s to come.

credits

released October 6, 2023

2023 Blank Forms Editions reissue credits

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu
Audio restoration and remastering by Graham Lambkin with Daniel Martin-McCormick and Jade Guterman
Design by Alec Mapes-Frances

1993 Dry Leaf Discs release credits

The Shadow Ring: Graham Lambkin & Darren Harris
with S. Fritz & Tony Clark, special guest
Klaus Canterbury: electrics & xylophone

Recorded at S.H.P. Studios, Autumn
Produced by: G. Lambkin with D. Harris
Engineered by: Brian East (F/Stone)
Cover art by: G. Lambkin (front) & The Shadow Ring (back)

Lyrics by: G. Lambkin
Music by: G. Lambkin & D. Harris

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about

Blank Forms Editions Brooklyn, New York

Blank Forms is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting emerging and underrepresented artists working in a range of time-based and interdisciplinary art practices, including experimental music, performance, dance, and sound art. Blank Forms provides artists with curatorial support, residencies, commissions, and publications to help document, disseminate, and advance their practices. ... more

blankforms.org

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