The Cat & Bells Club, by The Cat & Bells Club

The Cat & Bells Club

by The Cat & Bells Club

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
140g black vinyl pressed at RTI. Insert & jacket printed at Stoughton Printing Co. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.

Includes unlimited streaming of The Cat & Bells Club via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	Cat Thread 02:39	buy track
2.	Father's Dead 01:30	buy track
3.	Salt Would 03:13	buy track
4.	Coffee House 02:07	buy track
5.	Prallo By Window 04:24	buy track
6.	Oak Key 01:17	buy track
7.	Raven Chest 03:06	buy track
8.	Pipe Fly 02:11	buy track
9.	A Fairwell Rive 00:32	buy track
10.	Spanish Donkey 03:01	buy track
11.	C-Town Breeding Ground 02:46	buy track
12.	The Co-operative 03:43	buy track
13.	Clip Blue Ceap 01:26	buy track
14.	Cave of Ice Cats 04:03	buy track
15.	Theme'ers 02:42	buy track
16.	Kent Custer 03:29	buy track

about

In 1992, under the guise of the Cat & Bells Club, eighteen-year-old Cheriton residents Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris self-released three tapes—two yellow cassettes and one pink—documenting their earliest musical efforts at S.H.P. studios (Lambkin’s bedroom in his parents’ house). The lowest of all lo-fi recordings, these tracks were laid down live, directly into a boombox with no overdubs. Relieved of their academic expectations and plunged into the workforce, the duo aspired to enter the annals of rock history, making their own primitive teenage overtures to Marc Bolan, the Incredible String Band, Whitehouse, and the Godz. Lyrically and spiritually the Cat & Bells Club had much to do with Bolan’s early Tyrannosaurus Rex project, but with a hyperlocalized Folkestonian twist that nonetheless maintained his penchant for chevaline. While much of the Club’s repertoire comprised freeform instrumental try-outs—untuned charity shop guitars and coffee cup drum kits—a number of songs featured Lambkin’s original lyrics, read by both members of the band, dramatizing the comings and goings of anthropomorphic animals and musing abstractly on the minutiae of daily life in Cheriton (their native C-Town).

Taking their moniker from a mishearing of “the jester’s bauble, cap and bells,”' a line from Incredible String Band’s “The Iron Stone,” the duo operated for a brief year under the increasingly esoteric influence of the Fisheye mail-order and then fledgling Forced Exposure fanzine, and from the airwaves via Radio 1’s John Peel show. This collection was compiled by Lambkin in the early aughts for an unrealized release on his now defunct Kye label, but barring a few tracks on a retrospective 7″ issued by Siltbreeze in 2010, hardly any of these recordings have been heard beyond a handful of hangers-on, inner-circle drinking allies, and the most devoted of fans. The Cat & Bells Club set the stage for what was to soon follow, when the group changed its name to the Shadow Ring—the rest is history.

credits

released June 23, 2023

Remastered by Graham Lambkin
Mastered for vinyl & digital by Stephan Mathieu
Design by Alec Mapes-Frances

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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

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