Lori Vambe - Drumland Dreamland [Strut]

Format: LP in printed sleeve + booklet.
CAT: STRUT340LP1

Occasionally, music emerges from outside the commercial circuit, outside of everything: the music of visionaries, eccentrics, inventors, recluses. Moondog, Daphne Oram, and Harry Partch belong to that lineage. And so does Lori Vambe.

Strut presents a new single vinyl reissue of Vambe's sought-after 1982 self-released album, Drumland Dreamland. A self-taught drummer, inventor, and sound experimenter, Vambe holds a unique place in British music. Creator of his own instrument, the drumgita (pronounced “drum-guitar”) or string drum, he sought to create music never before realized to access the fourth dimension and forge a radical new musical language: intuitive, polyrhythmic, and metaphysical. Drumland Dreamland is profound and unsettling; a dense tapestry of layered percussion, time-stretched tape loops, and drumgita spirals, all underpinned by hypnotic improvisations from Brazilian pianist Rafael Dos Santos. It is at once ecstatic and disturbing, a seminal recording within British Black experimental music.

Lori Vambe was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, and his father, Lawrence Vambe, was a renowned Zimbabwean journalist and author. After moving to London in 1959, Vambe immersed himself in the Brixton squatting movement in the early 1970s, where he taught himself to play drums and created an ephemeral performance group, The Healing Drums of Brixton (with sculptor Alexander Sokolov and outsider musician Michael O’Shea). Later, Vambe had a dream vision in which he experienced a sense of ecstasy playing an unknown instrument that extended from his own umbilical cord, and which would eventually manifest as the drumgita. Drumland Dreamland is one of his two independently produced home recordings from 1982, alongside Drumgita Solo, both released on his own label, Drumony.

Drumland Dreamland has been faithfully reproduced from the original artwork in single LP format and remastered by The Carvery.