It’s been a full three years since Lee Gamble’s debut, the 80mm 0!I!0 3″ CD (part1), also on Entr’acte. In the time time since, he’s been performing in and around the U.K both solo and in collaboration with John Wall, and occasionally leaking material via his website. Join Extensions clocks in at a commendably concise 37 minutes, but contains ample evidence that Gamble’s deployment of digital noise textures have only sharpened in the interim. Its abrasive sonics, as precisely sculpted as they are immediate and confrontational, link him to what in our post-Mego era has come to be tagged as ‘extreme computer music’. But his compositional deftness, characterised by volatile dynamics and rapid shifts in perspective, alludes to musique concrète and, less overtly, electroacoustics.
Gamble has described his compositional process as one of “perpetual configuration, disfiguration and reconfiguration”. Flashes of structures certainly emerge on several tracks, if only sporadically. Certain textures occur and fleetingly recur, most commonly a snippet of a looming, ascending tone. It functions as a locating device, an aid to navigating some difficult terrain. Swarms of wildly oscillating tones fragment with alarming suddenness; wayward pitches and erratic, sibilant frequencies are exploded into sputtering white noise.
Gamble’s fondness for algorithmic wave patterns brings to mind the work of Florian Hecker — passages in Lidddc Version and Elastic Points Transitions work up barrages of swooping sound arcs, which fire out digital fragments in multidirectional sprays. But Gamble is working with different sound velocities and filtering them through less obtuse trajectories, as the album’s artwork — angularly skewed orthogonal graphics — might indicate. Join Extensions closes with the beguiling Udhrust 1994, which swaddles percussive tinklings in swirling harmonics. An almost psychedelic concoction, it’s generated from a markedly different sound palette. Gamble’s handling of it is, like Join Extensions as a whole, impressively assured.
Nick Cain in The Wire – Feb 2010
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Brummie’s formidable power-electronics. As composers such as Florian Hecker have proved, it takes a lot of imaginiative programming to make a computer sound like a hoard of flies. Birmingham producer Lee Gamble has dedicated the best part of a decade to this kind of inscrutable number crunching, and with the fizzy blitz of a second album Join Extensions it’s clear one is encountering a distinctive voice in the field of digital synthesis. Admittedly, it’s difficult to form an emotional attachment to pieces that sound like a gale roaring round a tent, but what most impresses, particularly on “Elastic Point Transitions”, is Gamble’s playfulness. * * *
Piers Martin in Uncut Magazine – March 2010
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This half-hour synthesis work, which has remarkable parallels with Florian Hecker, proves on closer examination a software album par excellence, and takes on an amazingly unselfconscious straddling position alongside Kim Cascone’s early MaxMSP works. Join Extensions, appears as a studio album conceptually similar to Florian Hecker’s “Acid In The Style of David Tudor,” but not in the circumscribed technological way of the Mego-artist. Lee Gamble knows how to use the Psychoacoustic scaling of stereo and DSP-blending, the very acoustic sounding digitalis sometimes bringing the music into more Xenakis like territory, but without the accompanying baggage. What sets Join Extensions apart from the rest is it’s magnificent use of silence and stereoscopic direction, making it considerably different from the run of the mill PD and the self-styled Cycling74 Group. Great work, even for those who hitherto only had Kraftwerk and Seesselberg as a reference. 5/5
Feb issue 13 – Aemag
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Through various digital synthesis techniques Lee Gamble creates abrasive and motionful vignettes. According to Gamble some of the tracks are the result of chaotic and improvised operations, others of rigorous compositional choices, yet it is difficult for the listener to distinguish between these two methods. Which is of little importance, as this albums interest resides elsewhere, namely in the wealth of textures on offer. At times, these evoke the irritating flight of a mosquito, or the roaring vibrations of futuristic machines. But rather than building an impenetrable wall of sound, Gamble favours swift changes of intensity and colours. In this, Join Extensions evokes the musique concrète work of Bernard Parmegiani, or Mego’s experimentations. If this album mostly gives the impression of a demonstration of force, it nonetheless is a racy, abstract and fascinating work .
Jean Dezert at Le son du grisli – Jan 2010
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Gamble does computerised music out of the concrète tradition. Most of the music here is dense, tightly packed, even claustrophobic in character. For my taste, I get too much the sensation of a sequence of sound effects — often very elaborate ones, but still — and little that exerts force on me as a slab of music. There’s also a slight sheen of the overly synthesised as well; for all the apparent rough edges, I sense little real grit. I may well be missing something but I’m hearing too much flash, not enough sinew.
Brian Olewnick at Just outside – Jan 2010
Lee Gamble of the CYRK collective presents an exclusive mega-mix shaped from a dazzling array of computer music techniques – a veritable funhouse of timbre and spectral dynamics, and not a factory preset in sight. As a test run for his upcoming Entr’acte CD ‘Join Extensions’, this piece shows promise for that disc to continue the exciting trend of 21st century computer music and digital synthesis: that is to say, music which has escaped from its ivory tower imprisonment and is now free once again to act as a physical AND intellectual force.
Thomas Bey William Bailey – Aug 2009
Lee Gamble presented a laptop noise-scape which sounded a bit like a tribute to various film genres starting out with a killer bee style electronic insects assault, followed by a cartoonish cry of someone in freefall and ending with polite applause which sounded uncannily like it might have been recorded at the end of the previous act.
(web review by kreigslok – 10 Jul 2008, 08:57)
” His entertaining, eventful debut digitally reconstitutes existing recordings into seven brief electroacoustic compositions, which playfully bounce and jump–cut from shifting layers of sibilant frequencies to fractal pitch-mangling to busy, boinging barrages of all manner of random sound.”
Nick Cain in The Wire
” I must admit that, after almost 40 years of listening to sounds of every conceivable species, there are still records that leave me at a loss for words.
Enter Lee Gamble, author of ‘seven virtual-hybrid models of spontaneous and ordered (non essential goal) related Celomund O!I!O! computer audio compositions’ (of course, Lee, I trust you). Comprised of little more than 19 minutes — it’s a 3-inch, folks — there are more abrupt changes, sudden discharges, alien burps and ultra-short complex melodies here than in the zapped circuit of an electronic pinball machine. Fizzing white noise, extreme panning and continuously morphing timbres — which could have been conceived either by a mad scientist or a deranged dentist — are featured in this (unfortunately) short briefing about the best of what computer music has to offer nowadays. Could have been released only by Entr’acte, the only label whose record covers must be scissor-sliced to access the content. Incidentally, there’s still someone around talking about ‘seven notes’.”
Massimo Ricci at Touching Extremes