Lamb Alley

An experienced sound designer and composer working in film, Jeff T Byrd’s first full length album ‘Lamb Alley’ shows an abundance of skill, clarity and nuance befitting his cinematic credentials and a new kind of deeply emotive ambient music. The record acts as a kind of audio autobiography of his space and new environs in Lammgasse, Vienna, where everything from the neighbours’ infant crying, the creak of a piano stool and the thrum of an ending washing machine cycle are repurposed into Byrd’s audio language. There is a forensic level of detail in these recordings, with each track acting like a diary entry chronicling Byrd’s experience of Lammgasse and his inquisitive investigation into the diegetic sounds that hum in his apartment. Whether splicing these audio events into skeletal rhythmic structures or slowly revealing their clarity through modulation, Jeff has been keenly sensitive in intermingling these sonics with sumptuous and liminal melodic themes that ruminate in the ear, flowering throughout the album with the subtle graciousness of an art film score. With so much monosyllabic music being made under the dubious and overpopulated auspices of drone, hauntology and ambient music, ‘Lamb Alley’ assuredly eclipses these restrictive pigeonholes to create a new kind of expressive and narrative audio language that is anything but minimalist. It’s life affirming. A remarkable and inspiring story for the ears.