Celebrating the world of words

A bold and immersive live performance with writer/musician David Lambert and Sean South. Blending spoken text, narration, and live and recorded music, this performance brings to life fourteen original texts set against a rich mix of electronic, punk, and atmospheric soundscapes.

David Lambert is a Cardiff-born, Lincolnshire-based writer/musician whose creative journey took an unexpected turn. Whilst completing his second novel – a story of a mixed race, polyamorous relationship in a post WWII Cardiff – he found himself at an impasse, so he laid the novel down … 

Seeking inspiration, he read fourteen novels in fourteen weeks –  novels that addressed the themes and issues of his unfinished novel: family, loss, racism, memory, deceit, bisexuality, identity, love – engaging, as he read, the cut-up technique made popular by William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and David Bowie, ending up with something completely new – fourteen unique spoken texts.  Over 14 months, David collaborated with the musicians Sean South, Stephen Hudson, Dave King, Liz Lenten, Duncan Chapman, Natalie Roe and Lucy Leland on the creation of 14 spoken texts to a range of diverse musical settings. 

David added, ‘The fourteen novels are diverse and cinematic. Each of the album’s 14 compositions are inspired by the books. From Nella Larsens’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel ‘Passing’, which inspired the track ‘…hopeless things … the stars’. The cut-up text from Dodie Smith’s classic novel ‘I Capture The Castle’ inspired the punk soundtrack RESTLESSNESS. Whilst Nadifa Mohammed’s heart-breaking tale, based on a true story, The Fortune Men, with its Tiger Bay backdrop, saw its cut-up narrative become the nine-minute electronic trance piece ‘The Potion and the Poison’. Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym morphed into the 1980s Human League-type production ALL GONE / THAT TIME / THOSE PEOPLE – PAWB WEDI MYND / YR AMSER HYNNW / Y BOBL HYNNY. Each novel inspired a new piece of art.

“A fascinating exploration of language, poetry, improvisation, electronics, the human voice and imagination that would crash ChatGPT … BBC RADIO WALES – BBC Introducing – Adam Thomas Walton 

• 40 min performance
• 15 min interval
• 20 min interview