Guitarist and composer John Lambert has made a beautiful album using the moniker Chequerboard. Penny Black is a meticulously wrought piece of instrumental wizardry. I’d use the term “soundscapes” if that didn’t immediately make me think of worthy but dull ambient stoner music.
This is far too good for that term. It contains interweaving acoustic and electric guitar picking, ideophones, lo-fi electronic, atmospheric musique concrète, and lovely processed sounds. It sounds like it sits somewhere between the New York minimalists (Steve Reich, Lamont Young and those fellas), Jean Michel Jarre (well I think that’s a good thing), Yann Tiersen, and (on tracks like ‘Quotidian Debris’) an occasional touch of folk.
But who knows what the inspirations really were. According to the press release Lambert has been beavering away in the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo writing and recording this album and making visual art on the side (the show off) including the artwork on the record sleeve. So I suspect he doesn’t wile away the hours watching America’s Next Top Model, craving stardom, or, in fact, my approval. Indeed, Chequerboard may well come from some weird and fertile scene I know nothing about – ‘post-Pro Tools, neo-harmonic, chamber music’ or something (there should be a scene called that). Frankly I don’t care. I got given a great album today and the quantum theory of happiness says someone else must have been kicked in the nuts to balance things out. So yet again Freyne wins. In your face world.

Key Track: All of them!