was a center for contemporary art in Southeast Portland, Oregon. It was led by a desire to support artists, propose new modes of production, and stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art. This website serves as an archive of Yale Union’s programming from 2011 through 2021.

Yale Union acknowledges that it occupies the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Chinook, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Indigenous peoples.

GRAHAM LAMBKIN

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A Performance as part of Agematsu…
Sunday, June 8, 8:30pm
$12 (Free to MEMBERS)

“I wouldn’t say I work with music, I would say I work with sound and if you wish to call it music that’s fine. I would be equally happy if you came up with a different definition.” Graham Lambkin has said, “I realized I was ‘organizing sound’ as opposed to ‘making music’ towards the end of the run of The Shadow Ring. Initially I wasn’t aware there was an alternative path you could take with sound. You were either in a band or you weren’t. Of course not being armed with the vocabulary that would come from studying it academically or otherwise, we were just taking the sounds that we could make, as untutored as they were, and organizing them into some kind of system where we had our own language. As the instruments changed and the conventionality of the instruments fell away, things like post production and application of events after the fact became more interesting and more important than strumming a guitar, I think that became a eureka moment. That became a chance for me to put my fingerprint on what we were doing. As a guitar player, I’m anonymous, I’m useless, and that’s fine. But as someone who is able to organize sounds after the fact, that’s where I think I found my tongue.”

“…I always keep in mind a sense of economy. I think it’s good for me to have less to work with. I think by taking stuff away all the time, it forces you to think harder, it ignites you… I got to the point a few years ago where the only equipment I had was a Walkman, and then I thought, ‘well, this is clearly not enough.’ There’s no way you can do good work with just a Walkman, and so I had to bring in things like YouTube, well that’s what I was doing, finding things. You should be able to make a decent record with a rubber band and a cardboard box just as easily as a string quartet.”

Graham Lambkin lives in Poughkeepsie, NY where he runs Kye Records. From 1993 to 2003, he was a member of the uncompromising British band The Shadow Ring.