Lori Vambe 'Drumgita Solo'

Occasionally, you find music outside the commercial mainstream, outside of everything – the music of visionaries, eccentrics, inventors, loners. Moondog, Daphne Oram, Harry Partch are from this mould. And so too is Lori Vambe.

Strut now present a new single vinyl reissue of Vambe’s privately pressed original album from 1982, Drumgita Solo. A self-taught drummer, inventor, and sonic experimentalist, Vambe is a unique figure in British music. The creator of his own instrument, the drumgita (pronounced ‘drum-guitar’) or string-drum, Vambe intended to create a kind of music that had never been made in order to pursue access to the fourth dimension. The album plays with time, mixing hypnotic, trance-like drumgita pieces with the same segments played backwards. You can hear echoes of African drumming traditions, minimalist repetition, and tape-manipulated musique concrète—but ultimately, the album defies genre. It is a solitary voyage, spiritual and
futuristic.

Lori Vambe was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and his father, Lawrence Vambe, was a noted Zimbabwean journalist and author. Moving to London in 1959, Vambe immersed himself in the Brixton squat movement of the early 1970s, teaching himself to drum and creating a short-lived performance group, The Healing Drums of Brixton (with sculptor Alexander Sokolov and outsider musician Michael O’Shea). Vambe later had a dream-vision involving a feeling of ecstasy while playing an unknown instrument that extended from his own umbilical cord which would manifest itself as the drumgita. Drumgita Solo is one of his two privately produced home recordings during 1982 alongside Drumland Dreamland, both released on his own label Drumony.

Drumgita Solo has been faithfully reproduced from the original artwork as a single vinyl LP and is remastered by The Carvery.