Black Truffle celebrates its 150th release with »Premasters«, a collaborative project by Emmett Kelly and Graham Lambkin. Kelly is a guitarist and songwriter active in underground rock supergroup The Hard Quartet and hypnotic boogie duo The Double with Jim White, with a trail of one-man-band power pop behind him as The Cairo Gang. Lambkin is a founding member of the Shadow Ring and a proponent of radically quotidian audio art. It might not seem a likely pairing, but on »Premasters« they mark out a secluded tract of common ground, where ruminative finger-picking and flashes of sputtering psych rock sit within a tape-collaged architecture of looped fragments, natural sounds, and mysterious interjections. After all, the spirit of Steve Peregrin Took always haunted the Shadow Ring and, like all one-man bands, The Cairo Gang always had a touch of cabin fever.

Beginning with repeated, resonant rubbing, the opener »Christopher Robin Comes Closer« abruptly cuts into a lumbering jam, Kelly’s twin electric guitars channelling prime Jerry Donahue over an off-kilter looped riff. The tracks that follow stray into a wayward take on British folk pastorale, with layered voices singing gently surreal, non-rhyming lyrics over intricate acoustic guitar patterns. By the time we reach »When Breezes Blew Smiles«, »Premasters« has stumbled through the looking glass: delicate acoustic guitars weave through back-masked crowds and dissonant piano chords, while voices repeatedly intone the title phrase, periodically interrupted by thunderous applause. The flipside follows a similar movement from song-length nuggets to collaged sprawl, though with a more frazzled edge. »Cosmoses« is derailed by a drum cameo from Jim White, while »Arkling« scrambles another slice of finger-picking into crooked loops. When twelve-string guitars fade into outdoor sounds and spectral smears at the beginning of the long »Stream of What Ifs«, the effect is like listening to a rip of an obscure film soundtrack, complete with diegetic sound.

Like Lambkin’s »Aphorisms«, »Premasters« occupies a unique space: it is essentially musique concrète, but works primarily with recognisably musical materials. Even at its most song-like, it retains a sense of tape construction, stemming less from high-brow academic experimentalism than from the unhinged edits of early Daevid Allen or Nascita Della Sfera. As the title suggests, »Premasters« captures the energy of music that is not quite finished: levels shift unexpectedly, overdubs sit starkly over their backgrounds, and borrowings from favourite records fill in gaps like placeholders for a finished version that never came. Lambkin and Kelly pay their respects to beloved private press records of the 1970s not by aping them, but by channelling the unpolished, obsessive, yet ad hoc quality that makes them so alive. Arriving in a handsome sleeve designed by Lambkin and Kathryn Pell, »Premasters« is undoubtedly the year’s finest slice of absurdist psych-folk concrète.