Alan Lamb is based in Dwellingup in regional Western Australia. Lamb is an artist, biomedical research scientist and General Practitioner and his investigations of The Wires have their foundations in site-specific installation, experimental audio and sound composition. After completing his PhD in Physiology at the University of Edinburgh 1975, Lamb permanently returned to Australia to undertake a Senior Research Fellowship in Neurophysiology at the University of WA. Lamb’s formal investigations of The Wires started in 1976 with his discovery of a 1km stretch of abandoned telephone wires on a farm in the Great Southern region of Western Australia, the 12 telegraph poles and 6 unsheathed wires made a soft “...singing” noise. Lamb called these wires the Faraway Wind Organ, and learnt to record them and later devised compositions with these recordings. During the 80’s and 90’s Lamb continued his work with The Wires through his own constructions in the WA desert, and collaborations with artists such as Sarah Hopkins, Joan Brassil, Kaffe Matthews, Simone de Haan and Julian Knowles. In 1997 he was commissioned by the Japanese Government to build a Wind Organ for the opening of the SPring8 Electron Synchrotron in Harima. In 2004 Wagga Space Program (WSP) commissioned Lamb to build a Wire installation for the unsound04 festival and Mutable Landscapes residency project on a farm on the outskirts of Wagga (NSW). In 2006 Lamb returned to Wagga for the unsound06 festival andLocomotivus project, which took place on a train as it moved through the landscape. During the festival the 8-carriage train pulled into a silo siding and tuned into a live CB radio transmission of the 'Pindari’ wires, which were played through a PA system installed on the train.
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