Dialogues

Both Catherine Lamb and I arrive for our interview in a west Berlin park slightly distracted, and the universe works to make us more so. First, a bird in a bush behind our bench insists on everyone hearing its loud, virtuosic song; we swiftly relocate to the grass in the middle of the square. Then, a man approaches us asking for water for his dogs; we give it to him, he leaves, and we try to carry on where we left off. Right as I’m in the middle of a complicated question—about what it feels like to be put in accidental lineages by cursory listeners unaware of her practice—his dogs arrive. They’re less interested in the politics of post-Feldman, and more concerned in engaging us in a game of fetch.

Both subject and interviewer struggle on valiantly, but questions false start, conversations break, begin again, then dissolve. It’s like using a roll of sellotape without a dispenser: I feel myself tearing and crunching at the end of a response, failing to find the end of a train of thought, and overcompensating for those crunched losses with ever-longer questions. Eventually, we walk away from the grass, and settle on a bench in the quietest corner of the park. 

Lamb is both a breezy talker and a deep thinker, and it’s fascinating to watch both parts of her brain war as she takes me through her music—organized in non-orthodox tuning systems, concerned with gradual unfoldings and unbroken spans, and lionizing the deep connections players find with one another—and later into thornier subjects, like activism, politics, and Gaza. The second part of her brain begins to take over as our interview goes on; pauses begin to grow at the start of her responses, and I become aware that she’s speaking carefully. A question about interpreting her music as resistance—of Western tuning systems, the thought that underpins them, and the concepts like virtuosity and complexity which build on them—perturbs her, though it’s a little later in the conversation before she reveals why that is. We speak for much longer than our allotted time, to try and find the truths in the rubble of our conversation.