Lori Vambe - Drumland Dreamland *Pre-Order

Release Date Friday 18th July 2025
All pre-orders will be dispatched/made ready for collection on that day.

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 present a new single vinyl reissue of Vambe’s sought-after privately pressed album from 1982, Drumland Dreamland. A self-taught drummer, inventor, and sonic experimentalist, Vambe holds a unique place in British music. The creator of his own instrument, the drumgita (pronounced ‘drumguitar’) or string-drum, he aimed to create music that had never been previously made to pursue access to the fourth dimension and forge a radical new musical language - intuitive, polyrhythmic and metaphysical. Drumland Dreamland is deep and haunting; a dense tapestry of layered percussion, time-warped tape loops, and spiralling drumgita figures, a l underpinned by hypnotic improvisations from Brazilian pianist Rafael Dos Santos. It is both ecstatic and unsettling, a landmark recording in black British experimental music.

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. Drumland Dreamland is one of his two privately produced home recordings during 1982 alongside Drumgita Solo, both released on his own label Drumony.

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

TRACKLIST:
A1. Drumsong (One)
A2. Drumsong (Two)
A3. Drumsong (Three)
A4. Strumelody
B1. Drumelody (One)
B2. Drumelody (Two)
B3. Ydolemurd
B4. Hum Drum Dring (One)
B5. Hum Drum Dring (Two) The Freedrum Song

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