Launching back into their widely celebrated and much needed reissue initiative, dedicated to The Shadow Ring’s seminal back catalog, Blank Forms deliver the first ever vinyl pressings of two of the band’s most celebrated and sought after releases: 1997’s ‘Hold Onto I.D.’ and 1996’s ‘Wax-Work Echoes’. Entirely singular efforts of sonic radicalism, channeling the bleak isolation of the 90s British seaside, bridging unanticipated chasms between punk, DIY electronic experimentalism, sound poetry, and the ghosts of Fluxus, nearly a full three decades on from their original release, each remain vital and compelling expressions of the power of sound and art.

Over the last few years, we’ve found ourselves with no shortage of praise for the New York based curatorial platform, publisher, and record label Blank Forms. Almost entirely unique in the landscape of experimental art and sound, they’ve brought forth a vast range of material at a startling pace - archival and contemporary texts and music - as well as presenting concerts, exhibitions, and talks. Central to the initiative’s output is their label, which, since launching in 2017, has delivered groundbreaking releases by Charlemagne Palestine, Don Cherry, Maryanne Amacher, Judith Hamann, Atrás Del Cosmos, James Rushford, Jerry Hunt, Takehisa Kosugi, Akio Suzuki, and numerous others, collectively building bridges between various idioms of experimental practice, across their historical and contemporary realizations. Beginning back in 2021, Blank Forms began releasing a significant amount of the English multidisciplinary artist Graham Lambkin’s seminal back catalog, to great critical response, which set the stage for an equally comprehensive dive into the work of his legendary group The Shadow Ring, one of the great gestures of DIY experimentalism to emerge from the UK during the 90s and early 2000s. Beginning in 2023, they reissued the band’s ‘City Lights’, ‘Put The Music In Its Coffin’, and ‘Live On KFJC’ in beautiful editions, before culminating the run with 2024’s monumental '1992-2002' box set. Now, a short while down the road, Blank Forms returns to this essential initiative, delivering the first ever vinyl pressings of two of the most celebrated and sought after releases in The Shadow Ring’s catalog, 1997’s ‘Hold Onto I.D.’ and 1996’s ‘Wax-Work Echoes’.

It seems, with hindsight, there was something in the air during the 1990s. Within numerous contexts of underground music, across the globe, creativity percolated and flowed, often embracing a radical sense of experimentation that was met by surprisingly receptive audiences. While output flowing from cities like New York, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, Seattle, and Paris have long dominated the narratives surrounding the sounds produced during this decade, among the most distinct and groundbreaking often occurred in less expected and slightly off the beaten path towns. In the case of The Shadow Ring, among the most singular and distinct projects to emerge from the early 90s UK scene, this was the small, neglected seaside town of Folkestone, on the English Channel, in Kent. Co-founded in 1991 by Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris, while they were all still in their teens, before being expanded by the joining of Tim Goss a few years later, for their decade long run the band occupied a distinct place at the margins of the English experimental scene - inheriting and making anew the incongruous territories opened by seminal projects Nurse With Wound, Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, and Psychic TV - via the sculpting of haunting aural landscapes that bridged DIY and noise aesthetics with radical notions of spoken word and sonic organisation. Decidedly English and working class, much like The Fall before them, The Shadow Ring pushed back at perceptions of who was perceived, within the social hierarchies of the UK, to speak into the contexts of art, channeling the isolation, boredom, socioeconomic neglect that defined so many aspects of its member’s lives. Part of a sprawling global network of artists loosely gathered around the Siltbreeze imprint - The Dead C, Alastair Galbraith, Gate, Charalambides, Harry Pussy, Alan Licht, The Tower Recordings, Hall of Fame, etc - they left behind eight full-lengths, a handful of 7"s, the memories of raucous gigs, and a handful of zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, before disbanding following Lambkin’s relocation to Poughkeepsie, NY, during the early years of the new millennium.

With their catalog having remained largely out of print and difficult to obtain for years, as the decades rolled by legends began to swirl around The Shadow Ring, bringing forth new generations of fans and deep need for access to their remarkable body of work. Thankfully, over the last few years, Blank Forms has endeavored to do just that.

Recorded across late 1996 into early 1997, ‘Hold Onto I.D.’ - originally (and previously only) released on CD by Siltbreeze - is The Shadow Ring’s fourth full-length and arguably the project’s most well-known and accessible album: ever so slightly holding a form roughly akin to rock song structure, albeit in the most irreverent and abstracted realizations. Recorded in their newly occupied home, Coombe House, Lambkin and Darren Harris embarked upon the album’s process by reworking material penned over the course of the previous year, aided by Tim Goss, who threaded his “home-cooked tape experiments and dime-store concrète” into the bristling tension formed by Harris’s deadpan, angular poetic recitations and Lambkin’s awkwardly strummed electric guitar. The resulting album, timed in its release to correspond with a US tour alongside Idea Fire Company, comprises seven deeply autobiographical pieces that filter and obscure Lambkin’s lyrics, laden with bureaucratic terms and codes - identification cards, National Insurance numbers, and British passport numbers, etc. - through expressionist tendencies, producing abstracted concrete poetics that convey the banality and existential gloom of the band’s day to day experience and environment, mirrored by the raw sense of musicality within which they rest.

Virtually unclassifiable in any meaningful set of terms, even at their most ‘accessible’ - a claim that many have applied to ‘Hold Onto I.D.’ - The Shadow Ring, encountered in all of their glory across the length of the LP, roughly three decades on, feel timeless and way ahead of the pack. Raw, open, and spacious, with its sounds stripped to their most elemental and necessary - where the topical necessities of punk meet an entirely radical and unpretentious reimagining of the avant-garde - as the trio writhes and rolls within its own off-kilter utterances, obscure meanings, textures, and tones, we are continuously reminded of the vital importance of art and its ability to convey and transport us into the inner experiences of self. A testament to the enduring legacy of The Shadow Ring, ‘Hold Onto I.D.’ stands as proof that even in its challenging forms and bleakest expressions, music is a conveyer of liberation and hope.

Released on CD in 1996 for Bruce Russell’s then newly minted Corpus Hermeticum imprint, ‘Wax-Work Echoes’ precedes ‘Hold Onto I.D.’ by roughly a year, following directly on from The Shadow Ring’s prior two groundbreaking full-lengths, ‘City Lights’ and ‘Put The Music In Its Coffin’, taking its name from the first line of the latter release’s title track. The first album to officially include Tim Goss in the band’s lineup, and thus inaugurating its final and lasting form, ‘Wax-Work Echoes’ also potently enlists contributions by Alasdair Willis of The Vitamin B12, Richard Youngs, and Brian Lavelle, all adding sparkling dimensions to the project’s rapidly evolving sound. Recorded concurrently with intense rehearsal periods, staged in anticipation of the forthcoming “Rose Watson Tour,” the album effectively bridges the “bits-and-bobs approach” of its predecessors, while gently anticipating the more “song” oriented formations that would appear on ‘Hold Onto I.D.’, gathering entirely original material around the project’s roving and pointedly irreverent lyrical tactics, in this case celebrating the clicking of horse hooves, and pondering the sociability of rats and mice, and the dangers of poultry, amongst other subjects.

Channeling the trio’s wilder instincts into an unresolved frustration or restlessness into sonic catharsis, ‘Wax-Work Echoes’ unfurls like an exercise in detuned, knotted tonal ferocity, at moments feeling as though the trio had been let loose in a room of soggy, warped instruments, with a giant middle finger to the musical establishment, for the better part of an hour. Against clanging guitars, battered, warbling piano tones, and deadpan vocal delivery, a relentless stream of electronic haze and squeals firmly thread a line between the actions of the 20th century avant-garde and latter day predecessors like Nurse With Wound, producing a soundtrack of post-modern poetics, very much the product of, and intent on shattering, the banality of one of England’s bleakest coastal towns, absorbing The Shadow Ring’s frenetic excess of their transatlantic travels into its very core.

Nothing short of a landmark in the history of English underground music and DIY experimentalism, ‘Wax-Work Echoes’ remains one of The Shadow Ring’s greatest achievements. Not for the faint of heart, and perfectly encapsulating what this project is all about, still hitting like a bag of broken bricks nearly three decades after it went out of print.