The Wires have foundations in sculpture, land art and sound composition. They are essentially an instrument consisting of strained spans of fencing wire that stretch across the open  landscape.  The Wires installed at The WIRED Lab in the Riverina District consist of  multiple sets of wires spanning several kilometres across the landscape.

Since the mid 1970’s Dr Alan Lamb has been developing The Wires, an audible instrument (that was initially) based on the principals of the Æolian Harp. Named after Æolis the Greek god of the wind, Æolian harps, often referred to as wind harps, were a popular domestic instrument in Western Europe during the Romantic (late 18^th Century) period. However, The Wires developed by Lamb, whilst also having a deep connection with nature, are not of a domestic scale, they are installations spanning expanses of rural landscape between 70 to 300 metres.

Lamb’s use of the phrase The Wires references the tightly strained strands of fencing wire which is the primary material used to construct any set of Wires. Over the years Lamb’s work with The Wires has uncovered that it is not only wind that ‘plays’ this instrument, it seems that on their own accord The Wires often harmonically ‘sing’, vibrate or roar as they react to environmental factors such as barometric air pressure, temperature, insects and people; with The Wires thereby creating a unique and infinite instrumentation of itself and its surrounds.

Lamb has been working with the wires for the past 30 years. During this time he developed a technique of attaching ‘piezo’ stereo contact microphones to record and listen to The Wires. These recordings expose an infinite and amplified universe of sound that sonically reflects things we cannot see. The Wires sonically reproduces environmental and human interactions with an enormous dynamic range of harmonics and frequencies. Whilst having traditional sonic qualities such as pitch, timbre, rhythm and key, the sounds produced are perhaps best described as a deep space atmosphere with earth hums and electro-pings, even insects can be heard as they collide or crawl up and down the wire.

In the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s Lamb’s work was published via radio/film commissions, installations and theatre performance projects, through the tapes he gave people and word of mouth. Although he has an international profile within the niche sound arts and film sound design sectors, and his work was (rather unsuccessfully) released by Dorobo Records in the mid 90’s released his work on CD, Lamb’s work has not been comprehensively consolidated or released utilizing the vast array of social networking and digital music exchange tools available to us today.