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Press
Selected reviews, profiles and pull quotes. Press enquiries through Loft Music.
The New Yorker
Profiles · November 2027
The Editor of Silence
Iris Lambert composes for the screen with the discipline of someone who knows exactly what to leave out.
The first thing one notices in the studio above the converted dairy in Hackney is the silence, which is more deliberate than any of the instruments. Iris Lambert sits at a 1962 Steinway upright and listens to a phrase she has just played, although the phrase is no longer there. She is forty seconds into our second hour together, and she has not yet said anything that could not have been said in fewer words.
The reason her music is so easy to recognise is that almost no one else is willing to be this quiet.
Le Mans (2027)
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The trick of the Le Mans soundtrack is that it never sounds like it is trying to be heard. Lambert finds the still hours inside a 24-hour race, and the album is all the more thrilling for it.
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A composer working at the height of her instincts. Le Mans is the rarest of soundtracks, an album that stands without its picture.
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Iris Lambert appartient à cette génération discrète de compositrices qui ont fait du silence un matériau. Le Mans en est la confirmation la plus complète.
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If you came expecting engines, you will leave with weather. Lambert's Le Mans is, beneath everything, a record about endurance, in the older and quieter sense of the word.
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Lambert has done with absence what most film composers attempt with presence. The score for Le Mans is the rarest kind of motorsport music. It does not sprint.
Slack Water (2024)
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Score of the year. Restrained, exact, and the best argument I have heard in some time for the viola.
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A score that knows when to be silent. Lambert's most striking achievement is restraint, in a film industry that mostly cannot manage it.
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Lambert writes for the spaces between notes. There is more weather in these eleven cues than in most actual seascapes.
Field Notes (2023)
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An immaculate small record. The piano is in fine voice, the cello is grave and exact, and the silences are tuned.
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Patient music for impatient times. Field Notes feels like it has been weathered into shape rather than written.
Quiet Wing (2021)
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A score with the discretion of the dancer it follows. Lambert's name has been the one to watch since she stopped performing in public.
General coverage
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Of the chamber-scale film composers working today, Lambert is the most disciplined and the least sentimental. Both qualities are rarer than they should be.
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