Chequerboard: Souvenir – It’s been 11 years since the Dublin artist’s last album, and the wait has been worth it

The rotational pulsing of a bullet-train journey from Tokyo to Kyoto is the most exciting thing you’ll hear on the much-delayed new album by Dublin’s John Lambert, who for some time has been making exquisitely calm instrumental music under the moniker Chequerboard.

Souvenir arrives 11 years after Chequerboard’s previous album, The Unfolding, but the wait is worth it. Lambert is unusual in that he doesn’t shamelessly plug his music, which is a union of electro-acoustic, minimalistic and postclassical. Rather, like the work itself, he allows it to drift along the outskirts of commercial acceptance. The potential outcomes of such an approach (a mix of obscurity, poverty and misery, say) isn’t what you might expect, as Chequerboard has clocked up more than 22 million Spotify streams.

Lambert once described his music as being like a Japanese garden. As with previous albums, the tracks on Souvenir are micro-cultivated and pristine. With his coproducer, Stephen Shannon, who also mixed, engineered and mastered, Lambert evokes the way music can act as a trigger for (we guess from the gentility of the music) either a specific comforting memory or a random heretofore forgotten image. The mood board might include Steve Reich (notably his 1989 album, Different Trains), Durutti Column, Cocteau Twins and Vangelis – dreamlike tracks such as Vermilion, Imperial Finery, The Art of Friendship, A Story on a Decorative Plate, and The Raised Glass feature a patchwork quilt of sound that has at its core softly plucked and deftly played acoustic guitar.

In other words, Souvenir is a work of rare beauty by an artist who bides his time and cares little for profile-raising newspaper articles. Put a face to the name, though, when John Lambert/Chequerboard launches the album on Saturday, March 9th, at Pepper Canister Church, in Dublin, at 8pm. Time to raise the eyes to heaven and pray?