Tag: Kina:Suttsu

A balanced view as summer dawns

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

June 2025
The Rossi Bar

The evening starts with a banging set from Spheress, he has added a Volca to the minimal setup of TR-08 drum machine and two reverb/delay units. He starts with a feedback loop through the FX which settles down into a noise pulse and then modulates out into bass. A kick on the ones comes in, the bass is modulated, and chaotic hi hats introduced, followed by heavily delayed claps, the bass is driving on, the claps fall over each other in disarray and the kick comes in on the fours and drives the bassline off. The delays bring in an off-beat pulse and the Volca brings a new bassline in. The beat steadies briefly, then falls apart into staccato racket. Stan tweaking away at the TR-08s controls, suddenly the beat is back and driving. We have cascading delays, weird pulses and the bassline falling over each other, then thinning out; back to basics, driving on again. The bassline mutates slightly then a squall of feedback and the Volca is off in a new direction. The feedback returns under strict control and we get a trance breakdown with bass feedback on the offbeat and everything is gone into a squall, the bassline returns slow as you like. A boinging super slow bass drum creeps in. we have noise, delayed snares, a heavily spring reverbed beat like something from mid 80s Public Enemy, the reverb is almost vocoder-ish in its depth. Noises build back in, its pretty groovy in a noisy Cabs-y fashion. The bass drum providing the bass line. Drum FX syncopating away. The Volca gives us a beepy offbeat. Imperceptibly the tempo inches up, the reverb drenched noise swirling away. Someone whistles. Intensity mounts.
The Volca comes in again with a mid range-y stab rhythm, the kick is back on the fours. Delays swirling all about. Feedback pulses on the 8s, hi hats 16s, energy levels are high. He’s working away on the drum machines controls again tweaking, scattering, glitching. The filters go on the Volca.  Some weird loop happens and everything judders. It all drops away to nothing, a slight swirl which is caught then sent back into the FX, feedback then the drum machine gives a floor tom staccato beat, with reverb generated bass and again glitched out drum noises spiralling all around. Everything is in motion against that tom tom pulse. Then that drops away leaving us adrift, the clap steadies us, the bass gets abrupt, suddenly it’s all in place and the toms are back or was it a kick all along – bang! A brief respite, then it’s back to the fours for the finale. Section again the intensity builds over the rock solid beat. And it’s done.

In the middle slot we are really privileged to have Ingrid Plum’s first live show in quite sone time. She starts with an astounding version of “Wayfaring stranger”. She’s set up on a table with a few devices, including a custom circuit board synth. Beginning with full sub-bass drone, she adds in rich crackles and scratches. And then she starts singing pure and clear. A few lines in and a second wobbling bass joins. The juxtaposition of traditional song and 78 crackles & crickets and the electronic tones adds a weird tension increasing the sadness that seems implicit in the song itself. The bass is very intense. After a couple of verses she loops in some humming and gives everything a bit more emotional heft. There are about six layers of vocals cycling under each other and she sets a massive sweep off across the song. The bass drones shift and one ever so slowly aeroplanes off into the stratosphere. Then everything drops apart from a single drone and the vocal loops. A rhythm track of rattling cupboards becomes perceptible, field recordings of voices? Or is it the audience? The bass drones intensify, slowly beating. She returns to the main vocal line “There is no good in me….”  Stark against the drone and rattling shutter. The bass becomes steady then starts pulsing again. a keyboard drone eases in. and a swirl of echoes, ushers in a second set of much higher pitched drones, so we’re pretty full spectrum. Ingrid starts whispering scarily,  ghosting quietly into the microphones. It’s vaguely churchy, but not in a good way. A pointed nasty note fires in, then drops down. The whispering layers up via the looper. I’m scared. The drones start beating against each other all pulsating slightly, the effect increases as more and more notes are added. Then Ingrid starts singing again – long slow “aaaAAAAhhhhHHHHuuuUUUHHHs”. This slowly develops, circling, meandering. Everything becomes steeped in meaning, eventually the whispering falls away, but the drone chord seems to keep building. Then it gently drops away to just the bass note and Ingrids final singing wordless, soulful, forlorn.

And to round off the evening it’s the third visit of Kina: Suttsu and E-Da. Both set up on – or at least near – the floor, so I couldn’t see from the back. They had their usual array of keyboards, percussion, soprano sax, effects and ephemera scattered all around. Also starting off with a drone, but also a whistle and whisp-y synth. A shifty cymbal through delay. It’s all textures. Bass drones filter in, squeaks, some big long reversed cymbal makes everything else drop. A bassy drum booms about. Tabla sounds. Scrapes and squeaks. The delay provides the rhythm, ill defined. Bells bowed and gently ring. There’s an ill-defined presence emerging slowly from the soup. Tape rewind or birds or shakers – just pitched ever so slightly and through shimmering effects. I can hear water, a sine wave, ducks in a flightpath. A sense of trepidation. Heartbeat drums, so slow; b-boom. A build in intensity and the sounds swirl together in a cauldron as Kina unwinds the sax – long notes at first, then odd flurries, the background still ramping up somehow. There is an un-beat of bass-y drum in there. A pattern, but not an obvious one. The drones quieten out, shift and then step up the scales and down, then up. And thicken in a wind tunnel. A bass note. Just one, then the drones fall away, an ending, but E-Da keeps the un rhythm going. Zither flurries flutter away in a loop, a bassline seems to start. Then a new intense set of drones set right off, ramping up in intensity and pitch, E-Das percussion following it. Shakers, sine tone bells, the wind tunnel is back. Star chimes looped infinitely a skronking sax line fierce but subsumed by everything around it. E-Da keeps the framework steady around Kina as she really wails away. I want to start yelling. It’s delirious heady stuff. She gets into some growly low end stuff before getting up into harsher squalls at the top. A big pinging. And somehow it seems to descend into a big bassy synth ball, and a plunging watery hole to end.

Thanks to Jim Purbrick for the photo



Last European Home

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

January 2020
The Rossi Bar

Hardworking Families

So, Hardworking Families starts the evening, Tom sat hands rummaging inside a black box containing Some Things, the lid flaps open towards us, balanced on top is a small PCB with a pot and a couple of other components. By the side of the box is a cassette player. His set starts with stuttering feedback-ish stammer. There’s something of a rumble train-ish, very reverbed coughing.  The rumbling gets grainier and bassier. A pseudo rhythm of gulps hits away in the background and everything falls away around it. A thin tone somewhere between a Casio organ and a reedy metallic whine is conjured from something hidden away. Something happens with the cassette and the reedy whine becomes a thin shard of feedback. There’s some static Morse code. Wind-jammed mic.  Whirr of an oscillator that rolls down into a pretty meaty judder while the Morse flips inside the tone to form a noise barrage. Other oscillators go about similar dirty business and we suddenly get into this toney noise wall that modulates outwards into several frequency strands all winding around each other. Something with some proper bass struggles up from beneath this like a jetliner over a Sicilian beach then it all gets very quiet before one last hurrah of a mechanical woodpecker getting to work in a lumber mill.

Monty Oxymoron

Monty Oxymoron had the second set, he’d played at The Spirit of Gravity previously as part of a trio and a quartet (once famously on copper dog and bird cage) but this was the first time we’d had him play solo, and I think the first time I’ve seen him do a set solely as a musical piece playing the keys on a keyboard (rather than extemporising on the case, lid, stand and anything nearby as well). It’s a piano/synth setup. He starts with some sparkling space jazz that sounds like something of Sun Ra’s from the head, shimmering flourishes and chords that spangle off into a little squelching synth line before zooming off. Some bassy synth crushes bring us back, then its twinkling off again before modulating chords bring back a hint of the original melody and then a little chord riff takes us off again to get lost in fantastical arpeggios. There’s a passage of wah wah stasis that’s rather lovely, that gets eventually overrun with harpsichordian dances of notes that slowly mutate back to piano sounds of the melody again then the electronic drum we can’t see at his feet comes into play. Starting with a jazzy ride with occasional rolls around the virtual kit while his hands keep at work fidgeting away at filtered stabbing chords the feet working away at an insistent rhythm under the table that fades away into an electric piano flourish drowned in a sweeping massive phase. Lovely. Then there’s a bit of an encore, a more orthodox-ish jazz piano ballad, that gets into a Yes Album left hand on a synth chord accompaniment for a bit of a dynamic with a slow wind down.

Kina:Suttsu and E-Da Kazuhisa

Kina:Suttsu and E-Da Kazuhisa finish off the evening. Kina with a midi roll flat piano keyboard starting with backwards piano into a slowly decaying long delay pedal building up a slowly revolving insistent piano part that she wordlessly vocalises over. E-da has a physical ride cymbal that he tings over this. There is birdsong the piano part decays into a churning organic murk, Kina keeps working away at her piano roll pushing notes into the delay chain until it loses all form in an undulating wave of little notes, E-da picks up the tempo on the ride to match this until it all slowly fades away. Kina brings the birdsong back, E-da gets a hand drum to work and Kina starts on the alto saxophone, a stutter skronk alternating with longer lines. E-Da is putting some effects on his drum, the bassy thumps really getting some presence. Kina gets some fire in her playing and E-Da follows her round, the birdsong seems to spiral off tiny electronic tones that glitter in the inner ear.  E-da gets right into it, driving us on under Kinas spiralling lines, then it all falls away underneath her. And she returns to the piano. Single notes: high, low, the memory of the last leaving a notion of melodic drift as it loops, she breathes the sax gently over the top. E-da has some rattling and rainstick washing away. She eventually starts adding extra notes in and the loops build up the effect of delays as E-Da starts with a beater on the cymbal. It all gets a bit psychedelic. Mushing, washing in and out like great waves. The deep layers of piano producing odd accordion-like tonalities amongst the sparkling of the high note hits. It ends like a two chord riff with E-Das cymbals rolling in like great Atlantic rollers, slow and stately and all enveloping, and then Kina beaks it all up with some free form playing on the piano and saxophone and we’re done for the night. subtlety.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/6Yh-ajRtlsM https://www.youtube.com/embed/3Z0-WIC_IUo https://www.youtube.com/embed/QA-1zcpOlWU https://www.youtube.com/embed/SzUGp_phG00 https://www.youtube.com/embed/piI68vNvX54 https://www.youtube.com/embed/AXo28QFrtdM

All sounds are up

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

July 2019

The Rossi Bar

Rapt

First up was Rapt, sat behind a laptop, his whole performance was an exercise in stasis, an almost Zen-like lack of activity, featuring variations on his first EP. Starting with shimmering drones layered several deep the overlying shifts between, I don’t know, three or four notes in an almost achingly emotional slowly unfolding melody line. The second piece takes things a bit more up-tempo, the parts moving around more dynamically, some murky bass drum and hint of hi-hat. It keeps the intensity up, without appearing to do much. Close listening reveals cycles of clacked bottles buried in the mix, but he is stationary at the monitor, not giving anything away, occasionally sipping Polish lager. The third and final piece has another slow motion melodic top line (this time it starts the piece off), the sound slowly filling out with bass washes and modulating synth lines underneath it. It doesn’t really unfold as engulf you in a warm wave of feeling. His new stuff is quite a bit different, but worth hearing: soundcloud.com/raptmusicuk/albums

Kina:Suttsu

Kina:Suttsu was about as far from that as you can get, we’ve been playing some of her music as bobobobin!!!? On the radio show, but this was a different thing. She was joined by local percussionist E-da Kuzuhisa. Kina starts on her odd guitar stick with gentle strumming, E-da has a contact mic on a rain-stick and some bells, Kina sings gently out of focus. The sound comes out of the quiet, slowly. Occasionally E-da bats his floor tom with a beater. Some cymbals wash and we shift; slowly the guitar becomes effected a Sitar-like chime, a rhythm picks up on a hand drum, her vocals shift into gasped phrases. This breaks down into a reverberant rainstorm. After that E-da picks up a tapping rhythm on a ride, and Kina moves briefly onto an Alto sax and gives us a good skronking while E-da gets a proper battery up on his limited percussion. Then she is back with the guitar on her lap with beaters and E-da is getting some shakers going. And some more distant singing to end.

Simon James

Finally And to finish we have Simon James, we had intended bringing his Synth and space echo to the front, but in the end it was too intricate a setup, so we left it at the back of the stage, which meant that Simon had to perform with his back to us – but that did mean we got to see the Buchla synth in all its glory. Simon had his NASA suit on as the set was to be a tribute to the Apollo 11 mission which had just had the 50th anniversary of its launch, so his set was suitably radiophonic in sound. Starting with a thin drone underpinned by a Sputnick-y beeping and full bass, this soon picked up space arpeggios and all sorts to take us on our journey. As we move out into orbit we get a stripped down bass drum and odd pong sound that slowly evolves into a grooving bass thing with more odd space noises. The further we get into this piece the harder it gets to describe. Glorious old style electronic space music. We can feel the stars moving in the sky and the Earth recede. As we get into Earth orbit things quieten right down for the slow beauty of Earthrise as we come round from the dark side. And finally they walk on the moon. Simon gets called back for an encore, so he treats us to a bleep and booster space jam, that ends abruptly with an “that’s what it sounds like in my room!”. Marvellous.