November 2018
Green Door Store
Klaus Von Mork
Stepping into the things at the last minute we have a welcome set from Klaus von Mork, caped and hooded with lighted up fingertips at one of the oil-drum tables, swirling in mist and mostly in the dark, he starts with slightly slowed reading from The book of the Revelation of John, some plainchant and drones and hyper slow beats. We’re getting a good head of spooky steam up and everything breaks. So we have a bit of silence while things are worked on. The hood goes down. And to be fair the mystique never quite recovers, however it’s still a corking set once it gets going again. Clattering beats under screaming drones and monster bass wooshes, the kind of thing that the green Door Store PA totally relishes. There are some nicely dark in a modern way bass pads, some evil bass lines, Bulgarian singing, along with some breakdowns to skewed slow beats. One track has a hard step D’n’B drum track under grinding gear bassline and harsh noise whooshes. He finishes on a epic obscure tale of slowly unwinding sitar drone, with mysterious beats hidden under impenetrable clouds of reverb.
Le Pavement
Next up it’s Le Pavement with a sweet but too short set of modern electronics, starting with a low level drone with the two of them working around each other over a laptop and keyboard setup. There are some synth chord riffs that John Barry would have been pleased with introduce a slow rhythm succeeded by the unnerving sounds of electronic insects about their business. Some voices work their way into these field recordings along with small radiophonic flourishes and jungle birds or maybe electronic delay effects. A fairly old skool slow beat starts and one of them reads some words from a book. This feeds into a bass drone with them taking it in turns to play a “drum solo” on the keyboard, sparse detuning clatters with the intensity of both the drone and percussion building towards the set’s climax. They oddly provide an ideal segue between the first and last acts.
Matawan
Matawan return to SoG to round off the evening, eschewing their guitars, they have a table with effects lines based around cassette recordings to build their drones this time. And boy they really work with the sonics of the room, as the sound swells filling using every part of the sonic spectrum that the not inconsiderable PA will allow pretty soon everything that can rattle in the room is going, I’ve heard odd bits go before – the air-conditioning pipe, the metal fittings on the door, but Matawan get the whole place resonating, all of those things, the cage around the mixing desk, the actual door, the chains inside the curtain. Every bolt, glass and piece of my clothing is thrumming away. They pull it back for a couple of quite lovely swelling patches of church like beauty, where tones slowly move around gently filling the room and your mind with its pleasantness, before they come back for one quite unbelievable leathering of the room. If it wasn’t for the fact it had withstood 100 years of trains rattling over it I’d be quite concerned for the safety of the room.
Starting the evening were Noteherder & McCloud, who based their set off some recordings of trains and then more notably Tube recordings as we got into the set. It was a slow start with quite a bit of tape hiss delayed and whined up by a bitcrusher into a distant alarm. Chris Parfitt’s soprano sax shouts jumped across that until a rolling, almost swinging bass sequence started up and he got into some really lyrical playing for about ten minutes until it all shredded out into noise and clanging rail screech and than toned down into breath hiss and gurgle.
map71, who have been one of the best things I’ve seen this year, and this was another good one. They took a little while to get right into it, but once they did, it was right there. Andy Pyne’s drumming and synths (a backing track rather than his old keyboard – I couldn’t see) were rock steady, as he takes some Jaki Liebezeit channelling tight beats. Lisa Jayne was a little more animated than sometimes, her left hand flicking as she held her book of spells in the right dexterously turning pages with her thumb. The highpoint came with some DNW buzzing synth, Andy on beaters, pattering out a steady toned rhythm on the toms (even the snare drum has the snare dropped for extra note) while Lisa Jayne intoned her deadpan words.
Matawan are all about the textures, the shimmer. I originally thought one of them had a keyboard on his table initially, but he seemed to have an unused guitar propped against the stage side wall there, while the chap in the middle sat stooped down guitar mostly across his lap as he muddled with his racks of effects at his feet. It was a slow drone build, layers modulating back and forth between the pair of players in what initially seemed an improvised set until you noticed that one of them was loading some pretty specific chords into three tiny Mooer loopers he had at his feet, not that when he played them back it sounded like strumming, but the triad of washing layers they produced as he faded from one to another gave clear indication of an compositional element unexpected in a drone environment.