Month: July 2013

The sound comes down that pipe

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May saw the end of an era, but also a visit from a legend.

4ThirtyThree

4thirtythree hadn’t played together for six months and Stuart Revill the guitarist was less than twenty four hours off the plane from Canada. Not that it noticed, like an avuncular band in your front room they immediately settled right into it: left to right we have acoustic guitar through loop station dropping still notes in slow motion cascades; tenor sax and un-tipped vocals providing nourish grit; finally soprano sax, chime boxes, thumb pianos, flute and piano loops bringing the ether. In spite of all this looping it’s a sparse, empty sound. Occasionally it winds backwards through psychedelic space, Tim’s cycling words repeating some elliptical husky semi-profundity; a hiss popping almost rhythmically; a piano note or ringing clean guitar note burrowing into your unconscious. An elliptical start to the evening.

The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Quite a different thing was The Organ Grinders Monkey; one high tech man with earpiece foldback, headphone mic, shiny fender jaguar and slick laptop/processing unit, Tearing through a highly structured set of songs. Jittering drums, bass pulses, odd swoops, heavily processed vocals, everything stopping and juddering in bizarre places, its sing-a-long in a warm jets pop way, if you can get round the leaps of logic, that is. A highlight comes where he hands over a controller to an audience member to mangle (filter; tremolo) the end of a song. The whole set seems like a battle between his innate song-writing ability and the flighty imagination that just wants to turn this knob, try this effect, stutter edit. Ending on a stuck CD lock.

Asmus Tietchens

By the time he hit the stage Asmus Tietchens had already given us two sneaky sets of minimal pings and bops on the elektrocreche – he seemed quite smitten. His actual performance was a restrained and masterful set of digital clicks and warm tones, light hums, space noises and Spooky shimmers. It’s low key and mesmerising, creepy with barely perceptible shifts in tone followed by cascades of skittering insect feet between the speakers. At one point a gated German speaker tries to hold a conversation with an alien who appears to be travelling backwards through time. The sound appears to reach escape density, but it’s not really a climax, its beyond that kind of thing: a staccato minor bass distracts the human voice who’s still trying to talk, in the distance a spaceship enters the void, it changes, opens up into toneful knocks and crickets.

Either he’s bigger than he looks, or that’s not quite a trombone

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Full marks for dedication on two counts this month.

Birds of Death Valley

Some whistles on the recorder, shortwave radio bursts and abstract block sounds, give way to sustained chords swelling over a gentle reverse hi-hat and plucked strings. It evolves gently, chiming and ringing, odd whistles Wasp buzzes synthetic drones layering away, until a slide trumpet player heaves swelling onto the stage to duet with echoed recorder for “The Cruel Landlady”… things continue to shimmer under the sustained trumpet notes, with a round of the songs chorus slowly rotating under the final gentle squalls of songs fade until a rather harsh stomp of four to the floor comes thumping martially in with some bass oomph and sonic wibble pays a little visit.

Pawnsphinx

Carrying on with the ringing resonant tones, Pawnsphinx, on the first stage of his honeymoon, gave a more formed and focussed set, less whimsical as befits something based on Dostoevsky but strangely sympathetic in the way it followed on till disrupted by a heavy bell-ish thump that seemed to emerge from some devilish rave memory initiating a freefall beat that really seemed to disrupt the dynamics more that drive them. It all got very ominous with creaking doors and unpleasant chords before some unlikely wobbling bass reminded us it is the 21st Century after all. Some Detroit beats led us on via throat singing and some cockney swearing on to the finale with some excellent detailed snare and rhythm patterns that took me right back to the heady days of Instrumentality.

Karl M. Waugh

In the absence of Chloe, who was laid up with a cold that had been conspiring with the unseasonal snow to rob us of as much of our regular audience as possible, the Zero Map gave way to a solo set by Karl M V Waugh. On guitar. For a full half hour. Which was really exceptional and may be one of the best things I’ve seen Karl do. Starting off with a cascade of scrapes before some clean endless echoing picked chords came through. He managed to avoid being too close sound-wise to The Durutti Column, my default mental state for clean guitar, due to some interesting eastern intervals. Something more like Dick Dale’s more thoughtful homages to his ethnicity. Having kept it clean for the majority of the set Karl eventually gave in and let rip with some max noise over-strumming, which still managed to maintain the context of what he’d been doing up to that point. Very tasty.

A return to chin-stroking

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For March, normal service is resumed, with an opportunity to drool at some vintage equipment.

TwentyTwenty

TwentyTwenty consisted of a new set of twenty one minute films with an improvised soundtrack provided by Andrew Greaves (SH101), Dan Powell (scrapey guitar), Tony Rimbaud (odd electronic things) and the very tall Richard Miles and his tiny guitar. As such its a much more electric sound than previously lots of beeps, some nice trafficy hums and washes, some clicks and scrapes. Each four minute segment starting on some strange base of atmosphere as they take it turns to lead off and build up into quite a different montage. The whole thing managing to go through a range of moods while remaining quite delicate and considered.

Sonic Roundabout

Sonic Roundabout were a two piece with some lovely old equipment that had been switched on while most of us were eating our tea: the minimoog needed tuning up just before they went on stage, it was a visual reminder of the sleeve notes of all those 70s Moog LPs… As well as the moog there was a rare sighting of the wonderful Lyricon, a clarinet powered synth, and some drum patterns based on old Simmons samples. Marvellous. Naturally it was heavy on arpeggios and warbly leads, wonderfully warm analogue sounds all round. Marvellous. Really. For a couple of numbers they were joined by a singer with a strong Germanic vocal style.

Baconhead

Taking a sidestep into digital synthesis, Baconhead were another two piece, this time ensconced behind Macs with midi controllers and fiercely bobbing heads as they stepped up the tempo, the bass and the harshness of the beats. As suits an act so allied with Wrong Music it’s a playful set, allied to a love of the harder edges of modern music, although not approaching the light-speed of days of yore.

The best excuse for being late to a sound check, ever

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Something of a milestone in February, the Spirit of Gravity is dragged away from the usual geeks for a female-only show.

Embla Quickbeam

Embla Quickbeam did manage to get started at a sensible time, rather than far too early, and she rewarded us with a lovely humming set of freakish field recordings, ghostly sonar pings, bell peals from lost churches, and visiting drones from the other side. Apparently this set was decided on at the last minute as she’d been working on something new, but had suffered catastrophic system failures during the afternoon. Which was made up by finding a gorgeous clothbound copy of FC Judd’s book on electronic music. And still managing a blinding set.

Bela Emerson and Carolina Diaz

After a quick turnaround we had the debut of a new collaboration between Bela Emerson on Cello and Carolina Diaz,a Butoh dancer. The processed cello progresses from warm friendly tones to almost astringent modernity, while Carolina reversed herself in front of a low table and slowly formed a series of starkly disquieting shapes, the whole thing was mesmerisingly beautiful to watch and listen to, completely involving and quite beyond my ability to describe. A well realised collaborating improvisation between two artists working very differently – Bela’s eyes never left Carolina during the whole performance.

Sarah Angliss

Sarah Angliss I find slightly more within my linguistic ability. She set up with her famous Theremin stage centre, Hugo the robot boy up to the left, laptop, carillon and keyboard to the right with brand new robot drummer Wolfgang (the only electronic drummer called Wolfgang playing in the UK that night [take THAT Mr Flür ]). She started off using the Theremin as a controller for filtering vocals off the laptop – a sort of reverse vocoder. And it kind of goes from there – it’s a set of songs, using unusual techniques and instrumentation, a couple of favourites from Space Dog (“The Submariner” and “The Lankey” in a rather developed form) its another visit to the spooky side, with Sarah’s Fortean interests to the fore.