The Spirit of Gravity presents the Scope VIII
Nad Spiro
Electronic textures and sound fiction
Underground musician Rosa Arruti has worked for many years under the anonymous alias NAD SPIRO, a solo venture where complex processed guitars are built into a world of electronic textures and sound fictions. Her recordings have been released on the pioneering Spanish experimental label GEOMETRIK RECORDS.
Member of some of Barcelona’s cult underground bands (MohoChemie, Tendre Tembles, Psicópatas del Norte.) she has collaborated with other experimentalists like Kim Cascone or My Cat is an Alien.
Leo Chadburn
Music with surprising and unusual words
Composer and vocalist Leo Chadburn (AKA Simon Bookish) presents an evening of music with surprising and unusual words, ranging from floating dreamscapes, haunting descriptions of imaginary places and mangled poetry.
Featuring song, spoken word and lo-fi electronics, and including rarely-heard experimental music by composers including Peter Ablinger, Travis Just and Jennifer Walshe alongside Chadburn’s own left-field pop aesthetic, the evening aims to invoke a kind of surreal “film for the ears.”
Freedom Frampton
Minimal condensation of the intensity of living
Mixing a cappella with minimal backing on phone and drum machine, Freedom Frampton condenses the intensity of living through this life.
Plus Lissajous figure projections
Wednesday 18th March | 8pm – 11.00pm | Feed the piggy donations on the door please
@ The Caroline of Brunswick, 39 Ditchling Rd, Brighton
Set up on a brace of chairs facing each other in the middle of the room, first up are DhákarlP; they have scores, Kev has his sax to which he applies various techniques starting with blowing down the reed in a fairly normal fashion, but going on through various extended techniques. Dan has his singing bow mic’d up just on the edge of ringing in and out of feedback, and his whistle apart from that he has … a lot of silence; They concentrate, seem to be playing apart and together at various times, the overall effect is almost a duet between sax and pure tones. It’s a very deliberate set, the scores are on stands and there is a lot of reading and a lot of considering about what is to be done before it’s done.![DA[FS]](https://spiritofgravity.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/DAFS.jpg)
After a short interval while we line the chairs up in rows facing DA[FS]’s set up at the side of the room and some folk have a play at the twin pink mini-guitars we have in the electrocreche tonight, we’re ready for Distant Animals. Dann has a big modular synth in a case and a small sampler/playback device like the one Robin uses these days. He also has scores, and pamphlets which he has scattered about. He gives the impression that the pamphlets are the scores but I suspect this not to be true. He has a stack of papers on the table to one side and works his way through them, adjusting various things. The music is rather lovely, meandering analogue phatness. He plays for just over 30 minutes and it’s nowhere near long enough. I’d love to have several hours of this on a languid afternoon at the Coach House. Long drinks. Lots of ice, sunshine. That kind of thing. Dann is performing these scores in a number of locations with a number of different setups. Catch him, yes. 
There are only three acts tonight, so we can give the Warrior Squares some room to flex themselves and it pays dividends. They play an expansive set with everyone on good form, Nick gets through three of the four trees he’s bought to play and his bass guitar, Geoff has his flute, voice and MicroKorg, James and Paul have boxes I can’t deduce, and we’re on one of those journeys where you can’t tell largely who is doing what, several layers of processing are going on, everyone is beavering away, blending and working together and it all flows and keeps on flowing as the set develops. 
The first act in at short notice for Guards! Guards! who can’t get their vocalist across the north sea, is Inwards – Kristian from the [beep] collective, with visuals from Irie pixel. Inwards is set up on the floor of the stage under the projections, he has a flight case with a modular synth and a drum machine. Interestingly he goes for an almost Baion rhythm with the bass drum, giving the start of his set a latin feel while the analogue synths cascade around it. He tweaks and turns at the knobs filtering and bringing the drums in and out. The visuals are good, mirrored lines, geometric tunnels, occasional blocks of code. Constantly flowing alongside the changes in Kristian’s music.
Second up is The Organ Grinder’s Monkey, Ben with his shiny guitar and helter skelter rhythms. I’m still not used to anyone being organised enough to monitor their set with stereo headphones while they play and he displays some nifty footwork controlling things with a midi footpad. He starts with an old song and belts through the first half at a pretty snappy pace ending up with the song where he hands a gameboy controller out to the audience (this time Kristian) who really gets into it, chopping and filtering stuttering and laughing like a drain playing havoc with Ben’s tune while he thrashes away on stage. Its a nice juxtaposition and you can really see the advantage of headphones for this one as he’d be lost trying to play along to what’s issuing from the speakers.
If I always say that Ben sounds like Brian Eno circa 1980, then Olivia Louvel has something of the De La Salle of the 21st Century, thick warm beats and lovingly extended bass. One definite advantage she does have is a hell of a voice, which even on this outing you feel you’re only really getting a mild taste of. She does have quite the best mic technique I’ve seen on the stage of the Green Door Store at our nights, controlling volume, timbre and tone impeccably. Starting slowly with deceptively stately beats and long bass tones, she was peaking in the middle of a set with choppy pop song with circling multiple voices and warbling tones and trailing off with a drivingly insistent number with an on off bass that almost felt played with a switch.