January 2019

The Rossi Bar

Rough Work

So we started our tenure at The Rossi Bar and the evening itself with Rachel Cohen and Kev Moore as Rough Work. Rachel most visibly had some teapots that she started, lid off, pouring water from one to the other, and bubbly blowing down the spout. Kev had some things probably electronic inside an attaché case, lid up. There are resonant ringings and janglings, chains and occasionally you can see Kev moves onto a physical thing. Rachel has found some school books from the year of the drought, if I’m any judge. She occasionally reads from them. There is paper unravelled and torn and some encounters with tightly stretched parcel tape that seems comically to stick to everything. Clatter and burble, rattle, the clash of lid on pot. Big electronic stereo exhalations. Tapping. Space noises – “The water came from the pond”. They chant in unison “A force cannot be seen” as a kind of chorus to readings from her physics exercise books. There is a brief discussion on whether a word is Pirate or Pivot. Then some more time spent showing unstructured can be fun and it’s over.

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Kieran Mahon

In contrast to the empty improv of the first act Kieran Mahon kicks off his set with a thick meaty electronic drone, mostly sourced from a Microbrute, with a nice resonant sweep over the top. A third strand powers through the middle of this for a while, before chunking up into a slow stepping sequence, while we’re concentrating on this the original drone is mutating away out of sight into a LFO driven braid of intersecting tones. By now the drone has completely given way to melange of discrete sonics, beeps, buzzes, chunks of bass all stepping around each other in some semi delirious Edgar Froese vision. This slowly steps out of phase through noise into some inverted version of the original setup, a new stepping sequence, a drone with a new shimmering space tonality. At this stage Kieran introduces a hint of unfolding melody hidden away that again morphs into space dust.

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Child

Child finished the evening off, Annabelle starting her set with an echoed chime riff and high flutelike parts underpinned by some seriously detached bass. She sings, while the parts loop around her. She speaks. Its eerie. She feeds some shaker into her delay chain and morphs into the second section. The decay on her vocals seems endlessly spacious. Some bass drum and twisting resonant synth brings in the next piece. Then its game time, it seems we start the Experience half way through her set. The bass has been pretty lightweight for a while, but she brings back seriously after this with a filtered bass line and a slow motion cascade of drums, she sings into a wine glass. There is some more physics (Newton’s Gravitational laws, rather than forces) as the beats drop away just to the bassline and vocals. To finish with the bass takes on a drone quality, while around it percussive synth parts shift in space and tone, her voice drifts in and out and weirdly Casio-tic keyboard melodies surprise us and shimmer.

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By the time we finish and get upstairs, early as it is, the snow is thick and buses and taxis have stopped running. Kev has to get back to Southampton, and I think I have a hard time getting up to the racecourse.