Month: May 2023

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 28th May – 8.00 to 10.00pm

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 28th May 2023 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/

1st hour: Recently, Linden Pomeroy led a 5 hour long live improvisation in aid of the Men Walk Talk charity for men’s mental health. This is an edit of a contribution by McCloud, a pointedly minimal and repetitive radio piece, featuring Linden Pomeroy on guitar, Kev Nickells on guitar, Jamie Bowden on piano, Steve Peckon  saxophone and McCloud on synthesiser.
Please contribute: www.totalgiving.co.uk/mypage/thepathiknow / menwalktalk.co.uk/learn-more
2nd hour: An Eliane Radique special.

The April edition of the Spirit of Gravity Radio show is available on the ResonanceFM Mixcloud page:
www.mixcloud.com/resonanceextra/gravity-waves-and-the-spirit-world-april-2023-23rdapril-2023/
For the first hour, in preparation for the upcoming AI release by Alien Alarms, Jim has lovingly prepared a mix of computer music from the deep past to the current day. The second hour features 3 tracks from Map 71 prior to the launch of their new album “Blood Fruit”. We also have new music from Jo Thomas, Ascsoms and Edgar Hansa.

ElectroSoG?

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

May 2023
The Rossi Bar

While we were sleeping starts with glitches redolent of a record kept in a damp corner of a cellar for 10 years. Some crackling bass washes slide in with ghost cars and distant bombers heard through ears dropping out from sound pressure. It’s an oppressive start, terrifying. Eventually one of the washed out sounds starts to modulate into something with pitch and we get some drones starting to evolve. A shortwave radio scan of “I am sitting in a room” brings us from behind the settee, and as the fear subsides, the drone subsides, Guy messes with the speech, in non-resonant ways tape winding, slowing it down, pitching it up. We get some heavily delayed intermittent synth line. The speech devolves into noise and acoustic grit and eventually bass pulse. Odd slurs of sound slip around it and the speech comes back. White noise percussion forms a pseudo beat about the pulse which modulates through various stages before settling on something like a bassline. Ah drums. A brass riff stolen from the mid ‘00s makes a surprising appearance dragging the beats down to a virtual deranged standstill. Lucier’s words return over bits of burnt brass, and shiny little slivers of distortion.

Tullis Rennie is next up, in another life he is a tromboning free-improv-er, and the brief disappointment I have for him turning up trombone free soon disperses once he starts. A lovely pulsating shimmer of a brisk arpeggio’s synth kicks off his set. A space whine sees this off; modulates around us briefly and the arpeggio returns. A deeper synth line unfolds and subsumes everything, there are slight flourishes hinting at what we’ve heard before. And now everything majestically stills and our vistas seem to expand, and then we’re suddenly returning home from the environs of Jupiter. Back on to Rock-a-nore beach in Hastings in 2021. The sea laps and a pointillistic synth note carries us along into another trip. We have percussion on this one, subtle a-go-go, perhaps. Lopsided unassuming synth riffs propel us. Interlaying lines build, the odd bass note, perhaps a dulcimer line. A quiet bass drum. Its given a good amount of time to gently evolve. The next section has a sharp stabbing line overlain with thick washes of sound, some detuning goes on and then an impossibly fat bassline runs through us several times and stops. We then get into a set of uneven interwoven lines a lurching rhythm, sharp synths, scurrying bells all weaving lines around each other.

Johanna Bramli’s set starts with a slowly blistering bass drone, superfast subliminal morse staccato blips run over it until eventually her piano and vocal comes in. A drum threatens to start, a slow oceanic scrape and the sound of swimming. The bass has slowly become threatening, a loping rhythm track skips underneath, the drone oppression slowly lifts as a piano starts afresh wordless vocals make us wistful, elegiac, the sounds of the pool become ghostly, distant. Some bursts of distorted bass, bring a different less threatening drone. Hi-hats seep in from a door opening onto a grime party in another building. There’s a grinding. Slow organ, a description of another room, a bass drum throbs, literally rumbling under it, then stops, returns. A counter melody to the organ and a nasty jet noise.  Again half heard distant things add depth and mystery. A male humming, the grime party door and the bass throb are linked… another organ line heralds the next section. Drums and sub bass form a line galloping towards us, a softer organ line and layered up vocals, male female, not unison, but united. Indecipherable sounds block around the singing, Johanna now, through effects. We get a low key percussion workout which slowly evolves into the final section of her set, the drones slowly return, layering, warm and enveloping and not threatening this time either. A click, spool winds, short busts of static, or morse. And finally falling into the Stargate for close.



Thursday 4th May at the Rossi Bar: Tullis Rennie / Johanna Bramli / While we were sleeping

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Tullis Rennie: Trombone and electronic improvisation
Johanna Bramli: Haunted voices from within the machine
While we were sleeping: Experimental silence through pop-disco to earth-shattering noise

Tullis Rennie is a composer, improvising trombonist, electronic musician, and field recordist. His work encompasses sound installation, community-engaged participative projects, multi-channel concert works, video, mixed media and live/improvised performances -presented at concerts and festivals across 20 countries, alongside broadcasts on NTS live, BBC Radio 3 and ResonanceFM.
Tullis Rennie’s most recent release is Fixed Freedoms on Accidental Jnr’s Room 2 – a new series for Matthew Herbert’s label dedicated to electronic music outside the main thoroughfare of club tracks. On Fixed Freedoms, Rennie presents a highly personal work created in response to changing life circumstances as well as the universal upheaval of the pandemic. Across seven diverse pieces the accomplished producer, trombonist and composer pivots between diaristic field recordings and analogue synth experiments: li.sten.to/fixedfreedoms

Rennie’s varied career to date has touched upon many different conceptual approaches, examining the impact of listening with jazz musicians Matthew Bourne and Graham South on 2018’s Muscle Memory and investigating the hidden process of performance preparation with Vonnegut Collective on 2021’s 48 Hours. He’s also a founder member of Barcelona-based AV collective Insectotròpics and co-director of community-oriented arts organisation Walls On Walls.
“Rennie foregrounds the act of listening as an active component in the creation of musical experience” The Wire Magazine
“…touches on Vladislav Delay, Lorenzo Senni and DJ Sprinkles … a mutated set of electronic experiments that bends recognizable formulae (trance, dub techno, electro) into abstract landscapes” Boomkat
“With his unique combination of experimental electronics, improvisation and field recording, Rennie’s music seems to reach towards a hyper-realist kind of ambient. His pieces are sensitive to the importance of noticing sound” The Cusp Magazine

Johanna Bramli is a sound artist, one half of motorik electronic pop band Fröst, co-founder of the all-female noise/feedback choir The Larsens and composes for contemporary dance. She blends granular synthesis, found sounds and vocal manipulation to create sensitive yet sonically assaulting textures.
www.johannabramli.com
www.instagram.com/johannabramli
www.facebook.com/johannabramli

While We Were Sleeping: Anything from experimental silence through pop-disco to earth-shattering noise and no idea what he will play on the day.

Hosted by our very own DJ Cheesemaster

Chris [Symmetrical Forces] creates live visuals for each performance using his own lo-fi footage, dusty VHS tapes and obscure videos from the internet to create futuristic images from the past overlayed with out-of-reach memories and vague fragments of lost visions.

The Rossi Bar is a small grade II building, and they are restricted with how they can improve access for anyone with mobility issues. The live music venue is located in the basement, which can only be accessed by a short spiral staircase. More accessibility information and images of the venue are in this document:
spiritofgravity.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/The-Spirit-of-Gravity-at-The-Rossi-Bar-for-audience-members.pdf

“The Spirit of Gravity: making experimental music a threat again – since 2001”

Thursday 4th May 2023 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5 (cash only)
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA