Clive Henry
Body/Noise/Body
Clive Henry has been actively pursuing sound for over twenty years. Whilst he has done this in bands and looser groupings, his solo work has seen him pick an untutored route through “noise” and associated areas. His work has often been autobiographical, with recurring themes and ideas including: dissonance, the process of decay, and the human body as instrument. Recent recorded work has concentrated on noise textures and “harsh noise walls”, as well as pieces more clearly akin to musique concrete; whilst live performances have utilised vocal work and a commitment to physicality and tension. His formative experiences in music occurred within the diy punk/hardcore scene and the values of this community continue to inform his musical activities and beliefs. He was a founder member of the bang the bore collective, who have organised gigs and occurrences around the UK. He has played across Europe and the US, and been heard on radio 1. He lives alone in Southampton, with no friends but hundreds of noise tapes which all sound the same. He dislikes writing short bios.
Gagarin
Sonic Cosmonaut
Gagarin is the solo project of Graham “Dids” Dowdall, current member of Pere Ubu and former collaborator with Nico and a myriad of others legendary and unheard of. As Gagarin he makes an electronica that carries influences ranging from Stockhausen to Chicory Tip and everywhere in between and outside. Performing live with a combination of drumpads, samplers, iPads and other hardware his sound is characterised by liberal use of field recordings, strong melodies, fractured rhythms and improvising from a starting point of composition and structure. His last album – the unpronounceable ‘Aoticp’ received rave reviews and lots of airplay including repeated Radio 3 plays. In the middle of recording the follow up – provisionally titled ‘Corvid’ – Gagarin will bring to Spirit of Gravity a mix of work in progress for this, alongside some from ‘Aoticp’ and some reworks of compositions commissioned for 5 hills in Surrey in Summer 2016 which he shared for the first time at Fort Process.
www.gagarin.org.uk
soundcloud.com/ gagarin-1
Feedback Cell
Alice Eldridge & Chris Kiefer: modified Cello
Alice Eldridge and Chris Kiefer’s ever-evolving modified cello project with fresh Reykjavík upgrade: cellos, code, car amps, pickups and lots of soldering. Emits dulcet tones and brutal yelps.
Thursday 2nd March 2017 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
Undercroft, Brighton Train Station, BN1 4FQ Brighton
The latest release on the Spirit of Gravity label documents a beautiful and unique live collaboration
between the traditional Indian instrumentalists of The Music of Benares and the electronic
soundmakers of The Spirit of Gravity.
The album is available for audition and as a pay-what-you want download on the label’s page:
spiritofgravity.bandcamp.com/album/music-of-benares-in-brighton
On 8 November 2015, sitarists Pandit Shivnath Mishra and Deobrat Mishra, together with tabla player Prashant Mishra – three generations of the same family from Benares, northern India – played a sold-out concert at the Dome studio. Two fusion pieces – performed that evening with the Spirit of Gravity collective’s Geoff Reader, Andrew Greaves and Howard Spencer – are presented on this album, along with four improvisations from a session at Bird Studios the previous day.
The Mishras tour Europe every year but had never previously visited the UK. The collaboration was facilitated by Spirit of Gravity Life President Chris Cook, and the resulting intertwining of subtle synth drones and wash was recorded and filmed by collective members Dan Powell and by Sarah Nelson at the Dome.
“It was great opportunity to perform for the first time in the UK in 2015 – we had some great memories of performing with local musicians and having great cultural exchange with the music” says Deobrat Mishra.