Experimental electronics, musical robotics and emodrone from Brighton and the Outer Limits
Sarah Angliss is unwell
Tim Blechmann will play instead – gorgeous ambient digital drones
SQ (Sound Quartet)
Acousmatic, electronic, electro-acoustic duo (on tour from Sweden)
Slow Listener
The king of emodrone; the wonder of the cassette age
Thursday 1st May | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
COMING SOON
June
Sarah Angliss / Meatbreak / Haz’n’Daz
Experimental electronic action and techno improvisations from Brighton and the Outer Limits
Baby
One or more musicians performing improvised or composed music
Pale Graphs
Elliptical techno improvisations with live visuals by Pillager
TCH
The swansong tour for Tim Holehouse’s noise project
Thursday 3rd April | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
COMING SOON
May
Sarah Angliss / Sound Quartet / Slow Listener
June
Space f!ght / Meatbreak / Haz’n’Daz
February, and back home at the Green Door Store. What an awful shitty stormy night, shortly after I arrived the rain started and boy it didn’t let up. I’m amazed anybody made it out at all, so the fact we had a decent turnout was a real bonus – thanks to everyone who came down.
Anormals
Starting the evening off with an epic hour long set, Anormals, GotoR the guitarist sidekick from Asem along with Boris Nasa his spar from the old country, got to work to cover all the old ground of their history: techno sparseness, pounding kicks, grinding metal riffs, delicate guitar arpeggios, vocal samples, primary coloured bunny visuals and lush forests. At some point I was in the bar and the fire alarm went off (dust in the detector, it seems), no-one win the main room noticed – it was that kind of set, and I don’t think anybody was about to stand outside.
Mechanical Elephant
Making their Brighton début we had Mechanical Elephant, recently moved from Canterbury. Live drums and vocals; both processed and played straight. Starting with fairly straight drums and electronica as the set progresses everything became mutated, the drums more processed and less straightforward, the singing more elliptical the electronic voices more alarming and everything stranger and more spooky. Excellent and nowhere near long enough.
Shabash
Completing the evening Shabash was down from Russia via London with her violin and pedals. No visuals, just a plain white light and in she goes, a drone into the pedals and a build and a melody and a paring down and a plucked sequence looped and a different drone and another melody and a breakdown… It sounds easy and familiar in bald text but intricate and alluring in the presence. A proper journey in a set and again – Far Too Short. I do love feeling that more is required really, but trains have to be caught and it’s damn well raining again.
Lorah Pierre and Andrew Jarvis
A new duo of young Brighton Sound Artists
Wrong Signals
Radiophonic punk synth action
Nuclear Whale
Mighty Analogue Monolith of Dark Industrial Ambience
Mighty analogue electronics, sound art and punk synth action
Thursday 6th March | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
In December The Dome asked us to play as part of their Earsthetics season. By all accounts Ryoji Ikeda’s amazing show was far and away the best thing, but we can put in a good case for coming second…
You can read about our day out on the Dome website.
minimal impact
Minimal impact came onstage bang on 8:15, seated at a tiny coffee table concealing his kit, a massive video of degraded VHS feedback washing in blue/yellow arcs across the giant screen behind him. Starting with a coarse buzz that thickened out into a full spectrum wall of noise before being slowly washed away in stately swathes of phaser and jets of steam as the buzz reasserts itself as a massive insectoid whirr. A low fidelity immersive experience.
TR Agency
Tony Rimbaud’s hand picked quartet, TR Agency, where second on stage for a commercial break. Ron Caines sat on a chair at the front of the stage, nick stalking behind looping collages, breathy sounds, synthy washes and swirling alto, while nick talks about Stuff. And chewing gum (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24518203). The visuals were from a fantastic set of Black and White slides of broken mannequins. Nick discusses advertising, consumer goods and even recalls when everything around here Was All Fields. Staying pretty solidly away from rhythm it gets pretty spooky at times.
Static Memories
Static Memories’ Gus and Dan set up right at the back clearing as much space as possible for Mirei Yazawa to dance. She took up most of the attention of the players and us, lit from a lamp low at the side of the stage, with a pale blue block of ice slowly melting across the background. The music was typically beyond description: scraped bow across double bass, chimes and delays, Mirei twisting in response and driving changes in what they were playing, its all Very abstract. Dancer and musicians interlocked tightly.
Noteherder & McCloud had Bartosz Dylewski who had booked the projector and built the screen supplying visuals, and Chris Parfitt came roaring out in a storm of soprano notes primary geometries sliding around behind him. It took me a while to get up a similar head of steam, but there was some grinding sequences I enjoyed and a section in the middle with me howling through the bitcrusher while Chris circular blew squealing overtones on the sax that still sounds pretty damn intense.
HL Collins
HLCollins starts his set in a rattling trio with Nicholas Langley and Hassni Malik from The Vitamin b12 sat in line at a metal baker’s tray, scraping metal objects of various sizes about. Its theatre and oddly musical, and very funny. After a quick session with Henry up a set of steps banging a mic’d metal bin Nick and Hassni leave the stage and Henry moves onto a didgeridoo coffee machine that spits water but makes amazing sounds, he then moves onto a turntable and some balloons and effects for a comedy improv session that gets slowly creepier with a slurring hum playing back against clicks and bumps and occasional bird call for an ambient music for hell’s ante-room.
Shabash
Drone, eerie melody and beguiling trance states from Russian-born, London-based multi-dimensional explorer
Mechanical Elephant
Ambient soundscapes, electronic textures, vocal manipulation, hard-hitting beats
Anormals
Electric guitarist & electronic producer: metaphysical, free-form utopian psychedelia
Weirdo electronics and ecstatic experimentalism
Thursday 6th February | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
November, as eclectic a night as you will see at the Spirit of Gravity.
Stereocilia sublimated some kind of guitar chink into a subtly modulating vibration that he slowly thickened and shimmered until it was a suitable place to land carefully echoed single notes, letting them fade and migrate away to a duskening horizon. Two notes seemed to chime forever while the sound underneath resonated more harshly and zithered up, before being engulfed in washes of valentine fuzz and we head off into a glorious space rock moment (I’d love to hear this section with a full on driving band) all wah wah heat and notes tracing off the fingertips into the unknown. Thin streams of trebly feedback pull us back through time and space to somewhere near the point we started modulating slowly past silver moons to some blissed out Kaleidoscope place of autumnal bucolic psychedelia.
Dogeeseseegod grumbled out of the blocks with yelps and growls of voice and implement. They had a glowing plastic goose. There were submarine noises and balloon farts, echoing beeps and chunks of radio. Occasionally things ticked for a while, sometimes it was funny. Tape blocks underpinned terrifying siren squalls and everything faded back down to subtle clicks. Steve who is a glyph, did his glyph voice thing occasionally. Sometimes from Very Far Away. Steve balanced the goose on their head. Sometimes it was terrifying. I have no idea what they had on their table to make sounds apart from the vocal microphone and a walkman.
After the sublime and the ridiculous, what? Arc start really drily, tonally they could have segued on from the end of Dogeeseseegod, but the sound is austere; Violin, Cello and Double Bass scratched thin on rough bows pulling out almost vocal sonorities. After the daftness preceding it, Arc have a sombre beauty. Sylvia Hallett is the first to break up the mood with a birdlike flurry of notes that skitters up and down the neck of her violin while the cello gets unworldly and Gus Garside rasps triangular patterns on his bass. Again it stretches out almost pastorally long notes sliding uneasily that puts me more in mind of the heath around Innsmouth than the South Downs. Gus flirts with an oddly metronomic drum machine, but this adds rigidity to the dark fluids that they are conjuring so is soon discarded as things fall into silence, boat creaks and rope torsion. As the bass and cello go about their dirty work the violin gets introduced to the effects and starts to float around the edges, there is a glorious section when it seems to drip like stars as the sound floats across the room. Then its Gus’ turn to get abstract with the bass, setting up some sawing industrial din hawing away underneath a terrifying section that takes on horrific colours towards the end, if they need a soundtrack to a film of Brueghel’s paintings they need look only this far. They finish with a hoe-down that sets Henry Flynt firmly in the mainstream.
We snuck a sneaky one in at The Coach House, too, on Friday 29th November.
Noteherder & McCloud continued their warm-ups for the Dome with some funny chirruping, feedback sounding drones and pretty relaxed skronking from Chris Parfitt’s sax.
Asem played a set similar to their recent SoG show, of low key electronics and guitar (I’ve never seen anyone get feedback off so low powered an amp so consistently) finishing up with a new song of Morricone-sque piano chords and light guitar strumming.
David Thomas and Gagarin reprised a thing they’d only done remotely on the US Pere Ubu tour – David Thomas in the US and Gagarin in the UK. Some organ, some percussive noises, David Thomas started with a sheet of words which he soon ditched in favour of improvising with Gagarin occasionally kicking him up a gear with a well placed beat, or taking it down, they did a handful of songs and it was fantastic in such an intimate venue.
Then rounding off the evening, Gagarin stayed on for Roshi (feat Pars Radio) who were sublime. Starting with “Opium” off the new CD, which moves from singer songwriter simplicity pretty swiftly to some dark places, the still banging even in a small venue “Three Almonds and a Walnut”, before David Thomas came back to provide unworldly moans to “Don’t Breathe it to a Soul”. It was really a bit special.