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Guitar night

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Four for the price of three in October.

ypsmael (5)Ypsmael. We squeezed in an extra set for this show, Ypsmael who we’d been after booking for a while was in the UK on a brief tour at short notice so it seemed rude not to. He started his set casually strumming his guitar a few times light shimers that fed into his chain of effects and eventually came back expanded by reverb in great bassy washes and far falling footsteps. Stick thumps, paper tears and penny whistle all go in at various stages ending up in some abstract state that has the expansiveness of space and the claustrophobia of undersea.

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asem (7)Asem were quickly up replacing them; Sara Selim on laptop electronica and GotoR on rangly guitar. Sara started the set with skittering reverb beetles with Gotor playing clean circulating notes into loops and wah-wahd thin lead lines. Vincent price and sonmeone I don’t recognise made an appearance with some american poetry and portentious bass drums and it all gets a bit psychedelic as Gotor goes heavily into Robby Krieger territory before eventually winding out on bells and ticking and dulcimer.

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scottish james brown

Scottish James Brown got a little looser, it was a little more chaotic on stage; stand up drums, another guitar, toy keyboards and a wonky mic stand in what looked like the least convenient spot. They started with a lovely bass drone and chiming notes picked out on the Casio. The drums either clicked by with clockwork precision or stammered unconvincingly, Tim fed a cornet into a loop (and always at an angle I couldn’t photograph) and analogue delay played with time, in several senses – once taking back to the 19th century with some lovely dreamtime chimebox before slamming me into the early 2000s with some indietronic fluff of detuned keyboard and murky guitar strumming. And then off into surprising bass tones. A joy of lurching stagger.

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priests of nothingness Carrying on the alternation between sly and slick The Priests of Nothingness sneak up on us with Derek and Dr David Reby slipping field noises and sliding effects around while Rob arpeggiates up and out with Moog and drum machine, it all sounds so easy, but was creepily effective with the bass of the Fallow Deer washing underneath, before it slips down into spooky interludes where synth, deer and slowed birds vie for the strangest noise and Derek plays acoustic guitar notes and building back up for a bit of a groove at the end.

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Colour me digital

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September saw our first involvement with Brighton Digital Festival and it came off rather well, three very different facets of digital music.

The 55th Flotilla were kind enough to take a break from their regular Build Brighton night and supply the elektrocreche, with their trademark ships wheel and telegraph, their new large size telegraph is a particular joy.

ian n nick useStarting our evening off was the first live collaboration between Nicholas Langley (Hz, Cosmonaut Transfer) and Ian Murphy (Hobo Sonn), Ian set up in front of the stage (“I like to hear the actual PA”) with his vintage sampler and Nick sat right down on the cobbled floor with a phone. They start with Nick circling Ian’s sonics quite uncertainly, settling into the evening before really starting to assert himself – pushing Ian out of his usual places, before fluttering some phoned in tapped tabla that had Ian bouncing back with some textural drones. Then Nick switched to a fuzzed organ that wound around what Ian was doing for a very satisfactory psychedelic finale.

john wall useJohn Wall had to leave early so played the central slot and turned in a real storming set, wringing every tone from the generous PA that the Green Door Store has, so a special mention to Matt Benzie the soundman for giving him free reign to really stretch the sonics of the room. It was also nice to have John play in an environment where you could see the whites of his eyes as they flick around his laptop screen, totally focussed on what he’s doing. Really abstract but very cohesive, from trouser flapping bass to the cleanest top ends.

baconheadSo Baconhead gear up the proceedings, keeping the bass extended but adding crunchy rhythms. Referencing Panoptica and Derrick May; with extreme repetition, pitch bends and odd sounds it was step on from their set in the spring, uncluttered and unhoodied keeping focus on the dynamics. Head noddingly good.

Is it birdsong, or is it bridge FX?

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It was the kind of evening that starts with a walk down the hill that just makes you happy to be out and about, a proper August Spirit of Gravity night.

Resonant Blue

Resonant Blue starts off squatting on the front of the stage, low level drone-stuffs laid out in front of him: keyboard and laptop, it modulates nicely for a while then seems to lift in a rush that precedes a whirr of traffic and field recordings and goes off in a more Ypsilon in Malaysia pale mode, the noise becoming tones and chimes, again it lifts into more digital sounding synths, before thickening up again with more choral drones and heading for deep space. Truly music for Starfelds.

Shinamo Moki

With the busiest stage we’ve had for a while, Shinamo Moki have guitar (!) electronic drums and electronics. Minutes before going on the guitarist’s effects rack goes west, so we have a slight delay while Tim Holehouse sets him up with his array; credit to both of them, I can detect no problem during the set. Shinamo Moki operate somewhere between Cornelius and Japan, the idea of eastern pop and its actuality. With the age and haircuts, it’s tempting to look on them as an indie band born of YouTube, but I think they go beyond that and manage to eschew vocals, which obviously helps us. It’s all bent sounds; gongs, string synths, drums that detune, everything shifts and stutters – a lightness around the rhythm and deftness of touch that make this as far to pop as we’ll go, and we go happily.

Timothy C. Holehouse

Timothy C Holehouse reclaims his effects array and sets up his collection of objects, and starts Ashtoreth Shaman, his new project. He has his effects and is just feeding sound in: throat-sung didgeridoo gurgles, drones and whistles, Brighton beach stones, sticks. And it’s just that: an hallucinatory ever-thickening drone of immense depth. We just soak it up, eyes closed, letting the sound wash over us and watching the internal unfolding.

It’s all quite straightforward really

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Thee Founders back with a bang

Ill-Fitting Suit/s

The return of the Ill Fitting Suit/s was something of a joy; combining thee founders performance art roots, Nick Rilke’s ongoing obsession with the human voice and Tony Rimbaud’s moderne processing. And some string telephones (6 into one, unless I’m much mistaken). They had prepared a list of twenty or so items and over the course of a set and half, probably only performed half of them. It was alienating, funny, adventurous, daft, entertaining and a good listen. And once more a very hard to describe without resorting to blow by blow description. Words, the human voice, effects, suits.

Animal Magic Tricks

In between the two sections of their set Animal Magic Tricks demonstrated a new instrument she’d been working on: resonating spheres placed inside containers to produce rich ringing tones with a laptop controller. So she ran through an introduction and slowly introduced the sounds before forming the abstractions into a quite startling version of “Love hurts” with Frances’ thick voice bubbling up as though through honey sitting on top of this completely abstract backing. Quite remarkable, she then had a workshop session for members of the audience before the grey suits returned.

Hobo Sonn

Hobo Sonn had established himself at the back of the room between the elektrocreche and the sound desk in almost complete darkness except for his usual low light that allowed us to follow his hand movements as they went back and forth over his twentieth century sampler taking on the sonic overspill from the bar with hums and clicks; low levels of distorted near silence followed by squalls of quasi-musical noise. It seemed quite a struggle to find a centre for the sound of the room for him to work off, before he identified this orchestral racing car ramp that pitched from bass up to some blistering treble fragmenting into coruscations of blistered hiss. It rounded off with midnight ghost clock chimes and Lovecraftian insect ticking.

Now that was quite extraordinary

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Who’d have thought watching someone read a book would be that fascinating?

Laborotoro

Normally it would be a drawback, but Ed being unable to make it down to the June Spirit of Gravity show meant that Laboratoro stepped up their imagination and came up with a singular solution. Xelis set up to the right of the stage with a stack of books; to the left of the stage we had a video projection of Ed sat at his drums. Xelis reads from his books and Ed drums, sometimes they talk to each other. They read and play several books, starting with “Tristram Shandy”, they both read “Fahrenheit 451” in silence for a full 3 minutes. It was a very singular performance, quite unlike anything else. Part of Xelis’ ongoing book project.

The Static Memories

The Static Memories, with Gus Garside on the left (let’s keep the geography for the time being at least), feed each other great chunks of sound back and forth: meaty sonorities, bass runs, sibilant drones, clacks, whistles and whirrs pass back and forth between them. Gus conjures unhealthy squealing and ticks of something, while Dan blasts out a vast sub bass whoom of terror, slides and balloon squeaks, before a modernist folk song played in a factory back room breaks free to plead its special case, before being caged away once more under the stairs. It tries to get free but the spiders seem to be keeping in place….

Luca Nasciuti

Luca Nasciuti did two pieces, the first was a purely electronic ‘Mirror’, the second was with a video artist Zeynep Dagli ‘Zetetikoi’. While she’s onstage Zeynap is illuminated, but otherwise it’s pretty much darkness apart from her film, warm green glows and cascading rainforests falling down the screen at the back of the stage, like the music constantly rolling towards us: tropical dark, dense. She moves it around on screen, occasionally resolving some jungle sky caught in the distance, while ram’s horn trumpets faintly blow against the metallic shimmer and harsh birds sing. At the end there’s a woman in a spider web hat, white, that’s lifted up onto the mirror ball that glances us all with starlight.

 

The sound comes down that pipe

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May saw the end of an era, but also a visit from a legend.

4ThirtyThree

4thirtythree hadn’t played together for six months and Stuart Revill the guitarist was less than twenty four hours off the plane from Canada. Not that it noticed, like an avuncular band in your front room they immediately settled right into it: left to right we have acoustic guitar through loop station dropping still notes in slow motion cascades; tenor sax and un-tipped vocals providing nourish grit; finally soprano sax, chime boxes, thumb pianos, flute and piano loops bringing the ether. In spite of all this looping it’s a sparse, empty sound. Occasionally it winds backwards through psychedelic space, Tim’s cycling words repeating some elliptical husky semi-profundity; a hiss popping almost rhythmically; a piano note or ringing clean guitar note burrowing into your unconscious. An elliptical start to the evening.

The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Quite a different thing was The Organ Grinders Monkey; one high tech man with earpiece foldback, headphone mic, shiny fender jaguar and slick laptop/processing unit, Tearing through a highly structured set of songs. Jittering drums, bass pulses, odd swoops, heavily processed vocals, everything stopping and juddering in bizarre places, its sing-a-long in a warm jets pop way, if you can get round the leaps of logic, that is. A highlight comes where he hands over a controller to an audience member to mangle (filter; tremolo) the end of a song. The whole set seems like a battle between his innate song-writing ability and the flighty imagination that just wants to turn this knob, try this effect, stutter edit. Ending on a stuck CD lock.

Asmus Tietchens

By the time he hit the stage Asmus Tietchens had already given us two sneaky sets of minimal pings and bops on the elektrocreche – he seemed quite smitten. His actual performance was a restrained and masterful set of digital clicks and warm tones, light hums, space noises and Spooky shimmers. It’s low key and mesmerising, creepy with barely perceptible shifts in tone followed by cascades of skittering insect feet between the speakers. At one point a gated German speaker tries to hold a conversation with an alien who appears to be travelling backwards through time. The sound appears to reach escape density, but it’s not really a climax, its beyond that kind of thing: a staccato minor bass distracts the human voice who’s still trying to talk, in the distance a spaceship enters the void, it changes, opens up into toneful knocks and crickets.

Either he’s bigger than he looks, or that’s not quite a trombone

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Full marks for dedication on two counts this month.

Birds of Death Valley

Some whistles on the recorder, shortwave radio bursts and abstract block sounds, give way to sustained chords swelling over a gentle reverse hi-hat and plucked strings. It evolves gently, chiming and ringing, odd whistles Wasp buzzes synthetic drones layering away, until a slide trumpet player heaves swelling onto the stage to duet with echoed recorder for “The Cruel Landlady”… things continue to shimmer under the sustained trumpet notes, with a round of the songs chorus slowly rotating under the final gentle squalls of songs fade until a rather harsh stomp of four to the floor comes thumping martially in with some bass oomph and sonic wibble pays a little visit.

Pawnsphinx

Carrying on with the ringing resonant tones, Pawnsphinx, on the first stage of his honeymoon, gave a more formed and focussed set, less whimsical as befits something based on Dostoevsky but strangely sympathetic in the way it followed on till disrupted by a heavy bell-ish thump that seemed to emerge from some devilish rave memory initiating a freefall beat that really seemed to disrupt the dynamics more that drive them. It all got very ominous with creaking doors and unpleasant chords before some unlikely wobbling bass reminded us it is the 21st Century after all. Some Detroit beats led us on via throat singing and some cockney swearing on to the finale with some excellent detailed snare and rhythm patterns that took me right back to the heady days of Instrumentality.

Karl M. Waugh

In the absence of Chloe, who was laid up with a cold that had been conspiring with the unseasonal snow to rob us of as much of our regular audience as possible, the Zero Map gave way to a solo set by Karl M V Waugh. On guitar. For a full half hour. Which was really exceptional and may be one of the best things I’ve seen Karl do. Starting off with a cascade of scrapes before some clean endless echoing picked chords came through. He managed to avoid being too close sound-wise to The Durutti Column, my default mental state for clean guitar, due to some interesting eastern intervals. Something more like Dick Dale’s more thoughtful homages to his ethnicity. Having kept it clean for the majority of the set Karl eventually gave in and let rip with some max noise over-strumming, which still managed to maintain the context of what he’d been doing up to that point. Very tasty.