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Thursday 6th July at the Rossi Bar: Új Bála / Sonaura / A New Question

Posted on July 6, 2023July 7, 2023 by Spirit of Gravity

Új Bála: noise, psychedelia & the fringes of techno
Sonaura: Dreamy drones, crunchy tape loops and found sounds.
A New Question: Twisted sounds; absurdist poetry

Gábor Kovács is a Budapest/Brussels-based musician and visual artist, also an alumni artist of the Shape platform. Active in a number of projects, he works with a wide range of genres and sounds, although his main output is Új Bála. Új Bála merges noise, psychedelia and fringes of techno and summons the rhythmic skeletons of dance music to bring order to his backdrop of mangled synth noises. In the past couple of years Új Bála released on labels such as Plaque, Baba Vanga, Altered States Tapes, Czaszka Rec.,Lost Dogs Entertainment or Dalmata Daniel, performed at festivals like Schiev(Bruxelles), Les Siestes Électroniques(Toulouse), Novas Frequencias(Rio de Janeiro), Rokolectiv(Bucharest), Tauron Nowa Muzyka (Katowice), Pohoda(Trencin), Next Festival(Bratislava), Uh Fest(Budapest) and played in clubs and DIY spaces all across Europe with his live act.

Sonaura – dreamy drones, crunchy tape loops and found sounds from Kent.
www.instagram.com/sonauramusic/
sonaura.bandcamp.com
www.youtube.com/user/sonauratube

A New Question is a solo project that takes organic sounds and twists them electronically, interwoven with absurdist poetry and cut-up monologue to create moments that attempt to communicate something that neither sound design or poetry can quite capture alone
anewquestion.bandcamp.com/music

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 6th July 2023 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5 (cash only)
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 25th June – 8.00 to 10.00pm

Posted on June 25, 2023June 26, 2023 by Spirit of Gravity

Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 25th June 2023 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/

This month’s show features a long piece by Polish artist Raman Marozau that occupies most of the first hour. The rest of the show, features tracks from around the orbit of the Spirit of Gravity, including Barelife, Ugly Animal, Secret Nuclear, Jilk, and Dhangsha.

First hour: Raman Marozau – composition.zeta.0.0.2 / Cour’en – My dreams are untethered by location / Ascsoms – Reflecting Machine
Second hour: Secret Nuclear – View across a city / Ugly Animal – Black Ice Manoeuvre / Jilk – Flags / Jilk – The Bewilderment Inside Syrup House / Barelife – Gender Christian / Barelife – Coca Colonialism / Dhangsha – Hostile Environment / Secret Nuclear – One hundred thousand windows / Ugly Animal – Cathode Carcass

The May 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-may-2023-28th-may-2023/
This edition features an edit from Linden Pomeroy’s 5 hour long live improvisation in aid of the Men Walk Talk charity for men’s mental health featuring Spirit of Gravity member, McCloud, along with an airing of Eliane Radigue‘s drone masterpiece Triptych.
For more info and to contribute: www.totalgiving.co.uk/mypage/thepathiknow / menwalktalk.co.uk/learn-more

The hottest show on record

Posted on June 1, 2023May 14, 2024 by Spirit of Gravity

June 2023
The Rossi Bar

We had a bonus guest tonight due to illness with a touring package due to play at The Bees Mouth, so we started off with M G Dysfunction, he was set up in front of the stage in a fine cowboy short and baseball hat, on a high stool. Which he soon abandons. It’s fair to say he splits the audience, and quite quickly. He starts with a nice piano tune, which he quite quickly annihilates with some hideous country style caterwauling. “Fuck the boys in blue”, I thought it was quite funny. That segues into a drone, moving into a grime inflected number. The backing track on the next one has something of Eno’s Discreet Music about it, and he talks over it about the moon & stars. Back into drones and a murky slow bass drum. Very slow. He sings again. Next one up is dedicated to all the Junglists in the audience, he makes some quip about Chocolate Monk that goes over everyone’s head. The tune has nothing to do with Jungle though. Some fat ugly bass drone, circular ranting. The noise rises up within it, ranting continues. This is my favourite part of the backing track. Juddering bassline, noise swirls through various delays, then a modern RnB backing that quickly tips back into the disgusting racket.

So first of the scheduled acts was the welcome return of Dale Frost, minimal drum kit, electronic pads, novelty cymbals (triple decker-ed, dimpled and warped or full of holes) and some other bits I couldn’t see. Starting with a shimmering roll on the synth triggering drum pads interspersed with occasional drums before he fires off a more familiar song set into the pads, is it sequenced, is it played. Both. Neither who knows. But holing down drum parts and synth lines Dale really pushes the idea of the independently controlled multi-limbed drummer to new lengths. It’s great to watch. The next track is more heavily into the beat, the synths more beeping rhythm lines weaving between the drums. Nice steps up when the beat thickens and the synths multiply with delays. The next track is definitely running off a sequencer. An odd whistly line giving way to a steel drum tick, bass drum on the fours. Then I’m not so sure about the sequencer, he seems to be playing the lines. Playing with my mind. Towards the end of this song he gets stuck into the hidden bits of kit, a keyboard and analogue delay, I’m guessing. One song has a nice one note bassline with some chunky stabs before giving way to something jerky that syncopates within a beat. The last song slows it down, with a nice fat bass and some pinging Tom Tom Club synth sounds. It slowly speeds up, the bass getting a bit rawer and groovier, other sounds trailing around it with a melodic synth line emerging in the firing chorus bits of it. And a big organ flourish to end on a high energy finish.

Then the return of f.Ampism, we had him booked in for one of the first shows after lockdown ended, in that spell of Will It Open Or Not. And it didn’t. But here we are now. He advises us to watch the projections rather than himself as he sets up some almost drones. There’s a bit too much going on to be actual drones, swelling, subtly shifting pitches, a hint of growled voice, a smidge of harmonium, a slowly unfolding melodic line that emerges gradually and slinks away. Its the sound of hot sun coming down through unruffled leaves, a hot still day, something stirs indistinctly in the distance. What it is we never mind. I’m drifting; open my eyes and 10 minutes has blissed, passed. Paul is working away, much more active than would be obvious, but the shifts are there, nothing is actually static even if you never noticed it change, it’s all different. At some point he gets me up to muck about with the monitor and we get some extra modulating midrange reedy layers sliding into the mix. It’s now quite a think complex montage of sounds. Still quite precise and separate, everything pulsing and morphing in its own individual way. It reaches a crescendo but I’m too blissed out to really notice and stops.

Rounding off the evening we have Cornish (via London) artist Yiskāh. Carrying on where Paul left off with a somewhat more menacing drone. Under this she feeds in a vibrating thin whirr the drone starts to vibrate and branch off, into sub bass whoomf and airplane hum. A ghost of a wind sends its icy chill to taunt us. The PA is pushed about as Jess plays with the sonics of the room. A creeping sensation spiders its way into the stew. The sounds is solid, it’s not unpleasant enough to be HNW, but it has a similar monolithic indistinctness; a vast incomprehensibility where it just quietly fills your head and erases sense of time and place, gentle rather than roaring but nonetheless abstract and almost formless. There are touches of tone that emerge from the fog, perhaps slippery streams of feedback that evaporate as you start to latch onto them. Occasionally things in the room vibrate, shifting around as the pitches from the stage evolve. As it winds down, we’re left with the more pitched sounds; wind, a swirl of sea. Tyre on gravel. None of these things.

Thursday 1st June at the Rossi Bar: f.Ampism / Yiskāh / Dale Frost

Posted on June 1, 2023June 3, 2023 by Spirit of Gravity

f.Ampism: Immersive improvised synth & sample gloop
Yiskāh: Drones & field recordings; generative & interactive natural environments
Dale Frost: Drums and Synthesiser; exploring rhythm through process

Paul Wilson has been playing around with sound for 20 years. As f.Ampism he has released albums on Ikuisuus, Lal Lal Lal, Chocolate Monk, Giant Tank and more. He is currently working on an album for Brighton-based Hive MInd. He contributed to the 2018 Kemialliset Ystavat LP “Siipe Empii” and is currently putting the finishing touches to a collaborative duo with Jan Anderzen (Kaloja) and a trio collaboration with Jani Hirvonen (Uton) and Johannes Schebler (Baldruin).
Also in 2018 he attended a 5 day immersive workshop/retreat in the French Pyrenees with ambient legend Laraaji. This included body and breath work as well as deep listening and sonic experimentation. He hosts a monthly radio show, “The Infinite Inward” on Resonance Extra, currently in its 5th year.

Yiskāh is the performance alias of Jessica Beechey, a Cornish sound artist, performer, sound designer and live sound engineer based between London and Cornwall. A Falmouth University BA(Hons) Creative Music Technology graduate, she is currently in her final year of MMus Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Working primarily as a Sound Artist, she performs and produces works within the realm of drone music, using field recordings and interactive & generative means of creation to explore natural environments.

Dale Frost is a drummer and electronic musician who performs solo using an acoustic drum kit connected to a sampler and loop pedal, allowing him to create loops and layer sounds in real-time. His previous work has explored networked, interconnected rhythms, as in his ‘Perm Octo Clavè Induction Set’ project.
Currently, Frost is exploring the use of audio sampling and resampling to generate polyrhythms in his solo drum kit performances. His music uses a blend of organic and synthetic sounds, drawing influences from minimalism, post-rock, IDM, and free jazz.

Hosted by our very own DJ Cheesemaster

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

Thursday 1st June 2023 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5 (cash only)
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

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

Posted on May 28, 2023May 29, 2023 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 May 4, 2023April 18, 2024 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 May 4, 2023May 5, 2023 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

“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