November 2022
The Rossi Bar

A busy night, starting off with a set by Evey, who runs the Electronic Music Open  Mic nights at The Rose Hill. Starting with a harpsicord arpeggio underpinned by a bassy wash, the harpsicord gets filtered out into something slightly spookier, other noises lurk about underneath, ending with a scream/machine noise that just overrides everything before fading off into reverb. The second track starts with a nicely resonant bassline, something picked and ‘Get Carter’-ish counterpoints this before a sub bass line swings in. Our first hint of drums comes in with a nicely reverbed out snare. The resonant bass is constantly moving, hardening the sound. The third track starts with what sounds like a one note bassline repeated on 3 instruments, that resonant picking sound comes back to pick up the melody line again. A full on churning beat comes in, with a noise drone and the lead line fills out, the noise mutates into a pulsating feedback line. The beat straightens out into a driving simplicity and everything else tumbles along in its wake. The next track starts with a big crushing rhythm, against this an electric piano and the chime work against each other to melodic effect. Lovely. The tempo picks up for the next one, a rhythm track working against the lead line, with a nicely detuned space noise doing odd things over it and a hammering riff building under it. The 6th song is short and spacious, just the chiming lead and some simple percussion. The penultimate track starts with a nice drone, before a intricate rhythm part swirls in under electric piano. The final track has the chime playing A Baion rhythm in a lower register than usual, against this percussion parts grind, a staccato bass drum, almost 80s snare sound, and eventually a 3 note pad riff with some squelching.

Ingrid Plum provides the tasty sound art filling in our beat-y sandwich of an evening, it’s the launch for her new album, “Corporeality” (available via Ryoanji Records) and the first time any of it has been played out live. The first track “Corporeality” starts with field recordings  of rain & birds, thunder, big pinging  drips into a metal bucket, elements of this get picked up into a subdued rhythm track and Ingrid exhales, shells scrape and the singing bowl gently bongs. Ingrid sings, somehow double tracking her voice on parts. The second piece features a special synth built for her, its starts with some pretty tortured breathing from Ingrid, breath in and out looped and rattly, some sampled speech on a slow loop, washes of white noise/drizzle, cassette organ with an almost bass guitar fuzz tone. The tape chirrups, some overtone whistling/singing from Ingrid. The third piece starts with a heartbeat, a gentle bassy drone that ever so slowly modulates, Ingrid breathes, a slow piano part, Ingrid sings. It has a real stillness.  The next song (“Stutter”) starts with a rhythm track of more sharp inhales/exhalations, looped and layered up to complexity. Staccato words “Are. You. You” tremulous vocalisations all churn into the mix. The final song (“The inversion of a shout”) starts with a clear almost crystalline tonal drone, it must be two drones as we can hear it beating against itself, shells again, breaths, what sounds like very distant monks, Ingrid is whispering. Spooky.

And to finish us off, we have Dhangsha back again. He starts with what sounds like a loop off his Monotron delay, but I don’t think he’d brought it, its has that murky, noisy quality to it that’s so appealing. Its chopped up into a more rhythmic part, delay added, twisted. A bass drum, kicks, stammers, and finally gets on that dancehall tip while the Monotron sound finally swirls itself into the ether. Bass comes booming through, almost totally out of the subs, near formless (Aniruddha was enthused by the PA at The Rossi, the way you could really get into the subs). And we hit a noisy groove. Squelching resonances come in, the drums drop, we get filtering, constantly mutating top lines before dropping down to a filthy bass drone, filtered up into noise, then a new bassline. The drums kick in again and we’re off into another groove. Insidious noises join the rhythm and fade away until we’re lost in delay feedback. This eventually seems to form itself into the next track. A bass drum and staccato hi hat bosh on, the kick overdriven to produce a bass tone, dry snare. Delay. Distorted voices. Effects units seem to pick up elements of the rhythm track to warp into new sounds over everything. Everything drops out for the fattest bass of the evening, berrooom, berroom, and back come the drums. This is the least cluttered by noise of his tracks, lean, driving. Until the breakdown, then we get a detuned counterpoint to the rhythm. The hi hats go just leaving us the bass elements, then everything’s back, new voices, tasteful delay feedback. “Insurrection”. The distortion levels increase, we lose the shape of the sounds, and they’re back again. Then finally we lose the rhythm track to several different delay decays and noise. Tasty.