Author: Spirit of Gravity

Thursday 2nd March at the Rossi Bar: Ascsoms / Jo Thomas / Simon James

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Ascsoms: Sound materials balancing atop a foundation of musique concrete
Jo Thomas: Voice, glitch, field recordings & synthesis
Simon James: Phantom Sounds from South of Shoreham Port

Adam Wimbush’s solo project Ascsoms is an ever evolving sound world formed from semi-improvisatory performance, signal processing systems and experiments with analogue equipment, tape players, loopers, field recordings, miscellaneous electronics, toys and a rotating cast of effects pedals. Sounds emerge and disintegrate, drone blankets shimmer, this is post-ambient music for derelict dreams.
ascsoms.bandcamp.com/music

Jo Thomas will be performing a series of electronic glitch landscapes. Her electronic work is bold, vast and sometimes delicate. Jo Thomas lives and works as a musician and composer in London. She publishes under her own imprint Soft Apple. Her work is available through Entracte , Tapeworm. Naxos, NMC Recordings and Ty Cerdd.
softapplesound.blogspot.com

Simon James: “Over two years of listening and recording around Shoreham Port I’ve had many experiences of what I describe as Phantom Sounds. They are fleeting, carried on the wind,  dissipating the moment I turn my attention to them, leaving me to wonder if they were real or imagined.   I’ll share extracts from my collection of field recordings and the Buchla Electric Music Box will provide the phantoms. This is a first public sharing of part of an ambitious large scale project focussed on the area around Shoreham Port, which sits just over the road from my house.”

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 2nd March 2023 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5 (cash only)
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

Endless travelator

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

March 2023
The Rossi Bar

Will a member of management please go to the security panel.

A boom arm full of loops of quarter inch tape hangs obscuring our view of Ascsoms as he sits at his tape player and effects. He introduces the pieces tonight as being from a work in progress called “A state of emergency”, a homage to klaxons, alarms and such. And it’s full on radiophonics, a lovely cascade of beeps and whirrs spills out of the PA, occasional tonal swirls, that are eventually swallowed up by a quiet repeating rasp. A fuzzy ill-defined drone hovers away in the background as the swirls occasionally continue and a Tuxedomoon shimmer whooshes through. A buzzing fly eventually realises itself as a thinned-out air raid alarm, pocket calculator tones away. Adam occasionally gets up to refresh the tape he’s using as a sound source. The tones vary, there’s a descending run that ends in bassy delay feedback. A circular saw seems to have defined pitch, everything slurs. One tape seems to have oud playing on, that he picks notes of particular frequencies to highlight that give us a rhythmic patter. Car horns unobtrusively provide a honking beat. A laser battle breaks out in the quietest traffic jam in the world. Stereo sonar pings!  It’s all surprisingly warm & emotional.

Jo Thomas is sat behind a Chapman stick laid out horizontally on the table in front of her. She plays with by hammering on to the strings, her hand like a piano player’s; reaching for the widest chord, she has some field recordings which come in under her sparse bass lines. Rhythmic leaf crunch, gives way to something ill-definably thumpier. I think of the Chapman stick as being a bass, but she gets some nice high notes out of it, including some nicely sustained feedback, which she distorts into a penetrating grind. Jo is also not immune to a little radiophonic warble here and there. Starting subtly then amping it up to overwhelm the field recordings. All the time making runs & rumblings on the stick. She runs for a while on a really nice abstract loop given rhythm by repetition, its quiet with a few notes, rumbles and whistles. We have walking / raindrops / knocking giving a counter beat, then a sudden rush of sub bass and take off rumble evolving into wind-tunnel  roar and improv rattle. Everything drops away leaving the sub-bass to loop away with sparse chords layered over.

Simon James rounds off the evening with his famous Buchla synth, once again the synth set up facing the audience and he sits with his back to us – we can see him working away: patching; adjusting, tweaking. He has programmed up a lot of sounds from his neighbourhood in Shoreham, the harbour, the beach, the wind, the occasional chime. The wind gradually becomes tuned and effected, a drone underpinning it. It drops away to the wind again, lock sirens, the distant warehouses. Distant foghorns boom gently, as we enter a factory, metal is dropped and lifts hum. We enter a world of water, waves against a wall, and Simon in his car talking about the wind of the sea buffeting his car. Lorries running past the bass off their exhaust enhanced by the Rossi bar’s PA. The final section starts with what sounds like a small wind turbine judging by the pitch, tuned up and down and briefly sawtoothed, ghosted with delay and some more proper bass and it suddenly stops to general laughter before recommencing back in the watery pool. Sirens woop and a ship engine throbs and vibrates past


Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 26th March – 8.00 to 10.00pm

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Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 26th March 2023 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/

For the first hour this month, we are celebrating the latest release on the Spirit of Gravity net label. ‘Night‘ is the new album by Noteherder and I’m Dr Buoyant. It follows their previous release, ‘Day‘. See what they did there. The 2nd hour is the usual mix of good good stuff from within the orbit of the Spirit of Gravity collective.

1st Hour:  Noteherder and I’m Dr Buoyant – Night (full album)
2nd Hour: R. Dyer – Risk / Othermen – Cacheless / I’m Dr Buoyant – Silica Minuteman MVP / Onemancrimewave – The Battleship Minimal Impact Enters Tactical Orbit Around Uranus / Andrew Greaves – Alapanal / Mark Leckey – Sirens into Bliss (Terror Wogan 800% slower botlegz remixxx)

The February 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-february-2023-26th-february-2023/
This month the first hour features tracks from within the inner orbit of the Spirit of Gravity Collective – a section of artists from Brighton UK, including the new Slightly Off Kilter compilation: Dulcet Business News 3. The second hour starts with a formidable new Dhangsha set recorded live at The Spirit of Gravity in November 2022, and continues with tracks from our friends Gorgonn, Ninit, Jilk, and Darren Harper.

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 26th February – 8.00 to 10.00pm

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

This month the first hour features tracks from within the inner orbit of the Spirit of Gravity Collective – a section of artists from Brighton UK, including the new Slightly Off Kilter compilation: Dulcet Business News 3. The second hour starts with a formidable new Dhangsha set recorded live at The Spirit of Gravity in November 2022, and continues with tracks from our friends Gorgonn, Ninit, Jilk, and Darren Harper.

First Hour: Correlations – Repetitions & Transitions Live from Kemptown – 01 Live from Kemptown Part 1 / Blanca Regina & Pierre Bouvier-Patron – A Better Place / Somnambulance – Wally’s Ashes / King Razor – Submerging / Ocean in a Bottle – Homage to Guion Bluford / Steve Beresford – Faradena Afifi – Paul Khimasia Morgan – flksngr
Second hour: Dhangsha – Systemik / Dhangsha – Re-Germinate / Gorgonn – Acid Body / Gorgonn – Abyss / Gorgonn – Not Yet Surrendered / Ninit – todaystomorrowstrance / Jilk – Lost and Gained / Darren Harper – A Thousand Tiny Heartbreaks

The January 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-january-2023-22nd-january-2023/
This month’s show is bookended by long pieces by Simon Pyke and Marcelo Armani, and it also features old friends of the Spirit of Gravity Fane, Thomas Stove and Jonathan Higgins, plus new to us noisemakers Bantu.