Author: Spirit of Gravity

Thursday 8th January at the Rossi Bar: Sophie Sirota / Agnes Haus / Remember Glaciers

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Sophie Sirota: Viola: ambient soundscapes & evolving textures
Agnes Haus: Fractured semi-autonomous modular explorations
Remember Glaciers: Improvised guitar, flute & generative synth

Sophie Sirota is a classically trained violist, singer, and composer. With an extensive career spanning across genres, Sophie has collaborated as a session musician, live performer, arranger, and composer with some of the most iconic names in music, including 4-Hero, D’Influence, Gabrielle, Beth Orton, Ed Harcourt, Paul Weller, Kim Deal, Robert Kirkby, Tindersticks, and visual artists Jeremy Millar and Sadie Hennesey.
Sophie blends her classical training with modern experimental sounds. A member of Coastal Electronauts and the Free Range String Orchestra, she regularly performs in the South East and London. Known for her innovative performances, Sophie creates ambient soundscapes, using looper and effects pedals to craft intricate, evolving textures. These live performances, particularly at electronic events, have garnered attention for their atmospheric depth and emotional resonance.
Her debut album, ‘Pressure Drop’ came out on Oct 24th, and has been reviewed as:
‘….captivating solo work using voice, viola and pedalboard.’ (JA- Electronic Sound)
‘A flame in the dark and a moment in time, as universal as it is deeply personal…’ (Rowan Blair Colver- Sound Read Six)
‘…takes you to big spaces with dreamy skies, all the while with a slight, ominous undertow which adds a certain industrial, urban spice.’ (Tim London- Outside Left)
sophiesirota.bandcamp.com/

Agnes Haus is a Brighton-based non-binary audio-visual artist and composer, creating murky, fractured aural landscapes that revolve around semi-autonomous explorations with modular synthesisers. In 2023 and 2024, respectively, their first two albums, “Sequel’ and ‘Everything Is Resurrection’ were released on the iconic Opal Tapes label – praised for their bleak minimalism and organic spaciousness. The upcoming 3rd album, Inexorable Ascent, is out 5 December 2025 on PenelopeTrappes’ Brighton imprint, Nite Hive. Agnes Haus’ live performances are fully improvisational, purposefully slow and hypnotic, with haunting self-created dystopian cinematics. Along with audio, Agnes Haus is known for their visual work, exploring the dark and the surreal through music videos for artists such as Mogwai, Penelope Trappes, and Microcorps. They have shown their visual work at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Attenborough Centre for the Arts, EarTH, Dark MOFO Festival, Sonica Festival and SXSW.
www.instagram.com/agneshaus_noise
agneshaus.bandcamp.com/

Remember Glaciers: Memories of glaciers echo and fade into glacially slow improvised generative ambient soundscapes joined by live guitar and flute improvisations by Natty Purbrick.
We may be the last generations to remember glaciers: if you have memories of glaciers you would like to share, please get in touch.
spiritofgravity.bandcamp.com/album/2025-07-13-ice-core-rhone-glacier-2009-and-2024

Live visuals by Meljoann

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 8th January 2026 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5 (cash only)
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

This was an actual birthday

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

January 2026
The Rossi Bar

Starting the year – a New Year following yet again another hottest year on record – we have a set by an augmented Remember Glaciers, with Jim with his laptop, but also electric guitar, and live memories narrated by Sophie Cowan and flute by Natty Purbrick. The synthesizer, as is the case with Remember Glaciers unfolds at a very slow rate, exceeding slow arpeggios and washes as befits the subject. The guitar and flute unfurl gently in the spaces around Sophie’s story of her visit to the Franz Josef Glacier on New Zealand’s south island. There is a melancholy, as you would expect from a series of performances based on the premise that we could be the last generation to remember glaciers. Jim and Natty alternate their responses to Sophie, each responding to the last’s playing. It’s really understated, and adds a nice level of detail on top of what is usually so stately in its flow. Sophie pauses speaking for a while and takes on some pre-recorded speech and starts to chop it using the Ableton controller, although its somewhat less frenzied than in others of Jim’s projects. While that is happening Jim and Natty play off each other, gently circling around and around.  Jim plays a little descending line that indicates closure and the piece ends with Jim’s usual request for more memories of glaciers.

Agnes Haus is next up, with a modular setup and their own flickering grey visuals. Starting with a reverb-y collapse into a church organ from a tidy modular setup. There is some creepy reverbed scrape from an untrue cassette player adding a warbling atmosphere, a scatter of harpsichord chimes give us a narrative frame. A slow regular staple double tap gives a rhythm and everything else strips away. The modular syncopates beeps slowly against that. A pinging piano line emerges from the mass of cables. This cycles away quite hypnotically for a while. Stephe picks up an electric mandolin (I believe) and holding it vertically bows in some harsh raspy drones and some blustery bursts of noise, which builds to a crescendo of squalls and racket – a nice buzzing bass-line underpinning it. It dies away to church organ drones again. Slowly against these we get bouncing little piano parts. The church organ fads and everything slows, there is a flapping fan, there’s a fade out while Stephe tries to find the source of the fan, and with a dramatic twist of a pot, kills it, to a burst of laughter from the audience.

And to finish off the evening it’s our friend from The North Kent Coastal Electronauts, Sophie Sirota who had travelled 90 miles through rain and fog. She starts with a nicely melancholic electric viola line set against an insistent buzzing synth bass with a hard square LFO modulating it. After a while she loops part of the viola, and then gets to work against it adding texture, counter melodic lines. As the loops thicken the bassline seems to recede. There’s some whooshing and then she gets down on the floor to get working on the effects units before hitting us with a melodic line over the top and some metallic fuzz soloing. The second piece starts with a single plucked note that sets up a cascading backing synth line. She sings breathily into a deep reverb. Again it’s loading the looper, some tricky work with a delay pedal, some lovely rich tones, some more singing. Some more of that lovely viola line and back to the vocals. We finish off with a song that was written for an Intox Extravaganza, which may or may be called either “F**k it” or “These are the good days”. This one starts with a jabbing riff through loads of delay, some creaking bass bow-work, and some floating creepiness. Over this insistent backing track Sophie sings, and plays viola lines that to me invoked Tuxedomoon’s haunting “Ninotchka”. Full of Eastern European mystery. The song winds out in a savage deconstruction of the jabbing riff and a harsh warbling.



Yew hadda bee fare

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

December 2025
The Rossi Bar

I’ve been kinda putting off reviewing this one. We squeezed in four sets, two of which were performances by Henry Collins and Chase Coley that bookended the night. Both of these were very visual, multi-media and are going to be a bit tricky to describe….

So we started the evening with Hyacinth Bucket and the magical testicle filled with thousands of bumble bees and the essence of creation. There is onstage a huge magical testicle, pink, a film starts with the back story and then Hyacinth Bucket herself appears onscreen and narrates the tale. Chase enacts the part of the shepherd and wanders around the room. And then approaches the magical testicle, and enters, skronking and plonking ensues. The testicle throbs. About ten minutes in The Bumble Bees are summoned. After a little longer angelic voices and a nearly naked Chase covered in magical symbols emerges from the testicle followed by Henry in a red dress coat and they gaze adoringly at the heavens.

Next up, with the tricky task of following that we had Meljoann set up at the side of the stage where she usually VJs. starting with a 4 to the floor kick, and quickly morphing through a variety of beats with a monster boinging kick sound, repetitive vocalisation stabs Meljoann goes for the extreme opposite of HBATMT.. Repetition, minimalism, looping back and forth, then dropping out down to a tiny pinging riff, and then she drops massive explosions onto it before bringing in some kind of truncated D’n’B drum track. Then a fidgeting bassline clambers all over that, before the rhythm track drop back to something possibly a little more techno, thickening up briefly into some kind of gurgly soup before a weird R’n’B drop takes into a pulverising one beat then something that I can only describe as doo-wop – which is a massive misdirection – reminiscent of the heady days when hardcore could go in all directions and often did. A fidgety drum track takes us out under some Prince-like synth drones to end.

Then we had Luuma, a beast of a modular setup, with a laptop and some other devices. It starts with a thick buzzing drone and some feedback whistling. A wind of distortion threads through, there’s a hint of a scraping sound cycling away in the background, the drone starts to blister and bubble. The drone drops away into sustained balloon squeaking, its evil stuff, that starts to burble away until it drops into some kind of square wave LFO thing. That speeds and slows and gets into a bit of squelchy territory before morphing into a different more aeroplane-y drone. This continues for a while before upending in a squall of nasty electronic sounds that skitter about in a radiophonic manner before filtering down to a murky storm. Some giants start arguing over a didgeridoo in a room in the distance. Chris has a big wooden home-made drone instrument, this looks like a didge, but has a single string and some electronics. He rasps at it with a bow (in another life Chris is a talented cellist) setting up layers of harmonics and buzzing before getting into some free improv scratching. It feels like the giants are in torment now. Then he starts some sustained bowing getting thick heavy drones, before thinning it out into streamers of sustained tone based around harmonic standing waves on the string, then thickens this right up into a tasty storm to end.

And to end the night its Chase and Henry again, filling the stage with clutter – old CRT portable TV, tables, home-made bits and pieces, cassette player, cymbal, TV aerial… whatever. This was the dangerous end of the evening.

The set started with a fat drone, sourced by pressing an electric screwdriver chassis into the stage making it resonate. Chase enters the stage barefoot and starts getting white noise out of the radio. I can hear the wind coming from somewhere. Henry comes onstage also barefoot and opens a big pot of drawing pins and slowly sprinkles onto a contact miked piece of metal. Chase needs to move and realises that the stage is now very effectively booby-trapped. He picks up the waterphone and tiptoeing across the stage starts bowing it, wrenching high pitched drones, Henry starts scrumpling a cellophane octopus. Chase gets a reverb-y warbling undertone out of the waterphone. He gongs it as well. Henry seems to dismantle the octopus and gets the active noisy element out and continues with the crumpling as Chase gets back onto the radio. Henry gets into a fight with a Middle Eastern horn. Chase starts bowing a big square sheet of steel, while Henry starts rummaging drumsticks on and then around a large steel bin. This sheets more vigorous drumsticks flying around the stage, until the large steel tape measure comes out – Henry reels out about 5 feet of it and starts whipping it about the stage – it’s a nice white source of static bursts, but a little terrifying as zooms around the stage – especially when reversed and the tape holder starts clobbering the objects littering the stage. And getting further afield, Chase gets the screwdriver back to work. The tape measure holder is by now whirling around above the audience’s heads. Chase starts droning the metal bin building up to gong-like crescendos and Henry winds down into cymballic pings off something. Henry leads the audience into a slow plodding stamp that slowly fades out to end.




Thursday 4th December at the Rossi Bar: Chase Coley & Henry Collins / Meljoann / Luuma

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Henry Collins & Chase Coley / Hyacinth Bucket and the Magical Testicles Filled with Thousands of Bumble Bees and the Essence of Creation
Meljoann: Deconstructed R&B beats
Luuma: Feedback systems & DIY instruments

Henry Oolli Collins: Nothing I can write will prepare you for what Henry Collins is going to do. A sound artist operating always at the limits of music, although he’s most famous for hist frenzied Shitmat alter ego, he’s also produced considered electronica, free improv rummaging, an album of the Sound of Music without music, and who could forget the exercise bike hurdy-gurdy. Look at these but do not consider them to be useful in working out what the performance will be like.
everycontactleavesatrace.bandcamp.com/album/music-of-sound
henryliamcollins.wordpress.com/”

Chase Coley is an experimental sound artist and natural science educator. Chases’s instrument-making practice is a point of departure that interrogates the choreography of movements, actions and intentions, to produce new acoustic instruments, he will joined with fellow sound artist Henry Collins
www.chasecoley.com

‘Hyacinth Bucket And The Magical Testicle Filled With Thousands Of Bumble Bees and the Essence of Creation’ is also Henry Oooli Collins and Chase Coley

Something slightly different from the head of our Gravitons live streaming organiser; Meljoann puts aside her usual high concept performances for something special just for us.
meljoann.com

Luuma will be be summoning homemade instruments into life to render a live remix of his recent release Ffroeds (on Flaming Pines). Created with DIY electronics, unruly string instruments, self-modulating analogue synths, erratic machine learning models and esoteric sound synthesis, Ffroeds is a series of experiments into the (edge of) chaotic world of musical feedback systems.
luuma.net/pages/listen/
flamingpines.bandcamp.com/album/ffroeds

Live visuals by Meljoann

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 4th December 2025 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5 (cash only)
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

New release on the Spirit of Gravity BandCamp label: Andrew Greaves – Headspace

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

The latest Spirit of Gravity BandCamp label release is Andrew Greaves’ new album Headspace
A collection of nine electronic pieces created out of a process improvisation.

The album  is aptly named. Its sparse, yet warm soundscapes offer plenty of room to wander and to think.

Greaves has adopted a simple set-up here, and improvised around equally simple melodic fragments. Less is always more in this particular sonic world – but while the sound canvas sits within certain guard rails, there are no such restrictions on either the dynamic or the emotional range.

Almost folk-like half-tunes interlace with spare and careful interpolations of found sound. Occasionally, over the album’s forty minute journey, playful references occur in one track to another. Forty minutes is, of course, the classic album length – like a Georgian house, a size and shape to which we return. And this lyrical and considered collection is a bit of a classic too.

Stream or download for £9 at spiritofgravity.bandcamp.com/album/headspace

Also available as a boxed dual format USB stick expanded album: £10+postage
This version includes the album in lossless WAV and MP3 formats, 6 specially commissioned films and VJ performances, photos, cover art and more.

Gravitons festival 2025

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Last November the Spirit of Gravity ran the Gravitons online streamed live music festival on the shiny new open source infrastructure that MelJoann set up. If you missed it, you can check out the videos here: tv.gravitons.org/c/gravitons_festival/videos

We are doing do it again this November and December, and the line-up has now been confirmed. Look out for more information at gravitons.org/

Tues 2nd December 20:00 electric.kitchen
Weds 3rd 16:00 Meljoann
Fri 5th 20:00 Rashamon
Fri 5th 21:00 shimmerglisten
Sat 6th 20:00 Tam Lin
Sun 7th 16:00 this occasional society

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 23rd November – 8.00 to 10.00pm

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 23rd November 2025 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/

The first hour this month features music from the North Kent Coast from the Coastal Electronauts crew, including tracks from Sophie Sirota’s new album, and then from the Sussex coast with some music from Brighton’s Patchworks label.
The second hour has long form works from our own collective member Remember Glaciers and, from Japan, a favourite of ours, Kina:Suttsu.
We may be the last generation who can remember Glaciers.

1st Hour: Gravity Waves
Sophie Sirota – I see / Sophie Sirota – Glitch / Dave Poole – Solstician Drone / John Gallen UY Scoti / Gagarin – Cingulum / Pie Are Squared – Plasdronal / Pie Are Squared –Propel / Siesmic Hum – Dentgist
2nd hour: The Spirit World
Kina: Suttsu – ex.meta halations / Remember Glaciers – Ice Core (Rhone Glacier 2009 and 2024)

The October edition of the Spirit of Gravity Radio show is available on the ResonanceFM Mixcloud page:
extra.resonance.fm/episodes/gravity-waves-and-the-spirit-world-omnistitions-transmissions-from-a-place-to-come-2025-10-26
This show features two new albums from artists who were there at the dawn of the Spirit of Gravity; Multiplex and Rashamon. We also have tracks from a new compilation, “Abstrakce Sample II”, plus the final episode from the Omnisitional Cultures Research Unit.