Author: Spirit of Gravity

Thursday 7th May at the Rossi Bar: Shark Calmer / Asher Fynn / SARRAM

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Shark Calmer: A dense, polyrhythmic and occasionally absurd soundscape of blips, beeps and thwacks. Between Mandishi and a Poundshop Autechre
Asher Fynn: Darkly abstract songs about freedom, representation, and even drastic hook up stories
SARRAM: A crushing yet graceful meeting of ambient, drone, doom, jazz, electronica and minimal post-rock

Shark Calmer: Tom Clarke and Peter Marsh first met as part of a trio cranking out jazz standards in a South London pub. Though they went on to play with the likes of Alan Wilkinson, Karl Blake, Simon King and others, the pair had also begun to meet for regular sessions of lo-fi improvised electronica, armed with whatever they could dredge up. Adding occasional real drums and lap steel guitar, they’ve evolved a dense, polyrhythmic and occasionally absurd soundscape of blips, bleeps and thwacks somewhere between Mwandishi-era Herbie Hancock and a Poundshop Autechre.
sharkcalmer.bandcamp.com/

S A R R A M is the instrumental avant-garde solo project of the Sardinian based Valerio Marras, active since 2017. Expect a performance poised between heavy ambient, dronejazz, electrodoom, spoken word, tape loop and postrock.
Streaming: sarram.bandcamp.com/
“There is a sense of vacuum-esque existence parallel to ours that really gives the album its supernatural emphasis, as even though you are there in flesh to undergo it, your soul flies far away in untold spheres.” Everything Is Noise
“A sonic adventure filled with highs and lows that will challenge your very subconscious.” The Sleeping Shaman
“This album is not just engaging, but moving. (…) it is intense, emotionally vulnerable, and beautiful, such that it pulls the listener back, to pay attention” Angry Metal Guy

Live visuals by Meljoann

Hosted by Geoff Cheesemaster

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 7th May 2026 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5 (cash only)
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

Before they be fires

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

May 2026
The Rossi Bar

Shark Calmer start the evening. A duo: a drummer at the back and lap steel at the front. Both have other devices also. Drum pads, small boxes: synths, effects and such. They start with a regular tapping from somewhere, a following semi-erratic synth line, a clatter of drums, a burble, and from the distance a soaring lap steel line. A squelchier synth line. After a while the synth line morphs off, then everything pauses for a vocal line, then drops back in then drops out again as we mutate again. The drums come back with a thick slurping slide guitar, there’s some nice interaction back and forth between drums and guitar. A new bassline and new drums. Things are inserts between, under and over the guitar strings. The snare staggers in. faster. A feedback synth line springs up. The synth gets springy, and the drums drop out. We go all sputnik. The drummer gets a loop going on the electronic drums, we get some more lap steel, then the synth comes back in all weirdly detuned and squelchy. We get into some decay, the drums scatter, the guitar is saturated, the synths bubble gently with the LFO pinging it around.  The drummer has a synth Pan sound from the ark, which is rather nicely nostalgic. He constructs a new rhythm out of it, then starts chopping beats up, superfast, slow; uptight, relaxed; full, minimal, they end up on a choppy beat that skitters around. He drops the snare to get a timbale like sound. Frenetic. Then we’re back into a motoring bassline, shuffling drums and tinging bell. We get some feedback unto the synth and the drums skitter up some more. Energy levels rise, the lap steel gets some work around the upper frets going into some filter and vibrato – not unlike early Cabs, it all gets a bit noisy on the synths and we end in a squall of feedback and some rather nice bells, drum snap!

Asher Fynn starts with a nice burst of proper noise, which quickly gives way to effected violin spruced into a looper than gritted up with some more effects. Some loops become bass swoops and Asher starts the vocals, a brief history of recent anti trans legislation and it’s tragic outcomes. It’s a very angry start and very quickly ramps up into some very grainy hard noise and ends on a blast of feedback. The second song starts with a bumpy rumbling delay, Asher starts a viola line and a high melismatic vocal line, which is followed by a similarly sliding viola part, a return of that grainy noise and some spoken word. The third song starts with double tracked vocals on the backing track, the viola is stowed, Asher sings against the voices. It’s a very brief set with an interesting arc from grainy anger into still beauty, quite a feat to pull off.

Sarram is our final act of the evening and our second act from Sardinia this year. He’s also another recombination guitar & synth player. It must be some kind of island adaptive evolution. He starts with lightly strummed high end notes that slowly fade up into our perception and into the effects chain. This picks out odd notes and resonances and slowly builds them into a massive swelling avalanche of sound augmented by neck bending and synthesiser blasts. Slowly everything starts to ebb away to some gentler thrumming and then to a 60s shimmer not un-similar to say the UK Kaleidoscope. You can still hear some vestigial synth buzz. The guitar starts to bounce off a lengthy delay, then we get into some filthy distortion and he bounces off into Vini Reilly labyrinthine delay. He drops the guitar and a voice is coaxed from one of the boxes on the table-top. We get creaking and rumbling; adding unease beneath it as the picking gives way to more distant sounds. He gets back into the distortion for a massive riff part that has almost no attack. Streams of washed out swirls drift around and it builds in intensity and volume that swells and then fades as he gets into a dramatic percussion solo on the synth. I start to worry about the wear and tear on the keyboard as he’s using his best Kung Fu moves on it. Children’s voices start to haunt us as the slightly squelchy onslaught continues. Then it’s into another more attacking riff, with thickening swamps of guitar pads murking up the backing. As its starts to fade away, we get a loop of brief dialogue about the nature of the music playing. He manages to coax some nice violin sounds out of his guitar and there’s some synth layers added.
And we fade out on a chiming synth sequence and the conversation chopped.



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

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Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 26th April 2026 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/

Details to follow

The March 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-hyena-collective-2026-03-22
In this episode, a special guest takeover by Hyena Collective. It features a stereo radio mix of Bass Superstructure – a recent 10 channel sound installation-performance by the collective, and a sonic response from Dr RAYPOWER inspired by a forthcoming exhibition text titled Hyenic Polyphony.

You can also catch up on all the previous shows this year from the Gravity Waves page at spiritofgravity.com/gravity-waves/

Inside the drains run all the time

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

April 2026
The Rossi Bar

Starting with Lorenzo Brilli purely because he has drums and it makes stage management easier. It’s not just acoustic drums, there’s a mic over the kit linked to a laptop and a contact mic’d long sheet of metal, which starts proceedings being gently beaten and processed. Then scraped with wire brushes, the processing migrates this into drones and crackling glitch, enhanced by rattling on the contact mike itself. The drones have a really nice sound, at once tonal and magnetic. He thickens the sound on the laptop, and then returns to the drum kit with a steady beater pattern on the ride. A voice wanders in and then everything halts with a crash.  A clacking from the laptop, then he’s on the full kit, a slightly elliptical beat, jazzy timing, little frills. The drones now wash in and out. It’s got a four to the floor bass drum, but everything else grooves around it really nicely, economical. The drones seem to be triggered by something. There’s an ending with a round the kit finish with a massive reverb off the end that turns into a wind tunnel and Lorenzo gets into some free improv drum fiddling, scraping cymbals with the end of the stick, and getting this into some creepy swirls. There’s some machinery and growling fading into some pretty detailed rattling. Then it’s another reset, a choral drone, occasional “Whey” against which he gets a surprisingly clacky floor tom rhythm. And handclaps. The next section starts with mutated throat singing (Bulgarian?), then it’s off into bells, whistles, hums and a steady brushes on snare beat. Jazz-ish. Plaintive. The drums stop and the voices carry on, thickening and warping. He does some fidgeting on the hi-hat that transforms into odd tonal swooshes.

Nanonic has a “non-keyboard” synth, a looper and a couple of effects pedals, here’s a nice synth in a wooden case with brass contacts instead of a keyboard. Nick false starts with a fat buzzing drone, modulating up into some pretty nasty frequencies, then back down into room rattling bass. He gets some pretty foul swoops into the looper and then gets to work on the synth again, with some feral scrapes and reedy foghorn drones. A shimmering delay gets to work white dogs bark near a major electrical plant. There is industrial clicking and a looped owl, the wind whistles over vibrating metal rods. Into this quiet eeriness we get buzzed by spaceships.  The wind whistles up for an end to the first piece. The second starts with a fast bass-y pulsing that you can feel flapping about in the speaker cabinets. There’s some manipulation of this up and down, in volume, tempo and tone. It gets a bit buzzy, a very different kind of pulsating UFO sound gets into the looper. The rinsed into a thin high looping whooshing, under which we get more buzzing bass pulses. And them pesky UFOs again. The whooshing thickens up and envelopes everything into a shrieking roar.

Drum and Lace is set up with 2 racks of hardware, Sofia completes the Italian sandwich for this evening, she starts with a firework crackle and field recordings of birds, straight in with wordless vocals and some synth pads. The crackling is joined rhythmically by some alarming short circuit clacks. We check for smoke, but it’s all planned. A nylon guitar arpeggio gently comes in, and some light string stabs. A rhythm proper starts under the track and we can see how the crackles and clacks all lock together. The second track swoops in with a speedy 2 note synth line, overlaid with 80s synth pop complementary parts, including a nice fat buzz followed by some warm emotional pads. Some slow vocals drift across the top underlying how frenetic the backing is. Things fall away under the vocals and one of the synth lines comes back fiercer and joined by some hard drums, another line returns – shifted slightly adding unease. Hissing hi-hats fade in to usher the end. A fast ticking hi-hat starts the next song with an intermittent kick and bass pulse. The pulse speeds up under vocals and a loping lead synth line takes us on into a hard techno section, then a drop. A slow kick brings back out under a changed vocal line, and back into the driving synth. The church bells toll, and a clockwork toy gives us the rhythm to start the next piece. A buzzing bass slurs between notes to give us the bassline, squeaks and strings layer in over it. The rhythm track layers up, bringing in a bassline as the vocals come in. There’s a nice melodic bass-y line that underpins the vocal that she does some buzzing filter work on as the song progresses. There’s a drop down to tapping and odd synth swells and birdsong before a new bassline comes in stronger and brassier to lift us into the final section, a blip on the offbeat, then the bassline transforms itself into a mutating percussive synth and the beat comes in strong and we’re briefly off on a tangent before everything is back and shifts around underneath it.



Thursday 2nd April at the Rossi Bar: VRIHI/Lorenzo Brill / Drum & Lace / Nanonic

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VRIHI/Lorenzo Brill: Drums & electronics between memory and transformation
Drum & Lace: Cinematic, densely textural, beat heavy
Nanonic: Dark ambient noisescapes

Lorenzo Brilli: Vrihi, from the Sanskrit “rice” is the symbolic starting point for an exploration of rhythm and voice as forms of collective memory.
Rice, cultivated through repetitive and communal gestures, becomes sonic matter — a trace of shared action rooted in practices that once intertwined labour, relationship, and listening, now redefined by automation and social fragmentation.
The live set reimagines the tracks from the homonymous album released by Esc.rec, traversing a sonic landscape that blends acoustic drumming, live sampling, and real-time electronic manipulation. Between memory and transformation, the performance reveals the living tensions between body, sound, and machine.
Lorenzo Brilli is an Italian drummer and percussionist whose work moves between jazz, improvisation, and experimental electronic music. His practice explores the relationship between acoustic gesture and electronic transformation — an investigation of rhythm, space, and the physical presence of sound. After studying drums and percussion in New York at the Aaron Copland School of Music, he expanded his research into Balinese gamelan, batá drumming, and contemporary repertoire.
His performances inhabit the fragile border between composition and improvisation, where repetition and silence shape time like a breathing organism. Brilli’s sound world is rooted in the tactility of percussion and the organic unpredictability of electronics. Whether in solo or collaborative settings, his work seeks to reveal the tension between body and machine, structure and decay, noise and resonance.
He has performed at festivals and venues across Europe, the United States, and Asia, collaborating with artists across jazz, contemporary, and experimental scenes. His latest solo project, Vrihi, was released by Esc.rec in 2025

Drum & Lace, aka Sofia degli Alessandri, is a Florence-raised, London-based musician and composer.
Her music takes inspiration from the natural world and is scattered with field recordings, so while the work is largely electronic there is a grounding and organic nature to every track. 2022’s debut album Natura (Past Inside The Present) found inspiration in the soil and in rolling hills, while 2023’s Frost EP (self released) captured the quiet beauty of winter. Her second LP ONDA (Fabrique Records), a dance floor-leaning record, is inspired by the ocean, with motifs of shells, sand and sisterhood present throughout. Following her second LP, Drum & Lace has released an EP of ambient vocal works called Tempora (2025) and her track ‘Marmo’ was featured on Mesh’s Lattice003 compilation.
In early 2026, Mesh announced that Drum & Lace had joined their roster with her new EP, Terra, that will be released on March 13th, 2026. Terra comprises a collection of meditations on human existence, tapping folkloric traditions and the breadth of electronic music. Using Italian lyrics for the first time, the London-based musician considers the ancient lands she grew up in, and the complex lore that overlooks nature, history, and technology.
Sofia has shared the stage with artists as disparate, and luminary, as William Basinski, Suzanne Ciani, Shirley Manson of Garbage, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, black midi, Sqürl and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, while the stages she’s performed on include revered London venues like Café OTO and EartH, Moogfest, Public Records NY, Slingshot Festival and National Sawdust’s Digital Discovery Festival in the US and Festa Dell’Opera in Italy.
As a composer for film & tv, her accolades include work with AppleTV+ (‘Dickinson’, ‘All of You’), 20th Century Studios (‘Rosaline’), Lionsgate (2023’s ‘Cobweb’), NBC (‘Good Girls’, ‘Grosse Pointe Garden Society’) and Amazon Studios (‘Red, White & Royal Blue’).

Nanonic: Nic returns to Spirit with a new dark ambient noise set. Inspired by eldritch horror, non-euclidean geometries, vast inhospitable spaces, cyclopean in scale, abyssal in depth. Improvised electronics, fractured noise, drone.

Live visuals by Meljoann

Hosted by Geoff Cheesemaster

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

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 22nd March – 8.00 to 10.00pm

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 22nd March 2026 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/

Details to follow

The February 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-steve-gillitt-aka-minimal-impact-2026-02-22
This special edition marks the passing of one the original Spirit of Gravity founding members: Steve Gillitt, AKA minimal impact. The first hour contains a helping of top grade experimental audio from around the orbit of the Spirit of Gravity collective, some choice cuts from recent SoG performers, and a sonic tribute to Minimal Impact. The second hour continues with some essential and unreleased Minimal Impact recordings. Rest in noise Steve.

You can also catch up on all the previous shows this year from the Gravity Waves page at spiritofgravity.com/gravity-waves/

Thursday 5th March at the Rossi Bar: Oddfellows Casino / Andrew Greaves / Tam Lin

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Oddfellows Casino: The Cult of Water – Al Strachan, Emma Papper, David Bramwell, Eliza Skelton + the Voice of Alan Moore
Andrew Greaves: Layered analogue soundscapes, warm, dark, fragmented earworms
Tam Lin: Sensitive noise pop

Live visuals by Meljoann

Hosted by Geoff Cheesemaster

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