We are extremely saddened to hear of the death this month of one of the founding members of the Spirit of Gravity Collective, Steve minimal impact Gillitt. In some ways he was the beating experimental heart of the Spirit of Gravity, with his single-minded search for the perfect noise, and keen willingness to collaborate, although if you played with him, he nearly always drowned you out with his volume. His 30 or so live performances in the first 15 years or so of our history were all memorably uncompromising, as were his appearances at related nights such as Wrong Music. He gave us the audience participation concept the electrocreche, although unfortunately we cannot fit this in at our current venue at the Rossi Bar, and his sardonic humour and rebellious attitude kept us honest through the years. His last release on our BandCamp label in 2018 was due to be part of a larger project, which we are very sad not to be able to experience, but he has left an archive of unreleased material from over the years, some of which we hope to be able to share with you in due course. We have lost a friend as well as a remarkable artist, so we will be marking Steve’s passing a number of times through our 25th Anniversary year, but this starts with Geoff Cheesemaster’s more comprehensive tribute on our website here: spiritofgravity.com/steve-minimal-impact-gillitt/
Author: Spirit of Gravity
Everything happens without seeming to
February 2026
The Rossi Bar
Em— (Em-Dash, a typographic joke in case you’re interested) is the first act on this evening, stepping up at the last minute. June’s setup is a laptop and a flight case chock full of hardware. Starting with eerie long tones and a turned bass drum. And where the snare should be a metal rattle. A creeping bass line joins along with hi-hats and an actual rattle-y snare that slips around the beat. A little descending melody with hints of origins back in the radiophonic workshop chimes in, the beat slips out of kilter, and sounds start to mutate. Hell, everything starts to mutate into the slinky, stalking lurch of Tom Waits’ drunken uncle. A chopped voice is discernible, but not understandable. A chipper woodblock pattern trips in speeding things up, the drums distort behind it. June starts chopping around with the woodblocks, adding a squelch then dropping them out. This continues then the woodblocks seem to come back as a different squelch, the beat picks up, voices are being made to do alien things. Interlocking rhythms sourced from not your usual sounds wind away. Then drop into a new clap heavy lopsided beat. Punctuation provided by bells and laser hits. This is a solid groove, it seems to have one leg longer than the other but is insistent nonetheless. There is a sudden drop in tempo, space appears taking out most of the elements of the beat and then slowly replacing them with buzzing stammers, more squelchy bits, bass-y buzzes or booms. A shining melody line shimmers in over the top of the churning chaos. And so it continues, seemingly ill defined, mesmerising, shifting about, developing constantly. Rhythmically and sonically so inventive. Ending in a staccato frenzy of beats and short organ blips.
Next up was Rhubiqs with a setup of laptop, tablet and controller and a set that eschews the hyper-evolution of Em- in favour of apparent stasis. Starting with string synths slowly rotating in and out, these are joined with warbling tones. We sit there in this gently evolving wash of sound, there is a field recording of waves and the synths slow down to almost drone levels. The waves slowly die away and the tonal sounds fade in to replace the synths, it now feels like space music; earthrise over the moon, perhaps. Warm, though, and rich. There is birdsong and quiet rain. The string synths drift back in and a melodic refrain slowly emerges, then eventually thickens up into a nice rich drone. The details shift inside the drone and then it fades out to some mild glitching, to be replaced by looping more orchestral sounding strings. Slow piano notes drift over the top. There’s another hint of water in a field recorder trickling away in the background as we shift back into a new dronescape. A male choir indistinctly chants under the drone. A muted brass sound serenely provides another melodic intervention when the singing ends. Gently the stream fades up, and everything bar the melody drifts out of earshot. And then it’s just the melodic line. A beautiful calming filling to a fairly frenetic sandwich.
ChopChop, left to right, Ed (usually the drummer) is on the floor with lots of things, electronic and percussive, Al at the back, synth and cornet as usual, although he’s bought the MS1 out for a change, Eddie on bass and effects, and out front the irrepressible Xelis with vocals, trumpet and expressive dance. It’s a slightly different setup, shorter on monster groove than usual, but no less entertaining. It starts with Ed tapping a cymbal and Xelis gibbering and twitching. They build the intensity and a pulsing starts in. Ed starts a rhythm on the objects around him, the MS1 starts to warble, and Eddie starts some slow high bass notes, half a bassline. Xelis plays flurries on the trumpet. Everything drops down bar Xelis talking. Ed starts tapping out another rhythm, some processing makes then notes as well as hits, electronic stabbing noises envelop us. Xelis is dancing. It drops away again, to Xelis & squelches this time, then builds again. Ed is triggering occasional big noises. More space. “The butchers have gone mad”. Xelis is still in motion as everything around him stalls. The cornet comes in, bringing synth washes and the trumpet. Ed is at work on the electronics and Eddie furnishing occasional bass frills. Xelis throbs. Amazed. Al is back on the synth, Xelis takes up abstract singing again as we drift. Eddie has a bassline that slowly grabs our attention, and everything drops again. Xelis is guttural now, issuing commands, endless and contradictory. Someone starts up a synth rhythm. More synth lines join in. Xelis is twitching again. Cymbals come back in and a bassline starts, the percussion thickens, even though lacking a kick and the trumpet swirls. A synth is on a ramp in the background. The synth rhythm is relentless propelling Xelis into jerks. He is the last thing moving.
Thursday 5th February at the Rossi Bar: ChopChop / rhubiqs / Em-
ChopChop: special electroChopChop set
rhubiqs: experimental electronic & ambient drone
Em-: Hardware and Software modified for a better world
CHOPCHOP’s music snakes round its orator like a slippery thing, cymbals replaced by the clatter of hubcaps on toms, cutlery-jammed guitars – there’s an itchy jazzy vibe to the melodics, fuelled by a fertile imagination full of bruised shapes and punkish angles.
rhubiqs is the solo project of London-based composer and sound designer Tom Squires.
Squires’ music creates a world where Actress meets Kranky, with a side dose of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works for good measure. These are far-reaching electronic and ambient sounds that provide immersive soundscapes for listeners to lose themselves in amidst thought-provoking textures, samples and field recordings.
rhubiqs.com/
Em― presents a live set that revels in the whimsy and ferocity of continuously evolving ideas, with dense synthetic textures, playful glitchy grooves and moments of accelerating chaos. Behind the wheel is musician June Kiff, using her live music ecosystem composed of drum machines and various custom devices, in service of the transformation of nonsense.
emdash.bandcamp.com/
www.junes.website/music/live
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 February 2026 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5 (cash only)
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA
Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 25th January – 8.00 to 10.00pm
Gravity Waves and the Spirit World
Sunday 25th January 2026 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/
This first show of the Spirit of Gravity’s 25th year sees us revisiting last year’s Wilde Volk exhibition at Rottingdean windmill, which we soundtracked. We are also playing a couple from Zizo’s new E.P. on Patchworks and to finish some tracks from the new compilation from our friends at Coastal Electronauts.
This month’s show will also be the first in a (probably irregular) series of spotlights on experimental music coming out of various UK cities. To get the ball rolling, the spotlight will be on Bristol, and specifically the output of new artist-run platform Music to Come, with tracks from Dali de Saint Paul; (Content Provider), Kinlaw and Franco Franco, and do you have peace? (Teresa Winter, Birthmark, Guest, A.Childs).
First hour: R. Dyer – Krampusglocken / Rackets – Bear Dance / Nanonic – Grieswirt Descent / DRASS – The Spell of Frau Perchta / Ring Modulator – Perchten / Ascsoms – Mill Fourteen / Gigi Catrina – Blestem / ZIZO – Da Mesh Zar / ZIZO – El Dayra / Dave Poole – Solstician Drone / Ghostyhed – SIX.
Second hour: Content Provider – This Music / Kinlaw and Franco Franco – Air Loom Gang / do you have peace? – Teresa Winter, Birthmark, Guest, A.Childs, Track 1 / Content Provider – A Feeling (RS Tangent Heatwave Mix) / Kinlaw and Franco Franco – A Spectre Still Haunting / Content Provider – This Urban Solitude (Monika Badly’s Hostile Architecture Mix) / do you have peace? – Teresa Winter, Birthmark, Guest, A.Childs, Track 2 / Kinlaw and Franco Franco – Faith Elsewhere (reprise) / do you have peace? – Teresa Winter, Birthmark, Guest, A.Childs, Track 4 / Content Provider – Walking Home / Content Provider – Sunday Morning
The November edition of the Spirit of Gravity Radio show is available on the ResonanceFM Mixcloud page (there was no show in December):
extra.resonance.fm/episodes/gravity-waves-and-the-spirit-world-coastal-electronauts-brighton-s-patchworks-2025-11-30
This show 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, plus long form works from our own collective member Remember Glaciers and, from Japan, a favourite of ours, Kina:Suttsu.
You can also catch up on all the previous shows this year from the Gravity Waves page at spiritofgravity.com/gravity-waves/
Thursday 8th January at the Rossi Bar: Sophie Sirota / Agnes Haus / Remember Glaciers
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
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
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.