June 2022
The Race Hill
Thanks again to everyone who came to the All day birthday party, we had a brilliant day. Thanks to the artists who came down and without exception played a brilliant set.
Thanks to Abraham, Kassia and Jukes from The Rose Hill for their help and support.
McCloud:
Bela Emerson and I’m Dr Buoyant:
Distant Animals:
R. Dyer:
Terror Wogan:
Screaming Alice:
Rashamon:
Dan Powell:
Fallow:
Dhangsha:
Meemo Comma:
June 2022
The Rossi Bar
Adam Martin performing for the first time ever under his own name a piece he composed for his dissertation about his ADHD, a video cutup collage set, Adam is on the floor with a laptop its unclear – is he processing visuals, is he processing sound? Both. It all starts with rumbling and a solarised image, pulsing and lined, a screeching drone laying into it as the image thickens. The sound is chunked into segments along with the visuals, Paul Blart Mall Cop makes an appearance. Voices looped calling back. Ascending vocalese. An explosion. Confusion. Paul Blart speaks. Stages Classic; Inattentive; Over-focused; Temporal Lobe; Limbic; Ring of Fire; Anxious. Max Headroom. Intensity increases, incomprehensibility. And a little Rick-Roll at the end.
BUNKR starts with a floating drone and sweet arpeggio, switching over to minutely detailed little patterns twitching around a detuned version of the drone, the arpeggio comes back with a heavy filter and lovely melody floating around in the pads. About 5 minutes in a bass drum slips in almost unnoticed and a squelch comes in slipping around the rest. The second song starts with an elastic bass, and sliding whistle, a low key brushed drum pattern again imperceptibly makes its way into your consciousness. And out again. Again things return in a slightly altered detuned creepy manner. The third is straight in with the arpeggio and a creepy melody stalking over the top. The arpeggio is constantly mutating in timbre and scope, eventually everything around the arpeggio fades away to be replaced by a stepping bassline overpowering everything with its sense of dread. Finally a high pitched sequencer sparkles in around the top of everything else. The last piece is just an unfolding of layers of drones with a slow arpeggio underneath.
RAAD with two As start in silence and darkness before Heather starts slowly working at the electric double bass, it’s a stuttering “Fever”, Chris provides a commentary of occasional electronic squalls. Heather sings. Chris also sings. A slowed down recording of a radio show on fever segues us into the next section. “Fever is your friend” looped. There is processing and some subtle electronic tomfoolery. The double bass works away. The globe smoking as it spins slowly emerges on the visuals behind them. Its all quite stately. They don protective goggles. Heather comes out with an infrared thermometer and starts to scan the audience a temperature chart slowly completing on the screen at the back of the stage. Chris completes notes on a clipboard. The looped words slowly fade and filter out. Heather hands out bags of herbs. They both start speaking, intoning against each other. Heather kicks in a filthy fuzz on the double bass and grinds out a repetitive riff.
We are now uploading the whole set to YouTube for your entertainment viewing pleasure:
The Spirit of Gravity presents BUNKR / RAAD /Adam Martin
BUNKR: Maximal melodic electronics from the outer orbit
RAAD With Two As: Hove-orientated nano-utopian angst
Adam Martin: Attention Deficit Deluge
The origin of BUNKR was the result of a happy accident. Back in 2017 Brighton (UK) based musician and producer James Dean (also known for his work under his Lost Idol guise) was tasked with making a chilled out house track for a TV commercial for German sausages. Whilst his track didn’t make the ad, it did unintentionally set him off on a path of writing zoned out house music and bubbling melodic techno as BUNKR.
The German connection continued as the first BUNKR release was issued by Berlin’s Love On The Rocks label, picking up fans across the globe including Tim Sweeney who featured Cloud Chaser in his best of 2017 round up on his Beats In Space radio show.
2018 found BUNKR further broadening his sonic horizon collaborating with the fledging V LSI label set up by the Echaskech crew. His Outerstellar and Appl Skies EP’s traversed techno and chugging house styles and were well received by some of the scene’s more discerning DJ’s including James Zabiela, Posthuman (I Love Acid), Joris Voorn, Nick Warren (Way Out West) and DJ Food (Ninja Tune).
Following these releases BUNKR set about producing his first long player. The end result was 2019’s The Initiation Well. This album was a far more exploratory affair than any other BUNKR material that had come before with slow-burning ambient interludes rubbing shoulders with hypnotic crawling techno and pastoral Kraut-esque electronica.
Skip to the now and BUNKR activity continues apace. He contributed a track to the highly lauded Castles In Space compilation The Isolation Tapes (Electronic Sound magazine’s compilation of the year in 2020), whilst recent live shows have seen him playing alongside Ulrich Schnauss, Richard Norris, Soccer96 and Leafcutter John. His second album Graveyard Orbit was released in October 2021 and took his sci-fi techno approach deeper into the electronic cosmos, thematically providing reflections on man-made waste and our own longevity. Or as one reviewer summed it up, “a dazzling, tone-rich journey that captures the moments when life ends and the story just begins”.
RAAD With Two As is mid-concept Hove-orientated nano-utopian emergence from the pressures of the quotidian. It is also dead clever.
Improvised double bass, sampled live vocals, droney bits, some found dialogue, leftie over-educated angst, and Edinburgh accents; oh, and you will likely receive a gift.
Adam Martin: A new piece exploring the depths of attention deficit disorder by sampling his YouTube history. Adam Martin has performed at The Spirit of Gravity in a number of guises, lacing serious intent and outrageous performance art.
adammartinindustries.bandcamp.com
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 overlaid with out-of-reach memories and vague fragments of lost visions.
Thursday 2nd June 2022 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA
The latest release on the Spirit of Gravity netlabel is available right now, “Numbers” by nil. nil are Chris Parfitt and Dan Powell, and they support their release with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges; “When I hear it play I am. I want to be. I bleed away”. An apt prospective endorsement for this release from the great Argentinian writer.
Available to stream and download now at spiritofgravity.bandcamp.com/album/numbers