Author: Spirit of Gravity

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 24th November 8.00 to 10.00pm

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Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 24th November 2019 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM. extra.resonance.fm/

In the 1st hour:

A selection of tracks from the orbit of the Spirit of Gravity Collective: Chr15m + Fenris – Yeh (see the Clan Analogue site for details) / Barker – Die-Hards Of The Darwinian Order / Ugly Animal – Tunnelling / Spaghetti Blacc – an entity without machina / Elefante Branco – Do Ato de Dançar Dormindo / Claire M Singer – Eilean / Scott McLaughlin – Harmonics of real metals

In the 2nd Hour:

A special mix of tracks from 2 recent albums on the Spirit of Gravity label: The Book of Melancholia by Mi Cosa De Resistance & The Melancholic Ladies Orchestra and Halftone by Andrew Greaves

The October edition of the Spirit of Gravity Radio show is available on the ResonanceFM Mixcloud page:
https://www.mixcloud.com/resonanceextra/gravity-waves-26th-march-2016/
This show was a repeat of one of the best Gravity Waves and the Spirit World shows from March 2016, and features a 1 hour commission from Graham Dunning’s AAS collective, “Half-Sun Gift”, plus Olivia Louvel, Gagarin and Map71, amongst others.

7th November at the Rossi Bar: Drill Folly / Gun Boiler / Nuclear Whale

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Drill Folly
21st Century Electronics: deep percussion and menacing melody

Sarah Phelan, heavy synth explorations: Deep industrial percussion sits atop heavy sound art textures and a menacing sense of abstracted melody.

Gun Boiler
Undulating landscapes, synthesisers and the human voice

Debut performance from Chris of Midi Error

Nuclear Whale
Sinister soundscapes with glitchy beats

Nuclear Whale uses modulation and hardware to create sinister experimental soundscapes layered with glitchy beats. The monolith is pulsing. His new album The Dog Days is available on Menk Recordings on Bandcamp:

https://nuclearwhale.bandcamp.com

Thursday 7th November 2019 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

No other talking than the talking directed

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October 2019

The Rossi Bar

Ill/Fitting Suits

Ill/Fitting Suits, their suits more fitting than ill, these days – I think they’ve grown into them. They had some plants among the audience reading from prepared scripts. Nick Rilke had a microphone on a long lead that was being processed by Tony Rimbaud along with some other sound sources and he wandered about picking up bits of what they were saying, I think it was some commentary on the history of The Spirit of Gravity. Anyway, the piece has a drifting quality due to the excessive delay on the snatches of speech. The written pieces were short enough so that you’d return to the same phrase as a chorus. “Handles for Forks” being a comedy favourite after a while. The loops felt haunted, nostalgic through reverb. Odd synth washes and a halting piano figure. In the end surprisingly moving. All fields. 

Amongst the Pigeons

Amongst the Pigeons had the front rows of the audience nodding along to his set wearing pigeon masks. He interspersed his set with pigeon facts (although some seemed a bit shifty to me). So we had pigeon coos, basslines and drum machines. The first piece had sampledelic style cut ups of a radio show intro and a broadcast of Happy Music, with a woolly bassline working under it. The second one, was a bit darker in tone, another sonic bass line with a crackling percussion track. Less direct pigeon-referencing. The third picks up the rhythmic intensity a notch or two more with a big breakdown with a recording of someone saying “DRUG”, leading into the “addiction to thinking” which was a bit more syncopated on the bass drum. Among the complaints about wearing a nylon pigeon suit he slyly introduces the last track, a pigeon related breakcore track. There is, even after nearly 20 years of The Spirit of Gravity, always something new, and that is definitely a first.

Roshi featuring Pars Radio

And rounding off the evening we have Roshi featuring Pars Radio, who are down for the first time in an age, she’s writing new material for her next album and on good form. She starts with an old favourite “Lor Batche” in the stripped down rhythmic version with her and Graham playing the slow down at the end. This was followed by “Night Swimming” which features her piano playing up front, Graham providing percussion space around that. Next is “Opium” that starts nicely with organ stabs and an uptempo rhythm that twists into an unfocussed vision of muted voices, drones and detuned whirls and woooshes that’s really quite unsettling. The horrors. The next song is one I didn’t know, a new one based on her experience with working with people from the wartime generation, it’s centred on an old song “Apple Blossom Time” piano and radio static. They finish off with “3 Almonds and a Walnut” which in its live version is a full on percussion work out.

We get into an odd conversation after the show with a member of the audience about nut/peanut/cashew allergies. Which is almost like a mirror of her introduction to the song.

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 27th October 8.00 to 10.00pm

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Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 27th October 2019 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM. extra.resonance.fm/

This month features a repeat of one of the best editions of Gravity Waves and The Spirit World from March 2016, including a 1 hour commission from Graham Dunning’s AAS collective “Half-Sun Gift”, plus Olivia Louvel, Gagarin and Map71, amongst others.

The September edition of the Spirit of Gravity Radio show is available on the ResonanceFM Mixcloud page: https://www.mixcloud.com/resonanceextra/gravity-waves-and-the-spirit-world-sunday-22nd-september-2019/

More South Coast experimental music from The Spirit of Gravity:

Claire M Singer – Solas / Brain Dead Ensemble – Ozelting / Psanck – Saith Cant Un Deg un / Raeppen – duopmosotnabeaivi

Jonathan Higgins – Desk Recording – Live at Spirit of Gravity September 2019 / Elaine Radigue – Triptych (Excerpt)

3rd October at the Rossi Bar: Roshi featuring Pars Radio / Ill/Fitting Suits / Amongst the Pigeons

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Roshi featuring Pars Radio
The Welsh Iranian songbook in electronic form

Roshi featuring Pars Radio is built around the songs of Roshi Nasehi  as well as interpretations of Iranian songs Roshi is a Welsh born singer-composer of Iranian parentage with a strong track record in live performance, collaboration, recording and workshops. The project also features percussionist/electronicist Graham Dowdall (Gagarin, Nico, Pere Ubu). It’s an unorthodox sound world combining Roshi’s intimate singing style with Gagarin’s experimental electronic powers to create a unique genre-crossing, ‘exotic, folktronica landscape.’

Roshi’s songs reflect her origins, influences and experiences in a personal highly individual way accompanied by unusual keyboard arrangements, vocal loops and effects – they are reflective, melodic and quirky – her voice airy and tender but possessed of an inner power. When she interprets Iranian song it is in a personal style bringing a contemporary twist combined with an authentic understanding of context and language.

As Roshi featuring Pars Radio, Roshi and Graham have released several records that have received significant airplay (Radio 3, 6 Music, RTE) and considerable critical acclaim including The Quietus, The Wire, The Independent, New Internationalist, Songlines, Rock n Reel, Q, DJ Magazine, PRS M Magazine and twice record of the month in Mixmag who described her as “one of the most singular voices working at the moment”. A new album is in the pipeline due for release in early 2020.

Ill/Fitting Suits Present Distance/Between
Rilke & Rimbaud: thee founders return

The Spirit of Gravity founding fathers Tony Rimbaud and Nick Rilke make a rare return to performance together with a new piece specially created for the Rossi Bar, Distance/Between.

Combining treated samples and sounds prompted by semi improvised spoken word and performance, Distance/Between creates dialogues and monologues between audience and artist that imagines the richness and randomness of human interactions from a chance collection of people.

Amongst The Pigeons
Dancing pigeons, music, electronica and pigeon facts

Amongst The Pigeons: a surreal, informative and wonderful experience of dancing pigeons, music, electronica and pigeon facts. A place inhabited by soaring loops and the beating of electronic wings. Be sure to expect creative beats, addictive melodies and a whole host of twisted ideas.

soundcloud.com/amongst_the_pigeons

Thursday 3rd October 2019 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

Clubs, Spades, Diamonds and that sweaty puddle

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September 2019

The Rossi Bar

Ræppen

Three touring acts this week, no locals. First up is the ever touring Tim Holehouse reprising his Ræppen (dis)guise. He has the fewest number of pedals that I think I’ve ever seen him play with. The core of his set is the looper pedal and the first thing he feeds in are the stones from Brighton beach he’s been using since the first appearance of the hooded shaman back at The Green Door Store. That reverbs away in a stately fashion, he has some new bones which he adds as a subtle rattle-y layer around that. Over this he adds some breath layers, followed by the first layer of throat singing gurgle. There’s some whistling in there and the overtones build up quite a complex set of lines, wind, vocal, unhuman, grind. Creepy. At some stage it enters a timeless space, while still evolving and imperceptibly building, until it erupts with bass-y, throaty gurgles and drops down to monkish chants. At which point it sets off on another journey, this one unfolding even more slowly. It sounds like there is a cow horn muting away at some distance – I don’t remember seeing that, but I swear it’s there. This second section has a much bigger sense of dread as it builds, creepier bass vocalisations underlying the whole thing and the percussion parts are more urgent and elliptical. This tie it builds to some sustained roaring. 

Connect_icut

Second act is ex Brighton resident now living in Canada, Connect_icut. This set is built around a crowdfunded Raspberry Pi based sampler that overloads fairly easily and starts to glitch, so Sam gets on that and just rides the glitches improvising around them. So it starts with a fairly eldritch black dog growl on a cycle with a clicking rhythm. There is some distorted sound that seems to step between notes that buzzes around this like an angry tonal fly. It’s another set that unfolds quite slowly. Odd sounds, very odd some of them, washes that judder, drones that on investigation a granular as hell, a bass drone that could be a dozen notes played at hyper speeds. This in particular seems to fork, one side to a bass line the other a complex riff of high notes played in time with it. It’s a drone piece with an incredible amount of detail and barely a sniff of delay. It decays from this drone into a staccato stereo gated pinging with lovely organic wash and emergent Bulgarian singing. The final section moves away from the drones and becomes almost completely abstract. The voices bouncing off stray thin stabs or vast swirls, or silence, or dentist’s space drill, or falling organ.

Rosebud

The final act is a duo from Worcester “The Provincial Midlands”, Rosebud, touring with Tim.  Starting with a siren and spoken introduction, eventually the air-horns kick in like some particularly nightmarish rave, but it still hangs on, on the cusp of starting properly. Tension. Mounts. Hysteria, More shouting, more layers of Rave Alarm. Eventually it comes in at about 120bpm, but still we have more hysterical levels to climb. At some stage the singer stakes his place in the audience, dripping, and sweatily masked. A bassline provides some relief from the endless building and you feel like it’s actually started. A squelch comes up against the pure bass and the momentum seems to just start building from there, the bass mutates into a sawtooth. And at the point of delirium, we drop down to a slooow heartbeat sub bass plod, with a detuned steel drum sound stalking around it. While the declaimer keeps up his commentary. A beat comes around that an de unfold into a breakdown of delay and sparse clatter. A bass wash comes in wipes that all out then a higher temper rhythm comes tick-tacking in the bass subdues as the rhythm track fills out into a really interesting beat. This totally turns into a rhythm workout with multiple bass drums, creaks, whirrs and whistles. There’s a terrific breakdown towards the end where just have the trebly elements working away. Bloody marvellous.

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

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Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 22nd September 2019 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM. extra.resonance.fm/

Gravity Waves

Claire M Singer – Solas / Brain Dead Ensemble – Ozelting / Psanck – Saith Cant Un Deg un / Raeppen – duopmosotnabeaivi

The Spirit World

Jonathan Higgins – Desk Recording – Live at Spirit of Gravity September 2019 / Elaine Radigue – Triptych (Excerpt)

The August edition of the Spirit of Gravity Radio show is available on the ResonanceFM Mixcloud page: https://www.mixcloud.com/resonanceextra/gravity-waves-and-the-spirit-world-august-2019-sunday-the-25th-of-august-2019/

More South Coast experimental music from The Spirit of Gravity:

Tim Sheinman – Music for Nine Coastguards / Muster – Find a City To Live In / Fane – Skaftafel / King Dong Quixote – Casio Beat / Mi Cosa De Resistance & The Melancholic Ladies Orchestra – Invisible Manoeuvres / ELEFANTE BRANCO – Movement TWO – Machine’s Carnaval / James Place – Inspite / Tim Sheinman – Kinski

The second half of the show features another long form piece by Spirit of Gravity founder and one time Rimbaud Brother Tony Rimbaud as Not By Radium.