Author: Spirit of Gravity

From the ridiculous to the remarkable

April 2022
The Rossi Bar

Muster start the evening off, Dan on small things processed through MaxMSP and synthesiser, if you’re lucky Tony will publish a picture of the frankly ridiculous patch on the SoGBlog; then there’s James seated on electric guitar, played by a variety of brushes, pins, clips, files and a plethora of other unsuitable things. Also fingers & thumbs, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t see a plectrum. Muster fall at the EAI end of what we put on, quiet, spacious and very much from a free improv place. It starts with chimes and scrapes – a very quiet ring of feedback – silence – a more forceful feedback squall. Electronics warble spookily. Clanking, radio voices passed through the guitar pickups, weird tonal radiophonic patches, squeaks. Dan works methodically around his table of things, shuffling the microphone, James a bit more animated: flipping his guitar flat on his lap to crocodile clip the strings or wedge things under the strings, or bringing it back vertically to fret it more orthodoxly or jam the headstock against the small amp for feedback. There was someone in the audience moved to join in for a while a baritone rumbling unverse, not quite comprehensible. Chime box and pinging guitar combine, an odd sproing and unexpected massive detuning of a guitar string. Dan thickens up his output for the final section, James sets his fingers scurrying and lets rip with a proper squall from the amp, a weaving two tone drone from Dan, counterpointed by thumb piano.


Second on the bill is Zoom Around Rainbow. Sat sideways on at his laptop at the back of the stage, right at the screen. He’s enjoying the PA, tweaking the EQ through the set to maximise his bass happiness from the house PA. Starting with a pretty full on textured jet engine roar that slowly builds up with a rattling high hat an occasional bass drum hit slipping in underneath, a full drum pattern gradually pushing its way through. A strangely hooky double pad stab motif slips into your head almost unnoticed adding a vaguely hysterical tinge to things. The drone differentiates itself into a scrabbling set of counter rhythmic figures, the beats morph heralding the next section. Porky hardcore beeps and the drums give it a bit of a 91 feel. The jet comes back and swamps everything in its mighty reverberant roar. New drums, bass, floor toms, no hi hats, the jet engine  now in bursts function as a 4 beat on off bassline, melodic content provided by woodblock. Then a pummelling bass drum batters us to the finish of this section. And suddenly they stop and everything washes away blissfully. A swell of bass washes up, a steady firm beat, train rattle percussion alongside, hard long sounds come and go like slowly walking along the construction site of the Lewes Road during lockdown. Its dense where Muster were sparse, getting ever denser. Ever denser. The grinds fade away and more rhythmic parts unfold giving no real relief. Then everything again gives way, this time to space sounds and distorted voices, a rolling slightly, oddly too short drum pattern. Eventually a detuned two not bassline rocks in derailing the rhythm and taking control. Around it swoop pads and squelches. The density falls away. It ends; we are released.

 


And finally its Vera Bremerton, we had been speaking before lockdown about her coming down to play for us, and now, eventually here she is. She has vocal mics and some heavy duty processing equipment. Possibly a sound source. She starts low key, an odd looping tone, vocalisations, gentle at first, some passing through the equipment unscathed others catching, repeated back at us, verbatim, some mangled, some delayed unfeasibly. Gurgles and shudders. The occasional horrors. This is going to be hard put not to be just a string of verbs. Her voice swoops, closely tracked by some awful electronic banshee, curling against machine judders and machine tool whirrs. She twists some tightly controlled feedback into an engaged tone whale-song, sets an earth hum against it suddenly releasing swarming robot bees against which she sets up some unearthly gurgling. Space ships flicker by sprinkling shimmering trails. She can really do some alarming things to her voice with this kit, processing it into some alien menagerie, or looping vocalisations into plunger rhythms. The thick rhythmic melange calms down into a 30,000 ft. jumbo jet ambience, with unknowable lyrical melodics and childish song-play, suddenly the plunger is back, then gone into a late 20th century modernist soundtrack, unnerving and edgy. Then cascading tones and the return of the bees, a fairly straight melodic vocal refrain, it feels looped but seems different every iteration. A steam belching factory throb underpins everything now. She sings again, now and again the electronic banshee follows her vocal line. The final section has her vocalising a melodic loop and winding distortions of it around itself, bass notes, harsh trebly runs that gets into some pretty extreme areas before winding back out to something fairly lovely to end. “Remarkable” I think I said at the end.


Thursday 7th April at the Rossi Bar: Vera Bremerton / Muster / Zoom Around Rainbow

Vera Bremerton: Solo vox experimental extreme mayhem
Muster: Guitar, electronics, small objects
Zoom Around Rainbow: Slower then glaciers, Harder then ecological collapse

Italian-born Vera Bremerton is equally influenced by classical, industrial, techino and avantgarde music.  Counting Diamanda Galàs, Maria Callas and Meredith Monk among her muses, she uses different timbres, effects and a 4-octaves vocal range.
High-end musical skills in composition and performance, and theatricality in spades… sensitivity and subtlety even in the more violent sections. (Chrissie Caulfield, Radio Free Midwich) She’s half art-house horror movie queen, half cabaret torch singer, and her studied, arch delivery of precision-crafted melodramatic ballads… certainly commands attention (Michael Johnson, Nemesis To Go)
www.verabremerton.com/

Muster is the improvising duo of James O’Sullivan (South London) and Dan Powell (Brighton). Having first worked together as part of the eight musicians who performed for twelve hours as The Long Half Day [see TSOKL sok052], they formed Muster accidentally on 2nd November 2016 in the Catford Constitutional Club. Their first album “Find a City to Live In” was released on Invisible City in 2019.
slightlyoffkilter.bandcamp.com/album/am

Zoom Around Rainbow is a Southampton based solo electronic artist described as ‘hardware rave dystopian’ and ‘Slower then glaciers, Harder then ecological collapse’. His sound carries an uncertain upbeat bounce, drenched in reverb with a melancholy haze.
soundcloud.com/zoom-around-rainbow

Thursday 7th April 2022 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM:

Gravity Waves and the Spirit World on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/

There will be no Gravity Waves and The Spirit World radio show this month as Resonance Extra is being taken over by the Outlands network to coincide with their Joyous Thing event in Milton Keynes.

We’d recommend listening to the whole thing as there is no doubt that there will be lots of the good stuff.

The February edition of the Spirit of Gravity Radio show is available on the ResonanceFM Mixcloud page:
www.mixcloud.com/resonanceextra/gravity-waves-and-the-spirit-world-february-2022-27th-february-2022/
This edition includes a track from Raeppen that didn’t make it onto the Elliptical Orbits 2 compilation, 2 tracks from the latest SoG release Washing Up Time, plus the usual melange of sounds from the orbit of The Spirit of Gravity.

Quality in depth – just look at that bench

March 2022
The Rossi Bar

The first unheralded act of the evening was Ninit / Polysicness, who literally agreed to play 24 hours before he stepped on stage, the first of two COVID stand-ins. A background thrum of cassette distortion seems baked into the start of the set, the sound is thick, warm, enveloping in that nicely saturated manner that iron oxide gives you. Barging their way into this comes a murky rhythm and some drums, the wash of background sound dissolves and the sudden clarity makes your ears pick up. Greg is stopped over afar too low table, it looks painful. He suddenly off and wandering round the audience in the creepy see through mask giving delayed words to us. The music canters off a nice rumbling uneven bassline and rhythmic piano-ish stabs giving way to arpeggiated counterpoint. There is some serious pitch adjustment to lead lines giving things an odd eerie edge. A general mutation as we progress through the set, each part built on one piece from the previous. Rhythms change, drums grow lumpy or staccato, holding back the drive or suddenly lifting us forward. In the middle of the set there’s a pause where everything fleetingly disappears save a child’s voice, just enough to give us a bliss of tension before the release of everything coming back and we’re off again. As we move through the sound gradually thickens back up, the parts get noisier. As we approach the end everything gets louder, more muffled. Slows down. Speeds up. More shouting. Riffs revisit. That tape ambience is back. More bass drum. More reverb.


With slightly more notice, our first replacement, playing second, was Monty Oxymoron. Opening with a flurry of Morricone-esque guitarish notes off his keyboard, bouncing off the delay, a sound somewhere between guitar, space organ and electric piano Monty was running up and down the keyboard, twinkles of top end notes. Razor edged bass parts. Pausing and slowing down for more retrospective passages, before a proper shimmer of space sounds held us blissfully for a minute or so, segueing into a lovely passage of jazz tinged spaceness. He had a very plastic looking electric tambura that droned in somewhere around here, giving him the opportunity to go right out into the further reaches. Little melodic flourishes, scary bass lines, then off on another extended pianistic improvisation. Then we have a pause while he reads some passages from his book “The Cosmic Brain Explodes” over the tambura backing. Then a flurry of super-fast trebly Tangerine-ish arpeggios herald the return of the cosmic jazz. He does some odd stuff with timbre where he almost disappears into a black hole, before emerging again, pulsating and twinkling.


So finally and the only person who knew he’d be playing 6 weeks – or even a week previously we had Alien Alarms. Starting in a twinkling manner that flowed on quite nicely from Monty’s set, with a vocal sample from what sounded like a documentary on that new-fangled electronic music. The melodic parts float over a sparse bass line, that seems to go missing for bars at a time without losing anything, the drums are constantly evolving, this is where the real movement is, the dynamism. Without straying into Aphex style erraticism, they shift, add dynamics imperceptibly, drive us on. The second track carries on the bassline becoming more constant, dropping into massive long slurred tones at one point. Gradually the tempo shifts upwards, the third track takes the longer bass notes, not so much notes as a bar long pitch bent single note at times. Over this is a queasy 16th detuned string part and something about vegetation. Track four gets all Marxist on us over something approaching super-fast drum and bass drums under super slow everything else, like that old joke about people dancing at 2 speeds at D’n’B raves put into very visible action. The final track has some very nice vocoder action, and continues the speed up, with some proper deranged pitch bent, well everything, basslines, pads, melodic lines all meandering all over the shop, the vocoder itself ending up washing out the voice into almost a complete synthetic wash.