Author: Spirit of Gravity

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Tuesday 10th July 10.00pm to 12.00

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

The next edition of the Spirit of Gravity radio show will be broadcast on Tuesday 10th July from 10.00pm to 12.00 on ResonanceExtra FM.
https://extra.resonance.fm/

We start with a full live recording of the recent Yunohama Variations performance at De La Warr Pavilion as part of the new Outlands touring programme: Three improvisational luminaries; multi-instrumentalist YoshimiO (Boredoms, OOIOO, SAICOBAB), avant-garde percussionist Susie Ibarra, and artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Lichens) perform together as Yunohana Variations for the first time in the UK.

The second half of the show features tracks from around the orbit of the Spirit Of Gravity:
Gagarin – Gibbet (Isnaj Dui’s Pinecones mix)
Daniel Jones – Feckless Statue Enthusiast
Freedom Frampton – live
Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – Fine Rinse (Featuring Doru Apreotesei)
Karl M V Waugh – Thought Mucus
Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – Salo
I’m Dr Buoyant – Cruciform

Resonance Extra is available on DAB to listeners in Central Brighton and online to the rest of the world (how to listen). You can also listen online at extra.resonance.fm and directly using this link. Resonance Extra is also available via Radioplayer and TuneIn.

The June 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-june-2018-tuesday-12th-june-2018/

Another quality mixed bag from Brighton’s Spirit of Gravity Collective – First hour – tunes culled from the general SoG dimensionality. The second hour is lifted from Orphan Drift’s post-disciplinary hyperstitional multi-verse…

Let’s get skulled up for the drop off

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

June 2018
Green Door Store

Fallow

Fallow

Fallow start the evening off, David Reby has a black and white film of deer scans playing behind them, his familiar deer skull illuminated from the inside on a stand at centre stage. Their set starts with heavily reverbed undetermined deer field recordings, some slow guitar notes, slowly dissonant drones creep in, some of those horrible deer vocalisations I promised wallow up among the musical elements as they fall away. Derek is playing keyboards rather than his usual pre-recorded CDJs alongside guitar, and pipes in some stentorian French horn blasts and piano before a templehead beat rolls in. The Intensity of the deer yowls ramps up. When the beats roll back out, we get into a pizzicato that brings us into a lengthy reflective passage before the intensity starts to ramp up with a layered set of hefty drones and we switch into a tritone riff that just builds, then drops and builds again before dropping down to just the bass elements that flatten into a drone that carries the guitar into the ending section.

Organon of the Antivoid

Organon of the Antivoid

With Zoom Around Rainbow falling foul of a technical hitch at the last minute Organon of the Antivoid stepped in at the last minute with a Youtube mashup. Caleb sits facing the screen, his desktop projected up onto it so we can follow exactly what’s happening. Starting with a TED talk “Are you a good person” adding in tabs and tabs of slowed down YouTube speech, we go a long way before we get to the obvious candidates. In the early stages he adds in some drones – 2 or 3 tabs of it – but apart from that and some tabs of pink and white noise, it’s pretty much all speech and babies crying. However obfuscated. At about 15 minutes he ups the levels, quickly opening a series of tabs as if he’s trying to crash the browser, but it’s obviously a pretty robust setup he has, so eventually he decides to wind it down, closing down the tabs from the latest to the first.

Jobina Tinnemans

Jobina Tinnemans

So Jobina Tinnemans finishes the evening, with two pieces. As a proper composer she does introduce her pieces in full, the first is based on recordings of voices from the Chamber Choir of South Iceland pretending to be birds that she has trapped inside a number of small jars. It’s a semi improvised piece, with the jars being chosen and Shaken, some Max/MSP processing is definitely going on there, with some of the results sounding remarkably like David’s field recordings. The sound is more spacious than anything else we’ve heard this evening. Supporting the sounds are violin or cello sonorities and synth washes, with a massive foghorn indicating closure is imminent.
She goes straight into her second piece, quickly changing into her swimsuit and hat, this is an aquatic piece it has the bird noises again, but with the drips and reverb of a watery place. Synth sounds give the sense of waves and something impending, before she takes a breath and we’re suddenly underwater – there is no treble, a bass whoomph – exhale and we’re back above. The second time we go under we seem to be in the company of whistling alien cetaceans. The third time they seem to be in a more playful mood, maybe having found a toy piano. The riff they bang out becomes more insistent, bringing steam, noise and musicality along with it. The sense of approaching the surf from underneath.

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Tuesday 12th June 10.00pm to 12.00

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

The next edition of the Spirit of Gravity radio show will be broadcast on Tuesday 12th June from 10.00pm to 12.00 on ResonanceExtra FM.
https://extra.resonance.fm/

Another quality mixed bag from Brighton’s Spirit of Gravity Collective – First hour – tunes culled from the general SoG dimensionality. The second hour is lifted from Orphan Drift’s post-disciplinary hyperstitional multi-verse…

First Hour:

Binnsclagg arranged by THF Drenching – Bring back hanging 5
Forktail – Primitivo
T-Toe and Luke Goddard – Purple Haxe
Same Actor – Italo Stevo
f.Ampism – The Spirit Level
Spheress McCloud – Holds 4/Segs Weigh/Without a pulse (Live)
I’m Dr Buoyant – Inmate

Second Hour:

Orphan Drift. 9006. 1999
Orphan Drift. Katak Avatar Hybridised Mix Syzygy. 1994.
Orphan Drift with Nick Land. Meltdown. 1994
Orphan Drift. Motion Capture, Excerpt. with Kode 9. 2001

Resonance Extra is available on DAB to listeners in Central Brighton and online to the rest of the world (how to listen). You can also listen online at extra.resonance.fm and directly using this link. Resonance Extra is also available via Radioplayer and TuneIn.

The April edition of the Spirit of Gravity Radio show is available on the ResonanceFM Mixcloud page:
www.mixcloud.com/resonanceextra/gravity-waves-april-2018/

This month featured a set of live recordings from the launch party for Brighton’s new Peripheral visionaries festival. This is a bit of an outlier, some sound art from the Antivoid Alliance, spoken word from A number of local poetry nights, spoken unwords from Dyian Nyoukis and Duncan Harrison, sounds and words from Kayfabe and Vapour Vox.

7th June at the Green Door Store: Zoom Around Rainbow / Fallow / Jobina Tinnemanns

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Zoom Around Rainbow
“hardware rave dystopian”
“slower than glaciers, harder than ecological collapse”

vimeo.com/219264058

Fallow
The longstanding collaboration between Derek Thompson (SPK, Hoodlum Priest, The Cure) and Dr David Reby from the University of Sussex, they fuse electronics with frankly terrifying field recordings of Fallow Deer.

www.hoodlumpriest.net/

Jobina Tinnemans
The Dutch/English contemporary composer returns to The Spirit of Gravity.
Her oeuvre runs through page turning, knitters, hedge trimmers, kung fu and Shakespeare; Piano and electronics, video and live performance. You can do no better than spend some time looking round her website.

jobinatinnemans.com/

Thursday 7th June 2018 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
Undercroft, Brighton Train Station, BN1 4FQ Brighton

I have life on other worlds

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

May 2018
Green Door Store

Binnsclagg

Binnsclagg

Binnsclagg started the evening off with what was probably the best set I’ve seen them do. They have a certain reputation (they claim completely undeserved) for power tools, noisy chaos, found poetry and leaving a hell of a mess. None of this was apparent. Verity and Karl had an oil-drum table each of things with acoustic or electronic intent, and set to work about them; psychedelic warble, cassette voice, rattle, thrum, grandmother’s clock. It’s quite spacious unlike the super-dense harshness of the last time they played. They even take turns to read. There are rhythmic sections, which quite confused me. They play chimes against thin feedback and distant jazz while Verity reads, its rather lovely, which I wasn’t expecting to write. It ends in pings dissolving into giggles. As it should.

Ned Rush

Ned Rush

The meaty filling in the sandwich was provided by a nice AV set from Ned Rush. He was running a modular synth, and linked that up to a laptop to create some kind of generative visuals. A lot of the visuals had that kind of kinetic thing going on so you constantly feel like you’re travelling into the screen. In the absence of having videoed his whole set I won’t reference his visuals again. The sounds started with small tonal blips and hums, scatter glitches and tiny squelches. It’s the most freeform thing I’ve seen anyone do on a modular, managing to avoid the tyranny of clocking or LFO. This is followed by something where he gets a hum and white noise loop going, with an acidy squelch with a growl that becomes a bassline. This deepens in intensity and rhythmic intent, like some odd hyper-interlocked rave where someone has stolen the 909. He slews in these odd concrete sounds and nasty drones to keep you off balance, and the breakdown when it comes almost makes you stagger sideways with its glitching detunedness. The final piece really pushes it, like something from a chill-out room of a party where the ketamine has been laced with strychnine and half those present are travelling backwards through time. Great stuff.

Johanna Bramli

Johanna Bramli

And finally we had the return of Johanna Bramli, also playing against visuals, she’d taken down the screen show they were ghostly against the black curtains. Starting with a slow humming tick rhythm and organ layered with wordless vocals she was the otherworldly manifestation of the film she was showing. The piece mutates slowly, some piano, odd voices, external sounds, some singing. In many ways this is the kind of thing I wanted from Laurie Anderson last time she was here; proper haunted, mysterious, emotionally haunting music. She breathes and plays some single stringed DIY instrument, thin feedback tremors wailing across the room, underpinned by a monstrous block of bass that pulses monolithically into the room while god moves chairs around upstairs. A head itch rhythm stealths into the song and tines ping, then it all shifts suddenly – lightweight arpeggios echo back around the room and the bass battering is gone, there is some singing before it dissolves into rain, and a bubble bath of small synthesizer an organ drone and more wordless vocals through to the end. Bloody lovely.

Three, Two, One

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

April 2018
Green Door Store

Innixi Fix

Innixi Fix

To start the evening is Innixi Fix, billed as a three piece but playing as Jack on his own (he found out at 5:30 in the evening that this would be the case). So he set up on the floor with his guitar and electronics array. He starts by banging a loop of a clobbered string percussion part into the kit, supplemented with small flourishes giving it a clockwork feel. Before fattening out with balalaika twangs, reverb and then haring off down a blind alley of plics and ant-scurry thuds. Which devolves into a series of radiophonic space ping echoes. This goes on for not quite long enough before a tube train smashes through it. Which in turn gives way to an almost acoustic sounding passage of single noted loveliness which again evolves into some radiophonics mixed with gratuitous delay tweaking. It settles down into a more reflective passage before we get the Foghorns and heavy goods trains.

Andrew Greaves

Andrew Greaves

Andrew Greaves was also supposed to be playing with others in this case the percussionist was ill so Andrew fell back onto his electronic percussion along with organs and delays. The percussion ticks while Andrew played I think two pieces from his new album, which are long semi improvisations in some scales based on Indian Raags, played with extraordinarily long delays, and the occasional bass tone. The organ parts repeat, almost, slowing down and speeding up. Hypnotic is about the only way to describe it, I was quite in phase with the whole room by the time the first piece ended. He wound it down quite nicely and did the changeover to the second part pretty seamlessly. This continued the arpeggios and riffs style but with some longer, slightly slower parts woven into them. Both hands working together along with some suspicious looping technology and some more prominent action from the bass. Although again, it wouldn’t be called foregrounded. About a third of the way into the second piece the hi-hats tip over into woodblocks and rim-shots. Towards the end they trickle out just leaving the dynamic stasis of the organ figures worming into your consciousness.

Map 71

Map71

So Map71. A real drummer and one poet. Lisa Jayne, slight, static, book of words glanced at, pages thumb flicked occasionally. Andy Pyne a perpetual movement machine, elbows, knees, sticks, head, feet. The first track is drums and words alone, a circular patter around the kit, around the kit, around the kit. Anti-noise. The second is an older song. Starting with a cheap synthesiser riff before Andy and Lisa kick in. The electronic insistence rises during the song. The third song starts like “Summer breeze” closed hi-hats in threes, uneasy words. The fourth song is new I think too, starting with a staggered snare pattern “freak radar collision” Lisa’s word come at you in obsessional bursts. Every few bars everything stutters. Another new song follows, slight piano echoes, brushes occasional Kick yr ass drum. Lisa less declamatory than usual. The rhythm is still in her voice. Back with the favourites “controversial dance moves should not be attempted” buzz bass, half speed drums. A song about shopping. Hah. Lisa speaks between songs, I think this is a new thing. They still are the most charismatic act to grace the GDS stage. The final song is a tightly wound arpeggio that takes an age before the drums kick in. The tension mounts constantly, even when parts drop out. Insistence.