Author: Spirit of Gravity

Thursday 2nd December at the Rossi Bar: Xylitol / Andrew Greaves / Dolly Rae Star

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Xylitol: gutter kosmische
Andrew Greaves: album launch show – found recordings, Casio improvisations, layers analogue sequencer patterns.
Dolly Rae Star: Sound, Poetry & Magic
Ingrid Plum is unfortunately unable to appear

Xylitol: gutter Kosmische from East Sussex
www.facebook.com/xylitolmusic
xylitol.bandcamp.com

Andrew Greaves is a Brighton based musician and artist, who combines intense combo organ improvisations within minimalist and sound art contexts. A member of the Spirit of Gravity collective, Andrew has performed live film soundtracks with Broken Star and collaborated with the massed fuzz organs of Himmel and the Indian master musician Deobrat Mishra.
Andrew has performed text based scores as member of the New Interpretations Orchestra and contributed to large ensemble performances of Terry Riley’s In C and works by John Cage. His previous Spirit of Gravity releases included 2 “Octabeast” albums; featuring modal organ improvisations within minimalist compositional forms. His “Entartete” and “Halftone” releases, combined Indian and Ethiopian scales with sound collages built from a collection of found, home recorded, cassette recordings.
During lockdown, Andrew has focussed on studio composition and sound art for film, as well as 2 new releases for the Spirit of Gravity label. The first of these albums “Works From Home”, includes passages of analogue sequencer work and simple improvised melodies; recalling both Suzanne Ciani and Roedelius.
With this performance (his first in almost 2 years), Andrew launches his latest release “Works from Home 2: Rhizomes”. Here, each piece utilises  archive cassette recordings of his father (Frank). An operatic tenor singer; he was recorded mostly in unaccompanied rehearsal. Starting from these primitive artifacts, Andrew has built entirely new pieces, utilising the existing tonal and harmonic content as a basis new contexts.
Andrew plays a Casiotone MT400V mini keyboard, Electribe ER1 & EA1 groove boxes, Korg Monologue synthesiser and a Boss RC-202 Loop Station.

Dolly Rae Starcore plays in sound, poetry, and magic. Movement, play and transcendence.
Let’s dance!
Dolly plays percussion and electronics in God’s Teeth and the Interstellar Tropics and the Beam Eye Babies and holds gong bath sound adventures. Over 2020/21 they held these in local parks, embracing the beauty of ambient sounds (and positioning away from angle grinders).
Their book Play Stance, came out on Polyversity Press this year.
A poem of theirs was once described as “a bold anthem” in The New Statesman (wtf). Their book / sound piece Quest)ion) is out soon on Veer after five years of live ritual exploration and international collaboration.
They also perform as drag king act Will Helm Rightly, who recently graced the Cockpit stage at Journey to Nutopia’s night on Wilhelm Reich.

Thursday 2nd December 2021 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Sunday 28th November – 8.00 to 10.00pm

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Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

Sunday 28th November 2021 from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM, DAB radio or online at extra.resonance.fm/

This month we have a guest mix from Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire), Dan Powell‘s set from Spirit of Gravity night in October, plus lots of good stuff from Spirit of Gravity land.

Stephen Mallinder Mix for Gravity Waves: Abul Mogard – ‘Tumbling Restlessness Heaps’ / Demdike Stare – ‘Ishmail’s Intent’ / Rod Modell – ‘Outro’ / GH – ‘Albedo’ / Wrangler – ‘Peace & Love’ (Holy Mix) / Pye Corner Audio & The Advisory Circle – ‘November Sequence’ / Mika Vainio – ‘Sub Atlantic’
Dan Powell – Live at Spirit of Gravity October 2021
Stephen Mallinder – Black Frank Spectre

Nad Spiro – Spiaire; Misha Begley – Walking home at night; Strands (Ronan) – Loebawn artist; Audio Union – unknown title; Mi Cosa de Resistance – The things we have forgotten; Frost – Until it makes sense; Nad Spiro – Tunnel records; Deepkiss 720 – unknown title; Frost – Slippery Bricks; Noteherder & McCloud – The corner by the cemetery; Mi Cosa de Resistance – A song to sleep and dream

The October 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-october-2021-sunday-24th-october-2021/
This months’ show included tracks from the Bang the Bore compilation ‘Here’, and more from the Radiant Heretics label.

Thursday 4th November at the Rossi Bar: Emma Papper / FROST/ Territorial Gobbing

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Emma Papper: ambient electronics & improvised clarinet and EWI 5000
FROST: solo drum activated electronics
Territorial Gobbing: cut-up electronic noise & object improv performance art

Emma Papper is a Brighton musician – part of David Bramwell’s Oddfellows Casino (folky electronica) for 20 years and the Brighton Film Quartet (contemporary cinematic music) for 9 years.  Over the last 3 years I have got into composing electronic music using an EWI 5000 (electronic wind synthesizer) / Reason combination and to date have produced 2 solo and 2 collaborative albums (‘Sounds in Space’, ‘Deeper Sounds in Space’, ‘Long Distance Dreams’ and ‘Day Trip to Europa’  My live solo set is me playing mainly improvised clarinet / EWI 5000  over my electronic compositions.
emmapapper.co.uk/music

FROST is a drummer who plays as a soloist with an acoustic kit triggering sounds and loops from a sample pad.
Current project, Perm Octo Clavè Induction Set is a body of 10 songs centred on a binary rhythmic framework, encompassing 10 songs released as five separate records throughout 2021. Each song explores a unique iteration of a rhythmic motif, with acoustic instrumentation in dialogue with sequenced electronics. There are reoccurring themes of minimalism, leftfield techno and post rock, underpinned by the ideology of networked beats.
musicbyfrost.bandcamp.com
Not to be confused with Fröst.

Territorial Gobbing – high speed clutter, vocal garbage and tape abuse shooting for sound-art and settling for much less.
territorialgobbing.bandcamp.com

Thursday 4th November 2021 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
Downstairs @ The Rossi Bar
8 Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA

The wind chilled dew

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

November 2021

The Rossi Bar

Starting things off with lots of banging we have FROST. It’s unusual for us to have drums, and Dale has drums set up on the front of the tiny Rossi Bar stage, wires going off to a few devices, and the electronic pads. So he starts with a fairly open piece, rolling sprightly tight drums with pinging Raymond Scott sounds and a nice whistling melody over the top, from there he’s straight into more proggy territory, jerky beats, an elliptical sequence (backing track? I don’t think so by the way the sound modulates). There are too many beats to the bar, the timing is way odd. No melodic elements to this one, it’s all point/counterpoint. The third tune has a breathless Casio whine drone, with a more straightforward rhythm, this turns into a riff like Friske Frugt, it stretches out into a chiming section that alternates with something chiming in an altogether trickier time signature. The next starts with a chirrupingly tapped rhythm, that turns into some odd detuned riff, with pizzicato scattered rhythms and some buzzing hardcore on the cheap saw wave stabs. The last one is a full on prog action epic, that he somehow gets electric piano chords in amongst the staccato drum pattern.

Second up was Territorial Gobbing “down from Leeds”.  With his table of stuff, twin cassette players, a loop pedal, a springing ruler, desk bell, honker, file, matt with contact mic. He starts like some quick draw artiste with a cassette player in each hand, swinging each arm back and forth. Squalling feedback at us instead of bullets. Then we get a beautifully timed comedy patch of silence. Then we get into staccato snatches from the tapes, music, speech, reverbed, sped up, looped. Or not. A bout of rummaging gets us into a denser noisier passage while Theo tries to summon “Alex .. a … A.. Alex…. Alexa” He has a deft touch, the kind of comic timing we haven’t seen in an age, and an ear for when to let rip with a proper screech of noise. And he works hard at the table, I don’t think much is unused at the end.

Rounding the evening off we have Emma Papper, with laptop, Electronic Wind Instrument EWI5000, and clarinet. The first track is bouncing chimes and wafts of trilling synth with occasional tonal arpeggios with a hint of flexitone. The second has a percolating synth line, with a melody from the EWI that’s all slurred detuned washes that occasionally have stringy touches of Chi Mai sung out by ice bound sirens. The third is all angelic choirs and distant aliens that slowly shifts into focus, with some deep shifting detail. The next piece is harsher, winds and icy, gritty high pitched spines. Abstract and less comfortable. It feels like an ice cave, I can even hear the dripping, giving way to a landscape of slowly undulating tones. The next piece carries on from here with warmer vocal washes. The penultimate piece tends toward what sounds like overdriven guitar drones, with strings and hints of birdsong in its fluttering synths. The final piece brings the clarinet up off the table, meshing it against the shifting drones from the laptop, the backing shifts so slowly it’s almost imperceptible, giving the clarinet an evolving background to work on.

Joining the long list of people who have enjoyed playing at The Spirit of Gravity so much they’ve released their set afterwards here we have Emma Papper’s set from the November show: emmapapper.bandcamp.com/album/emma-papper-live-at-the-spirit-of-gravity