Author: Spirit of Gravity

New horizons, rearranged narratives

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June 2017
Green Door Store

Bitter Disko

Bitter Disko

We had a kind of story arc in mind for the June show, starting off with Bitter Disko and his stripped down all electronic percussion setup. Stunningly pure in conception, he builds some tonality in by overdriving tom or bell sounds, but it’s all hardware drum machines rattling away in erratic twitchy rhythms, driving on and on. We have had audiences dancing before but this mass twitching and odd convulsions are more widespread and unusual.

Nuclear Whale

Nuclear Whale

Second in line we have the return of Nuclear Whale, his lovely array of hardware and looping visuals. Interspersing disturbing off-centre drones and sirens with rhythmic passages that occasionally get up to a fair old rattle. He almost hits both sides of crystalline Detroit and noise walls without losing the sense of what it is he does. Some real fun in here.

Fane

Fane

The final act of the evening is Fane’s first show. So that’s a real bonus. His set unwinds quite unusually starting with a really intense thick bagpipey drones with banjo (Hah! Oh yes) before a mid-tempo rhythm slips in and he does some singing (now THAT is something unusual) and eventually it unravels as the bagpipes decay into space slides for a lengthy and quite hallucinatory drone out to end on a very odd digital folk tip. The sounds aren’t the earthy electronic folk inflected sounds of Kemper Norton, say, but oddly clean and shiny, but still with something that hints of the fence or hedgerow.

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Tuesday 6th June 8.00 to 10.00pm

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Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

The next edition of the Spirit of Gravity radio show will be broadcast on Tuesday 6th June from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM.
https://extra.resonance.fm/

This month we dedicate the whole show to a trip through the weird and wonderful world of Adaadat records. From a pummelling by the likes of DJ Scotch Egg and Ove Nax to the subtle splendour of Chosen Frequencies and Elephant house – this show marks an amazing history of exploration at the sonic frontier. Adaadat Records we salute you!

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.

1st June at the Green Door Store: Fane / Bitter Disko / Nuclear Whale

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Fane
Folk music from the furthest reaches

Fane released a self-titled EP at the beginning of 2017, a 2-part gnostic ramble through ancient Britain, followed by a second EP of two ambient/drone pieces shortly after. Mutated banjo, squeezebox and mandolin sit alongside beats and psychedelic drones in sagas of faraway places.

Bitter Disko
(live hardware breakdown)

Bitter Disko is a restless live hardware soundtrack of rhythmic experimentalism. Using cheap trash & analogue gear to produce percussive electronic sounds has generated a series of stripped-back nocturnal tracks that recall influences from classic electro, warped techno & tribal drumming.
bitterdisko.bandcamp.com

Nuclear Whale
Digital/Electronic secular apocalypse

Thursday 1st June 2017 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
Undercroft, Brighton Train Station, BN1 4FQ Brighton

Happy Birthday Delia

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May 2017
Green Door Store

So, yes, it’s what would have been the eve of Delia Derbyshire’s 80th birthday if she hadn’t died so young. As one of the series of events in Brighton to celebrate that event, I think this was a suitable occasion.

Lorah Pierre

Lorah Pierre

Lorah Pierre is set up in front of the left hand stack on one of the round tables, a small breadboard device with wires, switches, unknobbed potentiometers wires and bare light bulbs sprouting out. She has a small jeweller’s screwdriver in her hand and the house lights down. She starts with small pulses of white noise serried up in blocks, the bulb pulsing in time. Silence erupts with darkness and then pow! Back in with a thin blast of white noise full throttle, again it pulses as she works at the hidden presets. The blasts fatten out and then fall away in volume. Darkness and flashes of light illuminating us standing around the table watching the concentrated effort. The set climaxes with full throttle blasts and then all too soon in darkness ends.

Karen Constance

Karen Constance

Karen Constance is up on stage, to one side of the screen onto which is projected full size some film by Andy Bolus, it’s large with stained glass colours and the intensity of melting celluloid. After a false start due to connectivity issues, she starts with what sounds like a cassette recording of bricks being chipped resonating through some kind of piano soundboard. It morphs into an unrecognisable lumpy rhythm, before being subsumed by chirruping tape birds and someone gulping a noisy tea before having a sliding door bash their head in. Karen’s collage sets are singular things. Evoking dreams of the city bombsites of my youth, weeds, dust. Machines. There are birds and natural sounds, but it’s not bucolic in any way, when the tonal wind blows it’s through a window, a bell is an oddly warped domestic sound pitch bending into an absurdist shape. Urban Horror. Dogs, elephants. Voices. I’m kind of lost. And a bit scared. It’s dark… she ends with a woman’s voice reading.

Roshi featuring Pars Radio

Roshi feat. Pars Radio

Finishing the evening is Roshi featuring Pars Radio, starting with a new song, well a new cover of an old Persian folk song, “Rashied Khan” with a short clip of an old Iranian film playing behind them. It’s pretty abstract, Roshi’s voice, a constant, her organ holding quivering notes behind her and Graham Dowdall’s occasional beats scattering about behind her. Then a trio of older ones, including the single “Don’t breathe it to a soul” with film, before finishing off with a rattling version of “Three almonds and a walnut” and unusually an encore! “Lor Batche”. Rocking.

4th May at the Green Door Store: Roshi feat. Pars Radio / Karen Constance / Lorah Pierre White

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A concert for Delia Derbyshire’s 80th Birthday.

Roshi (feat. Pars Radio)
Iranian traditional songs and London electronica.

Roshi Nasehi is a Welsh born singer-composer of Iranian parentage with a strong track record in live performance, collaboration, recording and workshops. As a child she sang 80s pop, songs from musicals and Welsh folk at school and in local choirs. At home her parents played old tapes of Iranian folk and pop music and her father resumed traditional violin playing, which influenced early compositions. She also learned piano and in 1997 won a place at RWCMD to study composition and sang in the jazz ensemble directed by Keith Tippett. She moved to London in 2000 and before long formed her much acclaimed “experimental, electronic Welsh-Iranian folk pop” project Roshi Featuring Pars Radio with prolific percussionist/producer Graham Dowdall. 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 has received several commissions including the Belonging exhibition at the Museum Of London, BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, So & So Circus Theatre, Birds Eye View, the Southbank 2012 WOW festival and the British Council for whom she presented major public sound art pieces in Kuwait in May 2014.

www.roshi.biz/about

Karen Constance
Audio and visual artist in rare solo show.

Included on this year’s Tectonics lineup, sound artist, member of Blood Stereo and the Polly Shang Kuan Band, and co-curator of another UK experimental music festival, Brighton’s Colour out of Space.

Lorah Pierre White
Recycled DIY hardware & hacking

Recycling of materials, self-built hardware, hacking and bending, along with a DIY ethos that allows interactive installations and performances to develop out of temporal space

Thursday 4th May 2017 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
Undercroft, Brighton Train Station, BN1 4FQ Brighton

Next radio broadcast on ResonanceExtra FM: Tuesday 2nd May 8.00 to 10.00pm

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Gravity Waves and the Spirit World

The next edition of the Spirit of Gravity radio show will be broadcast on Tuesday 2nd May from 8.00 to 10.00pm on ResonanceExtra FM.
https://extra.resonance.fm/

** Please note the change of date, the show will now go out on the 1st Tuesday of the month **

Gravity Waves:
The first hour will be a Noise special, details to follow

The Spirit World:
The second half will be a Delia Derbyshire 80th Birthday special, including tracks by:

Delia Derbyshire / Ron Granier – Dr Who theme (1963)
Delia Derbyshire & Anthony Newley – I Decoded You
White Noise – Black Mass: an electric storm in hell
Delia Derbyshire – The Legend of Hell House
Spheress – Kindalini Sprawl
Magliocchi, Boss, Chagas, Okamoto – after silence
Colin Webster & Mark Holub – Qara Capa
Viva la Muerte – Martinez Estrada
Geoff Leigh and Yumi Hara – stone of the beach
Der Plan – Hohe kante
Bovaflux – Red Sector
Transept – Follow Your Heart

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.

Just the one duck

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

April 2017
Green Door Store

Duck Rabbit

Duck Rabbit

It was a warm spring day, but a cool spring evening. At the Green Door Store, first up for Spirit of Gravity were Duck Rabbit, intrepid and enterprising sound collectors who had done us proud at the Caroline of Brunswick about eighteen months back. Joe, James and Tom played two improvised pieces tonight – the first drawing on samples from a historic working grain-mill (the last full-time working one, they said), and the second from the sounds of a Liverpool scrapyard. Sometimes they whipped up a storm, twisting and wringing the sounds from their machines – in Tom’s case a self-made controller called a Clarinot. At other times – especially on the fadeouts – the sonics they conjured were so subtle that no one knew if they should applaud yet. Eventually, they did anyway.

Andrew Greaves

Andrew Greaves

Next up, Spirit of Gravity collective member Andrew Greaves played the final instalment of his Octabeast series – the ‘last will and tentacle’. Appropriately, its minor key imparted an elegiac sense of a page turned, or a book closed. Over layered, pulsating sequences and echo loops, Andrew added lyrical notes on the mighty Casio 400, with plenty of rhythmic and harmonic contrast and counterpoint to hold attention fast. Behind him flashed up magnificent, self-produced collages, in which Renaissance cherubs vied for space with Russian iconography, a boxer and 1950s goalkeeper (former Palace legend Bill Glazier, it emerges). Andrew hasn’t combined these two elements of his artistic output before but, on this showing, he should surely do it again. As a performer, the lad done great and, as always, gave 110 percent.

Resonant Blue

Resonant Blue

Last but unleast, Resonant Blue from Hove, who let it be known during the sound check that they would be loud, and didn’t disappoint in that or in the overall impact of their set. With a simple guitar and laptop setup, the duo produced the kind of soundthrob that really rolls and rumbles in the stomach. On the screen, logs burned in a grate – keeping the home fires burning, while Guardian news alerts went off in my pocket about bombs landing in Syria. Much of Resonant Blue’s loudest sounds derived, I think, from a single sampled growl; the higher frequencies sang in the ears, in my case for some days afterwards, enhancing the sense of time well spent. Towards the end to the set, what sounded like a fire alarm mutated into something closer (odd as this may sound) to ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us’ played on the bagpipes.

Unfortunately, no video was taken of this event.