October 2018
Green Door Store

So that was the Fort Process Dispersion our contribution to the season of events surrounding the amazing event that was Fort Process at Newhaven fort.

Loftslag

We had a great start to the evening with new duo Loftslag (apparently Icelandic for “Climate”) starting with a what sounds like a pounding kick that quickly sweeps up to a rhythmic mid range boinging thing (it’s not a boing, but it escapes my descriptive powers) that gets a lopsided drum pattern under it, its got some major drive and gets a weird overlay of scrapes, whirrs and beeps, with words. The rhythmic part drops out to be replaced by something a bit more randomly scrapey and the drum pattern notches up the intensity a couple of places and the rhythmic boing comes back almost as a gated pad and we get some proper bass in briefly before a two note drone comes to life. With a mirroring noise layer after a few bars that slowly increasing intensity until Greg starts groaning over it. Somehow it reminds me of late 70s Eno. Eventually all the melodic elements fall away leaving kick and noise. That builds up again with snatches of bass warp and skwirls of detuned synth. This gets increasingly randomised as we head towards the end with gurgles and more intense drums. So raucous party music instead of the noise set they promised us, but we enjoyed it nonetheless.

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ESP

Second on the bill, another duo ESP (Electronic Sound Pictures); 3 turntables and shed-loads of effects and a couple of boxes of records. So pitched down warped psychedelic kaleidoscope of stuff. A cash register pings and pays out, bass drones loop. A boxing record (?!) provides percussion. Records start up and slow down, voices drop from chipmunk to buzzing bass. 70s Space noise sweeps by launching swirling gurgles, audio vistas of bubbling spaceship. A spaceship that seems to be travelling through the dinner hall at my old school. There’s some wonderfully dissonant orchestral drone passages reminiscent of Attileo Mineo’s world fair music from the 50s. Train records, some denser passages where Raymond Scott daft percussion underpins winds and planes. A couple of passages get quite dense but mostly its space and decontextualised sounds. The whole thing is online on their MixCloud, it’s really good, you’ll find it at this link: www.mixcloud.com/Electronic_Sound_Pictures/esp-live-spirit-of-gravity/?fbclid=IwAR1VtzgWdewVMyvqVJCfuRaNRoxr5E2oU0CNmtW_A4YQ1t6mq7sNk9C5t-c (NB. Copy the link into the address box of your browser for best results)

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Nil By Nose

Unfortunately Katie English / Isnaj Dui was ill so couldn’t travel down to play which meant that for the first time this year we had an all male bill. Nil by Nose who stepped in made up for this to some extent by basing his set around a recording of his mum. It was another audio collage, but this time off a couple of tiny boxes that he had at the front of stage (where he sat in his usual wrestlers mask). It starts with a loop of a recording of his mum playing a timple (the Canary islands equivalent of a Ukulele) with some singing, looped on about 2 bars. This continues (through a shed-load of reverb) for all of the set. The first thing that happens other this is a slowly rising pinging riff. An icy bass drone loosely comes in under it. Everything stops and restarts. Other odd noises come and go. I swear at about 5 minutes in I was starting to hallucinate. The whole thing was uncanny in the Victorian sense, but not in the Victorian way. At one point the whole thing winked out of existence in a filtered disco sweep, but came back as disturbed as ever. There are ghosts in there, it isn’t safe.
Carl, he who is Nil By Nose, produced this video taster of the whole night:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpx-xmh1zyY&feature=youtu.be

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