March 2018
Green Door Store
Operationz
101, shortly joined by repetitive drum machine and a thick distorted electric guitar. Without sounding like Wire this reminds me of Wire, there is a real dynamic thrust to it. After around 5 minutes he winds down the guitar and the drone gets a nasty edge to it before it drops out to just the SH101 sequencing away, and then it kicks off again. And winds down again to a different harsh drone. A couple of times he kicks off some tasty NDW bass lines but seems convinced that this isn’t the done thing here and cuts them off before they take over. There’s some really nice layering of feedback into the drones at a couple of points too.
Dolly Dollycore
Dolly Dollycore is set up on an oil drum table to one side of the stage; Shakers in real life and from the laptop. Starts reading a poem, that has occasional interludes for a shake of a shaker or an odd rattle. The gong she didn’t bring tonight comes from the laptop with swimming pool voice-verb, and she dips back into the words. The soundtrack develops into odd a/rhythmic scrapes, and she gives a flexatone flourish. She goes on to a new work in progress on Kesh who had died a few days before, very personal and moving, the room is silent and you can hear the emotion in everyone. I don’t expect to weep at SoG. The backing moves onto ducks on water and she gets back into the Magic Words. The next piece has odd scraped resonant strings and improv percussion parts, unlooped. unjointed. Reflecting the stagger of her spoken lines. And there is a disco ending, where she does dance. The last poem which seems to be about a childhood in Africa has a steady drum beaten, with scrapey violin lines and chain rattles layered up in fine array that just stop. That just leave the voice to carry the message. It ends with Dolly dancing to ELO.
Eub-Astra
Eub Astra have a long trestle table in front of the stage strewn with things electrical and acoustical, a string of coloured patio lights strung out over it that come and go as they command, enforcing changes starting with an accordion wheezy pulse put into someone’s looper, against a shimmery drone, there is a certain amount of messing about with it, before the lights change and we move on. Some scrape and light space noise, more string scrape and metal crash this section has a modern electronic shine hovering around the improv stammer. Some cornet parp. Some spooky sweep of an accordion in a haunted alley of broken neon. Cornet breath sweeps odd organ notes in front of it. It gets darker and more psychedelic before morphing into a balloon solo over an earth loop hum that again morphs into a beautiful cornet line over a thin unpleasant unviolin scratch (what was that thing I don’t remember).
