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.

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

Resonant Blue
Apocalypse Donut Vendors: A mesmeric maelstrom of feedback. A duo or possibly a mono appearance of this highly rated electronic act.

Andrew Greaves
Octabeast album launch: Intense minimalist analogue improvisation. Intense minimalist analogue composition. Not for 5 hours, though, this time. For this show, Andrew will be performing his final edition to the Octabeast series “Octabeast; a Last Will and Tentacle”. Prominently featuring the mighty Casiotone MT400 and a collection of his garish psychedelic/baroque collage images.

Duck Duck Rabbit
Trio of electronic and acoustic improvisors with field recordings, last seen whipping up a storm at The Scope.

Album release
This month’s event showcases the latest release on the Spirit of Gravity label, featuring another memorable live performance – that of Andrew Greaves’ focused and intense rendition of Octabeast, as seen and heard at the Terry Riley 80th Birthday celebration at the One Church, Brighton on 27 June 2015.

This ‘Ethiopian Dervish’ version of Octabeast was based on a series of Ethiopian 5 note scales; the shadow of Terry Riley may be detected in the use of a delay-laded combo organ sound. There is a hint too of famous Riley compositions, such as ‘A Rainbow In Curved Air’, as well as nods to other influential improvising organists like Mike Ratledge, Alice Coltrane, Larry Young and the great Ethiopian players Hailu Mercia and Mulatu Astatke.

The piece was framed as a shorter preview of the longer (5 hours), gallery version later performed by Andrew in October 2016. The album is available for audition and as a pay-what-you want download on the label’s page:
spiritofgravity.bandcamp.com/album/octabeast-ethiopian-dervish

Thursday 6th April 2017 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
Undercroft, Brighton Train Station, BN1 4FQ Brighton

COMING SOON: Delia Derbyshire’s 80th birthday, featuring Roshi feat. Pars Radio / Karen Constance / Lorah Pierre White

Clive Henry
Body/Noise/Body

Clive Henry has been actively pursuing sound for over twenty years. Whilst he has done this in bands and looser groupings, his solo work has seen him pick an untutored route through “noise” and associated areas. His work has often been autobiographical, with recurring themes and ideas including: dissonance, the process of decay, and the human body as instrument. Recent recorded work has concentrated on noise textures and “harsh noise walls”, as well as pieces more clearly akin to musique concrete; whilst live performances have utilised vocal work and a commitment to physicality and tension. His formative experiences in music occurred within the diy punk/hardcore scene and the values of this community continue to inform his musical activities and beliefs. He was a founder member of the bang the bore collective, who have organised gigs and occurrences around the UK. He has played across Europe and the US, and been heard on radio 1. He lives alone in Southampton, with no friends but hundreds of noise tapes which all sound the same. He dislikes writing short bios.

Gagarin
Sonic Cosmonaut

Gagarin is the solo project of Graham “Dids” Dowdall, current member of Pere Ubu and former collaborator with Nico and a myriad of others legendary and unheard of. As Gagarin he makes an electronica that carries influences ranging from Stockhausen to Chicory Tip and everywhere in between and outside. Performing live with a combination of drumpads, samplers, iPads and other hardware his sound is characterised by liberal use of field recordings, strong melodies, fractured rhythms and improvising from a starting point of composition and structure. His last album – the unpronounceable ‘Aoticp’ received rave reviews and lots of airplay including repeated Radio 3 plays. In the middle of recording the follow up – provisionally titled ‘Corvid’ – Gagarin will bring to Spirit of Gravity a mix of work in progress for this, alongside some from ‘Aoticp’ and some reworks of compositions commissioned for 5 hills in Surrey in Summer 2016 which he shared for the first time at Fort Process.
www.gagarin.org.uk
soundcloud.com/ gagarin-1

Feedback Cell
Alice Eldridge & Chris Kiefer: modified Cello

Alice Eldridge and Chris Kiefer’s ever-evolving modified cello project with fresh Reykjavík upgrade: cellos, code, car amps, pickups and lots of soldering. Emits dulcet tones and brutal yelps.

Thursday 2nd March 2017 | 8pm – 10.30pm | £5
@ The Green Door Store
Undercroft, Brighton Train Station, BN1 4FQ Brighton

The latest release on the Spirit of Gravity label documents a beautiful and unique live collaboration
between the traditional Indian instrumentalists of The Music of Benares and the electronic
soundmakers of The Spirit of Gravity.

The album is available for audition and as a pay-what-you want download on the label’s page:
spiritofgravity.bandcamp.com/album/music-of-benares-in-brighton

On 8 November 2015, sitarists Pandit Shivnath Mishra and Deobrat Mishra, together with tabla player Prashant Mishra – three generations of the same family from Benares, northern India – played a sold-out concert at the Dome studio. Two fusion pieces – performed that evening with the Spirit of Gravity collective’s Geoff Reader, Andrew Greaves and Howard Spencer – are presented on this album, along with four improvisations from a session at Bird Studios the previous day.

The Mishras tour Europe every year but had never previously visited the UK. The collaboration was facilitated by Spirit of Gravity Life President Chris Cook, and the resulting intertwining of subtle synth drones and wash was recorded and filmed by collective members Dan Powell and by Sarah Nelson at the Dome.

“It was great opportunity to perform for the first time in the UK in 2015 – we had some great memories of performing with local musicians and having great cultural exchange with the music” says Deobrat Mishra.