May 2016
Green Door Store
Broken Star
For various reasons, I’m not doing things at this show, and when I arrive Andrew and Tom have just started the Broken Star set. They set up on the floor of the Green Door Store, so as not to occlude the slide-show of Toms photographs of London. Updated since they first did this show at The Komedia. Tom’s getting some pretty nasty textures from his e-bowed guitar while Andrew switches around between electric piano and organ arpeggios, he hasn’t been wasting the things he’s learnt on his recent shows based around exploring Terry Riley’s mid sixties pieces, there’s some nicely psychedelic work afoot in here, slowly unfolding melodies in strange keys.
Leaver
Second up is Leaver, one of whom toured with Tim Holehouse last year and enjoyed his show with us so much he had to come back to Brighton and spend some more time here. They do short constructed but completely unnerving songs. There’s something very sinister, unsettling about them. They do enjoy the live ambience of the GDS though, Angel at one point fleeing his laptop on the stage to howl around the room.
Ræppen
While he’s doing that Ræppen has robed up and quietly set up to the side of the stage, as Leaver wind down, Tim starts rubbing beach stones together and getting his loops into shape, he starts the throat singing and things really start to get intense,there’s some chanting, and sudden drops each time buildng back to a dense storm of rich textured vocalese.
SQ feat KET
Finishing off the evening SQ feat KET clean the stage standing to each side, Thomas Bjelkeborn on the right, a Wii controller and laptop glitching the voices coming from Koray Tahiroglu’s visuals fed in from the left. Slurred, degraded video of an old Siberian mangled up by Bjelkborn’s software. Its very clean sounding and digital after the analogue murk of the rest of the evening, interesting how much space you can get into something so distorted and messed up.
Elena Desai has assembled a group of guitarists to accompany her film “Micro Infinity”, she’s sat up by the sound desk with her laptop playing the soundtrack and monitoring things. Onstage are the three guitarists, although one has an SH101as well judging from this angle. There’s some suspicious flanger, but that gives things a Twin Peaks creepiness at times, which adds to the films degraded and oversaturated but washed out feel. There is the impression of an unpleasant factory that lurks just out of view of the skies and streets visible through her window.
You can see him onstage with a collection of effects and home-made boxes – a step sequencer and a couple of circuit bent toys. Swarbrooke starts up urgently with an irritated buzz, Harvey enveloped in a comforting darkness, he slashes some chunks of noise across it as the bee starts to warble in a far from idyllic manner. The chunks morph into a machine grind before we drop to something like a live mains applied directly to the head and into a popping rhythm into which he cuts some of the rawest noise I’ve heard in a long time, twisting into an oscillating morphing crush. At one stage you can make him out in the darkness, toy lights flashing as he carries something flashing around the stage screeching. It’s a truncated set, washing out to a thin white noise hiss, but shows how much imagination can be applied to something as seemingly restrictive as noise. Thrilling.
Jeff Stonehouse finishes the evening off in a lovely wash of blue light with a red spot on the screen behind him. He has a long trestle table with his laptop at one end and a novelty guitar stand propping up his 60s Woolworth’s guitar at the other. An office fan blows ribbons gently onto the strings and occasionally he wanders over to it to jangle the bracelets that hang from its head or scrape the strings. The laptop processes all this and has some backing tracks possibly, or field recordings. The whole piece drifts almost in stasis, enveloping and warm. People sit on the floor (in The Green Door Store!) Shimmering developments slowly crystallise from the drones, time passes. I don’t fall asleep this time.
Baby was depleted even beyond the trio we were expecting, Adam Bushell turned up, set up his Vibraphone and drums, slept for an hour and then had to go home poorly. So we were left with Alfie on Double bass and Will on guitar and flute. I’d not seen Alfie before. He started with some plucked figures with Will interjecting on screwed up acoustic guitar, before switching to longer bowed figures and Will switching to flute, with some interesting overtones, switching between lower tones and almost feedback sonorities Alfie tapping the bass body in lieu of Adam, before dropping back to Will on the guitar chords and Alfie back off the bow. Before finishing strongly on long flute tones and bass rumble.
Jack starts his set off with some statement making monster bass blasts. They really make full use of the Green Door Store’s extended bass frequencies, they’re slow and powerful and he builds up some other regular noises in there before picking up his saxophone and letting it rip into his effects chain. There’s some pretty heavy distortion in there and his playing pretty quickly builds in intensity, with the bass blasts getting twisted with pitch bends before it falls away and starts building again around a more complex sequence. I think he could barely talk for a while after the end of that, he looked completely blown out.
Komuso (Derek and Cliff) are joined on stage by Der Rompf (Robert and Stephen). Starting slow, grit and warble with e-bowed guitar sliding in. A big metal sheet propped up against one of the GDS oil drum tables and electronic drums rattle in a Martin Denny-esque exotic patter, curling the guitar off into arabesques before fading out into noise and space whorls. Cliff has an interesting approach to the electronic drums, scraping around the edge and beating the limits rather than time. It builds again before sliding down to a quiet keyboard figure before some bassy growling gets them in the mood for proper metal bashing beats and space beeps to out.
Baby start warble and growl; cornet against cello with vibraphone bell and scrape before it starts to get a bit ominous with some choral decay before will gets onto the acoustic guitar and thinks get into more spacious territory, Alice’s cello dropping to strummed bass figures, odd Vibe tones, stroke of drum and slow cornet or Korg from Al, before Will suddenly stands and switches to flute which picks thing up, Adam beating cymbals, Will circling, the synth toning and Alice harsh jars on the bass strings with a moment of suspension with Al’s effects suspended lighter than air before the cello drones in all scare and we spiral out to nothing. The second piece starts with scrapes and whispers against scurried string plucks, before flute drones in underneath and the Korg does a detuned space warble under vibes and voices and isolated short flute flurries before we do an odd revisit to Denny but in a somewhat more ribald fashion
Duncan Harrison was originally slated for the middle slot, but as we had only three acts and were starting late he opted for the first. The score he was performing was this (page 115):
Hardworking Families without Nan; unfortunately Nan shipped their Cello off to far-most Africa two days before the show and we couldn’t source a replacement in time. This meant Hardworking Families had to step in to cover the fray on their own. I’m sure there’s some kind of wider metaphor there, but I’m going to move on.