February 2016
Green Door Store
It’s still a bit light as I walk down the hill, this is always my favourite Spirit of Gravity show of the year; coming out of the darkness. It’s not raining, which also helps.
Elena Desai
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.
Swarbrooke
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
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.
Apparently the performance is based on “the words just won’t come”.
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.
Starting the evening were Noteherder & McCloud, who based their set off some recordings of trains and then more notably Tube recordings as we got into the set. It was a slow start with quite a bit of tape hiss delayed and whined up by a bitcrusher into a distant alarm. Chris Parfitt’s soprano sax shouts jumped across that until a rolling, almost swinging bass sequence started up and he got into some really lyrical playing for about ten minutes until it all shredded out into noise and clanging rail screech and than toned down into breath hiss and gurgle.
map71, who have been one of the best things I’ve seen this year, and this was another good one. They took a little while to get right into it, but once they did, it was right there. Andy Pyne’s drumming and synths (a backing track rather than his old keyboard – I couldn’t see) were rock steady, as he takes some Jaki Liebezeit channelling tight beats. Lisa Jayne was a little more animated than sometimes, her left hand flicking as she held her book of spells in the right dexterously turning pages with her thumb. The highpoint came with some DNW buzzing synth, Andy on beaters, pattering out a steady toned rhythm on the toms (even the snare drum has the snare dropped for extra note) while Lisa Jayne intoned her deadpan words.
Matawan are all about the textures, the shimmer. I originally thought one of them had a keyboard on his table initially, but he seemed to have an unused guitar propped against the stage side wall there, while the chap in the middle sat stooped down guitar mostly across his lap as he muddled with his racks of effects at his feet. It was a slow drone build, layers modulating back and forth between the pair of players in what initially seemed an improvised set until you noticed that one of them was loading some pretty specific chords into three tiny Mooer loopers he had at his feet, not that when he played them back it sounded like strumming, but the triad of washing layers they produced as he faded from one to another gave clear indication of an compositional element unexpected in a drone environment.
Gus Garside started the evening with an introduction, and then a piece by James Tenney called “The Beast” which was a complex microtonal piece from a visual score, all bowed often two strings sounding, long notes , very technical and about 6 minutes long “it’s called ‘The Beast’ because it IS a beast”. I should coco.
The second act of the evening was Franck Barriac, over from France for the Himmel massed organs show at Cafe Oto. He was sitting at the back of the room with a quadrophonic setup, the usual Caroline PA behind us and two extra channels at the back, in front of us. Franc’s set was a soundscape piece based around urban field recordings and tones. It’s amazing how unused we are to this surrounding kind of performance, especially with the artist in front of us, sounds from behind (even after the introduction telling us it would happen) seem really disconcerting. Anyway a really nicely structured piece, partly pre arranged and partly improvised, I gather from talking to him.
Finally it was Futuro De Hierro from Spain. We utilised the extra speakers to boost up the sound – which was handy as it happened, as a few minutes into his set the main PA seemed to glitch out, although those of us sat at the back didn’t notice as we were immersed in the joyous racket lurking up behind us. A quick work around the cabling and it all seemed OK again, but Viktor seemed a little subdued. Still some excellent beats and bursts of noise, and some really interesting kit to look at. We must get him back for a full throttle set at The Green Door Store.
Back to a full strength roster tonight, and we got off to a good start with a set from Barn, with a laptop and controller plus some bits and pieces, his set seems to be in five sections, with a foil. The first reminds me somewhat of my airboat ride from last month, a nice gritty sound, but his properly generated. This breaks into pulses and thence into something that has washes of almost sea like noise, before the final section leads onto a cascade of electronic tones.
Quinta is accompanied by two other keyboard players, who also double up on saw and stylophone and laptop. This as you can imagine pushes the limits of the Caroline’s setup pretty effectively. They start with an unaccompanied vocal piece about Boudicca, before moving into a song with some Nyman-esque very rhythmic interlocking piano parts all three of them intricately locked . They then get stuck into the peripheral kit for an uncanny waltz before coming back to, I was going to say orthodox, but perhaps a more finely structured piece of tightly knuckled piano. A really good mix of modernist composition and sub five minutes pop song lengths.
Rick is down in Brighton for his first solo set as The Oneirologist, which is (I think) a live soundtrack project. The film is called something about moths and has two lights (from a boat, maybe) to which he makes some quiet noise or drones – its too fierce for a drone, but too quiet for noise – so work that out yourself. Strongly textured tones, and resonant knocks from séance next door. Overall, unsettling, I think.
And to round the evening off, Dan Powell plays his final collaboration of the series, this one with minimal impact. it was supposed to be acoustic, so he has his Bontempi reed organ mic’d up to a fuzzbox and delay, Steve minimal impact has his plastic harmonium from India, through a new Space Echo pedal he found somewhere and is rightly very pleased with. I found some old visuals by Karl so turn the projector round to play them over the duo while they hum and drone pleasingly.