February 2015
The Scope
DhákarlP
Set up on a brace of chairs facing each other in the middle of the room, first up are DhákarlP; they have scores, Kev has his sax to which he applies various techniques starting with blowing down the reed in a fairly normal fashion, but going on through various extended techniques. Dan has his singing bow mic’d up just on the edge of ringing in and out of feedback, and his whistle apart from that he has … a lot of silence; They concentrate, seem to be playing apart and together at various times, the overall effect is almost a duet between sax and pure tones. It’s a very deliberate set, the scores are on stands and there is a lot of reading and a lot of considering about what is to be done before it’s done.
DA[FS]
![DA[FS]](https://spiritofgravity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/DAFS.jpg)
After a short interval while we line the chairs up in rows facing DA[FS]’s set up at the side of the room and some folk have a play at the twin pink mini-guitars we have in the electrocreche tonight, we’re ready for Distant Animals. Dann has a big modular synth in a case and a small sampler/playback device like the one Robin uses these days. He also has scores, and pamphlets which he has scattered about. He gives the impression that the pamphlets are the scores but I suspect this not to be true. He has a stack of papers on the table to one side and works his way through them, adjusting various things. The music is rather lovely, meandering analogue phatness. He plays for just over 30 minutes and it’s nowhere near long enough. I’d love to have several hours of this on a languid afternoon at the Coach House. Long drinks. Lots of ice, sunshine. That kind of thing. Dann is performing these scores in a number of locations with a number of different setups. Catch him, yes.
Warrior Squares
There are only three acts tonight, so we can give the Warrior Squares some room to flex themselves and it pays dividends. They play an expansive set with everyone on good form, Nick gets through three of the four trees he’s bought to play and his bass guitar, Geoff has his flute, voice and MicroKorg, James and Paul have boxes I can’t deduce, and we’re on one of those journeys where you can’t tell largely who is doing what, several layers of processing are going on, everyone is beavering away, blending and working together and it all flows and keeps on flowing as the set develops.
The first act in at short notice for Guards! Guards! who can’t get their vocalist across the north sea, is Inwards – Kristian from the [beep] collective, with visuals from Irie pixel. Inwards is set up on the floor of the stage under the projections, he has a flight case with a modular synth and a drum machine. Interestingly he goes for an almost Baion rhythm with the bass drum, giving the start of his set a latin feel while the analogue synths cascade around it. He tweaks and turns at the knobs filtering and bringing the drums in and out. The visuals are good, mirrored lines, geometric tunnels, occasional blocks of code. Constantly flowing alongside the changes in Kristian’s music.
Second up is The Organ Grinder’s Monkey, Ben with his shiny guitar and helter skelter rhythms. I’m still not used to anyone being organised enough to monitor their set with stereo headphones while they play and he displays some nifty footwork controlling things with a midi footpad. He starts with an old song and belts through the first half at a pretty snappy pace ending up with the song where he hands a gameboy controller out to the audience (this time Kristian) who really gets into it, chopping and filtering stuttering and laughing like a drain playing havoc with Ben’s tune while he thrashes away on stage. Its a nice juxtaposition and you can really see the advantage of headphones for this one as he’d be lost trying to play along to what’s issuing from the speakers.
If I always say that Ben sounds like Brian Eno circa 1980, then Olivia Louvel has something of the De La Salle of the 21st Century, thick warm beats and lovingly extended bass. One definite advantage she does have is a hell of a voice, which even on this outing you feel you’re only really getting a mild taste of. She does have quite the best mic technique I’ve seen on the stage of the Green Door Store at our nights, controlling volume, timbre and tone impeccably. Starting slowly with deceptively stately beats and long bass tones, she was peaking in the middle of a set with choppy pop song with circling multiple voices and warbling tones and trailing off with a drivingly insistent number with an on off bass that almost felt played with a switch.
Before Laboratoro play we move people around a bit so that Xelis has some space on the floor. He has reflector dishes with microphones (and pickups?) suspended from the ceiling feeding thin wires to Ed who is set up under the Caroline of Brunswick’s screen. Xelis talks and sings into the dishes the sound is processed by Ed’s Max MSP patches into arpeggios, or noise or something… There are field recordings – bird song and bunker sounds – and they both play a range of trumpets and hunting horns, Ed has a couple of drums he sticks or pats with beaters. Xelis dances and prowls, too. It’s good to see that they’re still not managing to do anything straight. 
The gap between sets is far too long but we keep the wide open space for Duncan Harrison. He balances his mixer on a stool, puts on dark glasses (after apologising) and starts talking about and from Henry Miller & Henry Rollins. He has some text in the middle of the floor and a cassette recording of some of it, he reads the text; standing, kneeling, crouching – after a while of this he presses a button on his mixer and we’re engulfed with a not loud but very unpleasant squall of feedback so that it feels like someone has unplugged the speaker on reality. You can see Duncan continue talking but not hear anything distinctly. He comes over to Agata who has been taking photographs and whispers in her ear. The horn player from Birds of Death Valley leaves the room visibly distressed: it is very unpleasant. Duncan shuts it off and I don’t remember if he reads some more or just stops.
duck-rabbit are set up on a table at the “stage” end of the room, Tom Taylor playing a keyboard loaded with crunchy step sounds from Dungeness beach, and one of Joe Wright or James Opstead playing a weird joystick controller thing slung round a neck, and the other with a non-keyboard controller controlling a box synth I’d not seen before. the results are somewhere on the line of free improv and abstract electronica, Tom’s fingers bashing impressively around the keyboard bringing forth all manner of horrible noises. This mismatch is even more pronounced on the third improvisation where they replace the Dungeness sounds with those from a Widnes scrapyard.
Tourian was next, Fabriccio set up on a chair under the screen, with a laptop, home-made almost toy-shoppish wooden box with big round buttons and a mic through fx, wearing a black and white Mexican cowboy shirt with a black hood over his head. He played down some pretty full on noise, screaming through the hood into the effects chain and generally letting rip with a hearty grace. The human origin of some of the noise added something to the electronic and digital harshness of the rest of it. 
Giving us some respite from the density of the rest of the evening Ripshaw Catfish (Cath Roberts on baritone sax and Anton Hunter on guitar) shoaling with Static Memories (Gus Garside double bass and Dan Powell guitar into laptop/effects) was spacious and studied. I was expecting the baritone to be deafening in the room, but Cath really kept it down to breathy levels with, I think a knock on effect on everyone else. Static Memories have been playing a lot and this was probably the highlight for me, some deft playing, some deft not playing (a hard trick) the two sets of musicians blending well and picking up that emergent shoaling behaviour quite nicely.
Finishing off the evening were Nyogtha, apparently they’d hung a backdrop which I didn’t notice (a big old thing with a goats head and stuff on it seems) and had two guitars both smeared through effects into thick pastes of drone, with over-reverbed vocals (my fault) and a drum machine that heavily featured a gong. 
The first stage style set is Breaking Robots who seem to be the [beep] collective’s house band, Natasha Thoday with some kind of odd box with bits that slide in and out , wheels, controllers, she seems to be aggregating Zacarias and Sarah who have more instrument looking devices. Anthony Arborialist is controlling visuals (a job he maintains for the night). For the soundcheck Natasha had been thrashing the PA with some heavy bassdrum techno, but the actual set is a melange of weird noises, glitch and strange electronica.
HUM are set up behind a long trestle table on the stage, Mark, Heloise and Olmo, bits of kit, microphones, toy synths. In fact it makes me think of the missing elektrocreche. To start off Heloise sings a low key intro, which gets washed into pure atmosphere for a while. Then Mark hollers and wails and it all spins into echo and murk; Hapshash lurching rhythms and psychotic repetition. Electric tranced shamanistic thud.
Mai Mai Mai is right at the back of the stage hidden next to the screen, in a mask that makes Toni Cutrone look like Cerebus. His set is a crystal clear sound of electronic tones and field recordings of storms, a nicely tonal contrast to the thick soup of HUM. Some PA Juddering bass is particularly pleasing to me.
The evening started with a new duo of Paul Khimasia Morgan and Dan Powell. Dan had his laptop and a scattering of percussion and Paul had a tape player, zither and some jumble of things. Quiet and elliptical, rattling and humming. 
Robert Barry / Bobby Barry / Monster Bobby introduced his book, explained some pieces and what the book was about. He performed three pieces which were more loosely based on his scores than following them. Lots of processing and electronics.
nil set up an impromptu kitchen for Culinary Music, mic’d up the boiling pan and shopping board. Chris Parfitt is so wonderfully deadpan, a career in silent movies was sadly avoided. Dan has a lot more ham. But not literally.
