April 2015
The Scope
Renfield
Renfield is Dan Powell and Geoff Cheesemaster, Dan had his laptop with some Pure Data patches scratching out noises fed through an effects chain while Geoff had a no input mixing desk setup with some old fuzzboxes and a couple of analogue delays feeding off an old noisy Yamaha mixer. Definitely it was one of those things where you’re wondering who the hell is making that sound. Dan’s output was quite digital and grainy, but the effects chain put some analogue spin on that and the two setups merged into a nice mulch of noise. Textural.
I’m Dr Buoyant and Ron Caines
Ron Caines and I’m Dr Buoyant started with Colleen-ish chimes looping from Tony and Ron slowly starting in on his soprano sax from the shadows off at the side, the whole thing was rather lovely, aching with melancholy. It took some time in unfolding before Tony got to work on the effects units and it degenerated into something altogether a bit gnarlier, with Ron picking up the Alto and blowing a bit and Tony got into some orchestral rhythm hammering. They then seemed to do a piece based on loops of Ron’s Sax and it all went into an uneasy dreamstate before rounding off in a circular synth sweep with heavily delayed sax resonating feedback washes overlaid. A really good performance from Ron and Tony, possibly their strongest to date. They’re up again at SafeHouse soon.
Chemical Bbrench
Chemical Bbrench is Karl Waugh and his mate Felix. Apparently they play annually, but its their first time at The Spirit of Gravity. They had two guitars, two lots of effects chains and all played back through the PA. Literally. Occasionally you can tell a chunk of noise originates in some chirruping fret run or string scrape, but rather than guitar music it was mostly a solid blast of effects chain full throttle overdrive leavened with slow phaser grinds and broken down by low bouts of feedback. The temptation is to think of it as a straight noise set, but listening back, its a lot more nuanced than that, quite textured and with some nice interplay between the two of them. Which isn’t to say that it didn’t have some nice HNW moments.
Nuclear Whale is on first. Lots of lovely Dave Smith kit a few other bits and bobs and he’s LOUD. A dense, viscous sound with lots of crunchy beats and not the space to call it techno. Thick strong basslines and noisy melodies to the fore. Boo Cook has visuals running, a cutup of space trip, bombs and glazed talking heads working against the banging of the music quite nicely.
Binnsclagg pull together probably the best set I’ve seen them do since they gave up power tools. Lots of dynamics: peaks and troughs, noise, drones, wrong music mash-ups, sing-a-longs, noise and beauty. A favourite moment for me was a big chunk of the JAMMS first single. Both Verity and Karl on electronic devices, noise machines, tome generators, tone generators, loopers and Kaoss pads. They have words and stand to say their piece. The Verity-led singsong at the end was priceless.
‘Fields’ is a piece by Tim Shaw & Sébastien Piquemal, Tim was at Fort Process last year and they are touring this art piece. They are set up onstage with some extra speakers dotted about and their own wifi network which they have asked people to connect to before they start. On stage and through the big PA they pump out some bassy drones, I nip out to the bar and notice that the phone in someone’s pocket is making a weird sound. As I get back into the main room and wander about all the phones around me have started this thin droning. if you look at their screens white command text is scrolling up and slowly the sounds from the phones begins to diversify. Obviously its quite quiet and thin sounding but the acoustic space afforded by the bass drones leaves plenty of room. all the audience seems to be milling about, comparing phone sounds and talking about what’s happening. Its probably the first time I’ve been so happy with audience noise during a set as everyone is so involved. Aces.
Nad Spiro played first and quite early, she apparently has a tinnitus variant that means it gets worse as the evening progresses, so in spite of her having travelled the furthest was on first. I can see exactly why Dan was keen to get her to play, she plays a kind of detailed processed improv based on guitar and voice all put through a laptop for clicking and munging. There are precise glitches and smeared warps. She plays about five pieces.
Leo Chadburn has a different approach, he’s come down with a band:
Finally; Freedom Frampton. David K is usually a pretty nervous performer, but he’s looking really relaxed for this tonight, which considering how exposed it is, is pretty something. He stands at the back near the mixer with two mics and a small table with his phone on it. His set is probably about a third a cappella and two thirds vocal with minimal drum machine/ synth baking tracks off the phone. I’ll apologise for the poor sound from the mics as I mixed it, but drowning in muddy reverb gives a very human scope to some very personal songs. They’re mostly pretty short, some (e.g. Spaceman Three cover) are introduced, but many just seem to spring unbidden from his lips.
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]](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. 
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. 