September 2014
Month 2 of the Scope was great fun.
Benzo Fury
We’d booked Daniel Spice and Verity Spott expecting wordplay and were completely outflanked and got a tasty improv session from the debut outing of the pair, Verity on Cello and Daniel on his usual varieties of trumpet, bamboo sax, and percussion. Dan was on fine form playing some nice lines and they worked really well as a duo. Unfortunately, no photographs appear to exist for this performance.
I’m Dr Buoyant and Ron Caines
I’m Dr Buoyant and Ron Caines have played together a few times now and Tony Rimbaud seems to bring out the best in Ron, giving him the freedom to weave his lines as he wished. At the start Tony started by working on Ron’s sounds, looping and effecting them round. As the set progressed he worked up some more orthodox backing tracks to rumble away under Ron’s improvisations.
Ashtoreth / TCH
Rounding off the evening Tim Holehouse in collaboration with Ashtoreth. Ashtoreth started by burning a great swathe of Sage in a quite alarming manner before getting to work on his acoustic guitar loops. Tim had some doom-y chords going on under that before they both got into some gravelly vocalising and then twin electric guitars sweep up all the loose ends in the looping stations and Ashtoreth gets back to the acoustic guitar for the finale.
Unfortunately, we also have no video available for this event.
Andrew Greaves began with a premiere of his piece for organ, ‘Octabeast’. A rare foray into composition for SoG, this was a massively physical performance, with his swift fingers producing relentless arpeggios, the effort becoming increasingly visible as the piece developed. The overlaying echo, and rhythmic pulse which began to introduce itself, produced a kosmische feel. The accompanying visuals were provided by street photographer Simon Peacock, presented in Andrew’s patent flowing slideshow format, and grounded the experience in a way that more spacey images would have failed to do. Watch out for a photographic exhibition from Simon, with the possibility of further collaborations in store, and you can also find a CD of ‘Octabeast’ at our Bandcamp page at 
Set to his trademark film of Soviet space footage, Gagarin’s set eased in with ambient washes and picked out keyboard notes, but soon his mode of more delicate physical performance was introduced. Moving as lightly as Fred Astaire, his hands and feet danced across his pads and keys, always a pleasure to witness. Glitch funk recognisable from his Biophilia CD, nicely pulled apart and played around with live, was interspersed with less rhythmic interludes creating a subtle and nuanced set. The visuals developed into a more abstract, washed out style as things continued, closing with a more robust beat-driven sequence.
The professionalism of Pawnsphinx’ musical presentation apparently caused some confusion, with some mistaking his set of original pieces for a DJ set. Muscular beats emerged from his laptop, bouncing well-developed drum and synth pads around the venue. He also shared with a bemused audience the bizarre video art of Matthew Barney, from his Cremaster cycle (
So, the first Scope, quite a success.
The Caroline of Brunswick upstairs room is L shaped with a section missing the rather fetching sticky carpet. This is nil’s home for the evening their pile of things scattered about as you would expect, toys wine glasses small instruments, clinking and pinging and rolling and blowing things of every description. Their first set was very intense; quiet, intricate, serious. We closed the window to keep out the random drifting of music from the smoking yard. At some point they do something that makes someone in the audience laugh. Dan picks up on this and continues it. Its most alarming.
Captain Poopdeck took the helm on a table mid-room, Djellabah-clad beats and lots of number related samples, he has some fine new equipment and has spent a deal of the evening reading the manual for some of it. Which is always good to see.
The Zero Map set is the pivot point of the evening, two projectors throwing flames and custom animations around. Chloe’s voice is more prominent than at previous SoG shows. It has some triple octave dropping device on it and she plays a lot of theremin with a Blade-Runnerish stripe of light across her eyes. Karl’s guitar delays in a set that spirals in a nicely psychedelic manner.
HazanDaz (Howard Spencer and Dan Powell) came out with nylon tracksuits and a quick blast on a whistle, and sat down at a table on the floor like a couple of school kids. Howard had his old wasp, recorder and some small devices and Dan had his laptop and a collection of small things. I was expecting some world cup related daftness, but what we got was some nice chirrups and drones. I could hear the occasional football commentator, and some samples of recorder to echo Howards. So not daft, but enjoyable. The world cup all seems so long ago now. The bane of topicality.
Meatbreak was somewhat noisier, much denser affair than the footy chaps. Although it slides in unobtrusively with some rumbling bass drones before layering some weird trebles and squelches and then some industrial throb beefed up with distorted pulses of distorted bass drum ending with some space squelch.
“Some old stuff, some new stuff and some extemporisation” said Sarah Angliss at the beginning of her set and that pretty much sums it up. She had a new modular synth set up stage front, which although she had to teeter on the edge of the stage to get to it, added some noise and random elements. The carillon, recorder, Hugo and (for the first time in an age) the Crow, were all present along with some penetrating bass and sweeping space noises. So, kind of Sarah Angliss in a spookier, squelchier, slightly more abstract 12 inch form.
Unfortunately Sarah Angliss was ill, but at the very last minute we managed to rope in Tim Blechmann who had spent the day in the studio with Daniel Jones. He’s a resident of Venice on tour in the UK, who codes his own music on the fly (see the video for an example) adding nuances through a bank of fingertip controllers attached to his laptop, it’s an unusual way of working apparently bringing in massive latencies between action and result. The result is a finely detailed set of subtle drones. Set up at the back of the room he started with an almost subsonic bass that pushed around the limits of the Green Door Store’s PA. Slowly the frequency range was increased peaking with some nice distortion before winding down into a church organ finale. It wasn’t as trouser flappingly loud as a less polite person would have made it, but none the worse for that.
Slow Listener has eschewed his plethora of devices, wires and tapes for a single black box of sampler effects and mixer which looked rather incongruous set up at one end of our camping table, so I was a bit worried that we were going to go from one set of digital drones to another. Still the sound seems to reside in the man rather than his kit and this was a classic Slow Listener set. He started stood at the front of the stage orating; repeated semi phrases, verbalised cut ups of nonsensical word strings before getting behind the table to tend his murky art. Some lovely analogue-y sounds merging and warping with reverse gongs and field recordings, before he got into some serious quieter spaces that held near silence with clicks and whirrs, before bringing in a woman’s voice repeating his phrases from the start to bookend the performance. Nice.
Rounding off the evening were SQ, a duo on stage with a visuals artist up in the sound booth playing back oscilloscope transcriptions of the live sound onto the screen. I liked that. Onstage we had a clarinet player who had a laptop processing his sound and another laptop that could also have been processing the same source more interactively. It was very digital sounding, at times the clarinet completely subsumed into the transformations of the kit, at others Paul Spignon getting into full improv mode with chirruping morphs bouncing straight back at him from the laptop, one of the most dynamic interactions of an improviser with laptop processing I’ve seen. My favourite moment came when he had the top off the clarinet and was circular breathing straight into the tube of the instrument his throat and cheeks billowing like some human/bullfrog hybrid gulping strange music from the air around him.
Pale Graphs were originally intending to have visuals and for the soundcheck they did, unfortunately circumstances put paid to anyone other than me, Steve who does the electrocreche and Matt the soundman seeing it (it was good, too). Slightly diminished, Pale Graphs did his actual set single handed bathed only in red and green light rather than the digital goodness. His set more than made up for it though, stepping up a couple of notches: detuned basses, switching beeps and full speed skittering rhythms.
Baby was Will on Flute and guitar joined on this occasion by Adam Bushell on vibes and percussion. Adam had the motor going on the vibes for maximum tremolo space effect, before bowing the end of the blocks to get some eerie sound. Will started on flute before switching to acoustic guitar. There was plenty of space and plenty of listening and subtle interplay between Adam and Wills guitar harmonics. The vibes were surprisingly loud.
TCH played as a duo with Mytrip, an Italian noise artist, Tim starting bluesy flourishes on his acoustic while Angel has some droning tones. Tim switches round to electric guitar generating some noise and building towards a monster doom drone through a shedload of effects before biting into a wall of harsh noise and letting it hang before switching back to acoustic for the subdued tail. Although they were in the middle of a tour together this was their first actual collaboration and it worked really well.
Nuclear Whale was half hidden behind a keyboard stand (we don’t see many of them do we?), with a couple of small synths on that and a laptop off to the side. He started off nice and early with some chopped vocal drones that evolved into a slowly evolving stately theme, beats building underneath, before moving on in with percussive meeps and bass buzz, moving onto to a relentless grind. The voices come back, to be washed away by a shimmering wash and mid tempo beats, and science fiction sounds detune their way to a climax. It was a nicely constructed set complemented with a fast moving visual collage provided by Boo Cook.
Lorah Pierre and Andrew Jarvis did a good impression of a Health & Safety nightmare, set up on two oil drum tables in the middle of the cobblestone floor. Lorah had strung two bulbs on cables over a pipe overhead and had scattered boxes with lights and light sensitive equipment dotted about. Andrew had a laptop and a Copycat that he de-tracked with a couple of knitting needles playing with the tape, lifting it off heads and playing with the speed. Their set began with a slow throb that seemed to be set off by the glowing light bulbs brightening and dimming, with a static screech of shortwave stammer twittering away in the background. The throbs change nature and detourned to some kind of aeroplane buzz before squalling out into two kinds of harsh noise and falling away to the pulsing lightbulbs again. It went a bit radiophonic before we had some really nice noise interplay between the pair of them, taking apart the sonic spectrum piece by piece until we get TARDIS’d away.
Wrong Signals wrong footed me by avoiding the full radiophonic sounds I associate with him, by starting with a glitchy rhythmic synth pattern that developed a string melody and wax cylinder crackle. This faded into a shifting pad with an insistent warble melody, that gave way to one of the few beats of Toby’s set: densely structured, stereo denatured snares almost washed away by sonar pops and bass bops. After this we really get stuck into some radiophonic frenzy, Raymond Scott-ish repetition, with some crazy playing over the top, before ending on a slow moving piece of sci fi bliss that conjured blade runner cityscapes.