June 2014
Haz ‘n’ Daz
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
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.
Sarah Angliss
“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.
Starting the evening off with an epic hour long set, Anormals, GotoR the guitarist sidekick from Asem along with Boris Nasa his spar from the old country, got to work to cover all the old ground of their history: techno sparseness, pounding kicks, grinding metal riffs, delicate guitar arpeggios, vocal samples, primary coloured bunny visuals and lush forests. At some point I was in the bar and the fire alarm went off (dust in the detector, it seems), no-one win the main room noticed – it was that kind of set, and I don’t think anybody was about to stand outside.
Making their Brighton début we had Mechanical Elephant, recently moved from Canterbury. Live drums and vocals; both processed and played straight. Starting with fairly straight drums and electronica as the set progresses everything became mutated, the drums more processed and less straightforward, the singing more elliptical the electronic voices more alarming and everything stranger and more spooky. Excellent and nowhere near long enough.
Completing the evening Shabash was down from Russia via London with her violin and pedals. No visuals, just a plain white light and in she goes, a drone into the pedals and a build and a melody and a paring down and a plucked sequence looped and a different drone and another melody and a breakdown… It sounds easy and familiar in bald text but intricate and alluring in the presence. A proper journey in a set and again – Far Too Short. I do love feeling that more is required really, but trains have to be caught and it’s damn well raining again.
Minimal impact came onstage bang on 8:15, seated at a tiny coffee table concealing his kit, a massive video of degraded VHS feedback washing in blue/yellow arcs across the giant screen behind him. Starting with a coarse buzz that thickened out into a full spectrum wall of noise before being slowly washed away in stately swathes of phaser and jets of steam as the buzz reasserts itself as a massive insectoid whirr. A low fidelity immersive experience.
Tony Rimbaud’s hand picked quartet, TR Agency, where second on stage for a commercial break. Ron Caines sat on a chair at the front of the stage, nick stalking behind looping collages, breathy sounds, synthy washes and swirling alto, while nick talks about Stuff. And chewing gum (
Static Memories’ Gus and Dan set up right at the back clearing as much space as possible for Mirei Yazawa to dance. She took up most of the attention of the players and us, lit from a lamp low at the side of the stage, with a pale blue block of ice slowly melting across the background. The music was typically beyond description: scraped bow across double bass, chimes and delays, Mirei twisting in response and driving changes in what they were playing, its all Very abstract. Dancer and musicians interlocked tightly.
Noteherder & McCloud had Bartosz Dylewski who had booked the projector and built the screen supplying visuals, and Chris Parfitt came roaring out in a storm of soprano notes primary geometries sliding around behind him. It took me a while to get up a similar head of steam, but there was some grinding sequences I enjoyed and a section in the middle with me howling through the bitcrusher while Chris circular blew squealing overtones on the sax that still sounds pretty damn intense.
HLCollins starts his set in a rattling trio with Nicholas Langley and Hassni Malik from The Vitamin b12 sat in line at a metal baker’s tray, scraping metal objects of various sizes about. Its theatre and oddly musical, and very funny. After a quick session with Henry up a set of steps banging a mic’d metal bin Nick and Hassni leave the stage and Henry moves onto a didgeridoo coffee machine that spits water but makes amazing sounds, he then moves onto a turntable and some balloons and effects for a comedy improv session that gets slowly creepier with a slurring hum playing back against clicks and bumps and occasional bird call for an ambient music for hell’s ante-room.
