Category: SOG-BLOG

They’re redeveloping my waste ground

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

April 2023
The Rossi Bar

Starting with Andrew Greaves & Dan Powell onstage set up facing each other for a run through of the new piece they composed while on residency at The Rose Hill. Dan with his tray of small objects, his laptop and a new tray pf glasses from the location, Andrew with his usual mix of serious synths and trusty Casio. They start with Dan’s glass armonica warblings played against synthesiser drones from Andrew, some gentle clatter and bell chime mutated by MaxMSP and proper bass rumblings. Emergent is a slow haunting, detuning melody first on a synth, then the Casio organ, the clinking falls away and a bassline is revealed, Dan filtering in some subtle scraping of bow on glass. As the melody ebbs away we get some radiophonic beeps and arpeggios blending in, if the first piece felt like Dan, and the second Andrew, this is a nice meld of the two. Andrews repeated organ figures with Dan’s sinuous drones piercing snakelike in between, until overwhelming with a fat bass-y wash, phased in with wind FX and Andrew providing the drone. Plane, car or sea recordings, glass pub clatter, rattle and chime ruler thrum on table. Spacious churn of a bit of a rummage through what’s on the table, roll of saucer, shortwave whistle. Some speech, sounds like my friend Ursula. The organ riffs are back wedded with odd noises and washes again.

Next it was You&th, Maria and violin, field recordings, LoopStation and effects. Starting with a looped bass violin figure playing off against seagulls, Maria winds a melancholic line over it, something about it takes me back to my youth and the sound of the one legged violin player every Saturday playing under the railway bridge at Earlsfield station. Next up is a song called rainbow, I think, a drone underpinning this one, the lead line sliding between notes, I can hear the traffic along the main road behind the man’s back. The melodic line changes slightly; sawing, insistent. The traffic thrumming as it passes. Weird delays spiral off. The third song starts with an aching melodic line, solo, I think this is one of the songs Maria learnt from her Neapolitan father, at the end of the verse a little pizzicato phrase and we can hear the streets again.  Maria sings, birds chirrup, she has some odd double tracking on her voice. There is rain, loud on sheet metal, wind provides bass. It’s beautiful. The violin is back. I can feel the trains riding overhead as I hold my mother’s hand and can vividly see the man’s empty left trouser leg neatly pinned up, the arm holding the violin jammed firmly against the crutch holding him up. It’s amazing the unexpected images great music can conjure. That’s something I haven’t recalled in a very long time. Beautiful set. I wanted to write more but every time I try I’m lost in time.

Finally, it’s a newcomer to The Spirit of Gravity, Pylon&on&on coming to us via our friends at Electronic Music Open Mic. He’s launching a CD. He starts with a continuation of the melancholic lines from Maria’s set, slowly lifting them with some shimmering, shifting pads, everything seems to ebb and flow. An enormous, massive bass block swings slowly in, the pads fade to birdsong. Boom its back slower than plodding, birdsong; BOOM; harmonium; BOOM, occasionally something like a snare. Rattling, a bassline, slow – but double speed of that boom – and an organ part comes in. It’s as if he’s channelling the evening to date into the first few minutes of his set. We get what seems like a breakdown to a detuned synth phrase, bass tomes and mutating buzzing synths swarm around it. We get a distorted bass drum salvo, it almost has the sense of a pattern that’s constantly just beyond comprehension. Some voice then its back again almost breakcore in intensity, then something that’s definitely a drum pattern boots its way in boom clack rattle, some repetition – I can tell, then developing quickly into stop start distraction. There’s a voice, like clipping. rhythmic then nothing, a wash of gentle white noise, a hint of siren, filters, a slow half a bar of recurring beat. The other half filled with typing, the bass drum slowly consuming the whole bar with its insistence then  four to the floor in it comes, bosh, siren flailing. There is some shuffling (the horror) amongst the audience. Arpeggio, breakdown, filtered noise. Clanking and we’re into the next track, half a vocal phrase rhythm against a double beat bass drum in another building and untuned synths. A bubbling line slinks up under everything, then to end it veers off into some grime bass fatness that suddenly shoots off into breakcore crazed beats for the finale.



Endless travelator

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

March 2023
The Rossi Bar

Will a member of management please go to the security panel.

A boom arm full of loops of quarter inch tape hangs obscuring our view of Ascsoms as he sits at his tape player and effects. He introduces the pieces tonight as being from a work in progress called “A state of emergency”, a homage to klaxons, alarms and such. And it’s full on radiophonics, a lovely cascade of beeps and whirrs spills out of the PA, occasional tonal swirls, that are eventually swallowed up by a quiet repeating rasp. A fuzzy ill-defined drone hovers away in the background as the swirls occasionally continue and a Tuxedomoon shimmer whooshes through. A buzzing fly eventually realises itself as a thinned-out air raid alarm, pocket calculator tones away. Adam occasionally gets up to refresh the tape he’s using as a sound source. The tones vary, there’s a descending run that ends in bassy delay feedback. A circular saw seems to have defined pitch, everything slurs. One tape seems to have oud playing on, that he picks notes of particular frequencies to highlight that give us a rhythmic patter. Car horns unobtrusively provide a honking beat. A laser battle breaks out in the quietest traffic jam in the world. Stereo sonar pings!  It’s all surprisingly warm & emotional.

Jo Thomas is sat behind a Chapman stick laid out horizontally on the table in front of her. She plays with by hammering on to the strings, her hand like a piano player’s; reaching for the widest chord, she has some field recordings which come in under her sparse bass lines. Rhythmic leaf crunch, gives way to something ill-definably thumpier. I think of the Chapman stick as being a bass, but she gets some nice high notes out of it, including some nicely sustained feedback, which she distorts into a penetrating grind. Jo is also not immune to a little radiophonic warble here and there. Starting subtly then amping it up to overwhelm the field recordings. All the time making runs & rumblings on the stick. She runs for a while on a really nice abstract loop given rhythm by repetition, its quiet with a few notes, rumbles and whistles. We have walking / raindrops / knocking giving a counter beat, then a sudden rush of sub bass and take off rumble evolving into wind-tunnel  roar and improv rattle. Everything drops away leaving the sub-bass to loop away with sparse chords layered over.

Simon James rounds off the evening with his famous Buchla synth, once again the synth set up facing the audience and he sits with his back to us – we can see him working away: patching; adjusting, tweaking. He has programmed up a lot of sounds from his neighbourhood in Shoreham, the harbour, the beach, the wind, the occasional chime. The wind gradually becomes tuned and effected, a drone underpinning it. It drops away to the wind again, lock sirens, the distant warehouses. Distant foghorns boom gently, as we enter a factory, metal is dropped and lifts hum. We enter a world of water, waves against a wall, and Simon in his car talking about the wind of the sea buffeting his car. Lorries running past the bass off their exhaust enhanced by the Rossi bar’s PA. The final section starts with what sounds like a small wind turbine judging by the pitch, tuned up and down and briefly sawtoothed, ghosted with delay and some more proper bass and it suddenly stops to general laughter before recommencing back in the watery pool. Sirens woop and a ship engine throbs and vibrates past


Nocturnal Lee

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

Febrary 2023
The Rossi Bar

The first act of the evening is Alien Alarms, he’s set up with his launch-pad angled towards us so we can get some idea of what’s going on, and it’s really interesting you can get a much better feel of the way Jim is interacting with the rhythm tracks when you can see what’s going on, beats starting, chopping, and he seems to be really going to town with it for us, stammering the vocal parts and really getting into messing with the beats. The first track is quite slow, tooth rattling sub-sonics and eerie synth, someone deep voiced talking about the wheel of life, the beat almost stalling. The second uses Sun Tzu read by a woman, guitar parts by his son, and singing by Jim. There is an early 2000s nu jazz feel to the top layer undermined by the intricacy of the beat and the dubbing fx. The third is “Less of almost Everything” off the album, again Jim sings, it seems slow, the bass is vast. The fourth track is his track for the upcoming Spirit of Gravity compilation, its starts ponderously, pianos come in, the beat stops and starts becoming more energised each time, the bass turns to a buzzing drone and the beats get almost up to DnB levels underneath. No hi-hats to make it take flight, big piano chords break it up. The vocal samples speed up and it ends on a lovely piano figure. The Aphex Twin cover he dedicates to Lou, it’s even more frenetic than usual as he gets right into the beats and doesn’t have vocals to distract himself with. It ends up with him chopping up the melodic line as well as the rhythm. The final track is the last one he did before getting into his AI work, strings, breaks, bass: a kind of frenzied tribute to Shut Up And Dance, in my mind at least.

Following up closely behind we have Hannya White for her Spirit of Gravity debut, she got in touch with us by sending a track for the radio show, which we loved, so invited her down to play. It starts with breath and a mono-tonal, metronomic bass. She murmurs dogs bark. Bits of the room vibrate. Unexpectedly a flurry of drums breaks in and disappears, this becomes predominant. The dog may now be a piano. I can hear her words more clearly. They layer, the drums are constant. The second track starts with drums. Not what you’d call a rhythm, not at first, a very 80s sounding bass synth, the drums like a double time grime pattern. Something erratic is happening over the solidifying drums. The third starts Star Trek-like, a hammering bass drum confuses us and the filters take away the melody, she talks, pizzicato strings, bowed strings. Fire. The fourth starts with slurred strings and earthquakes. Spaceships, vocal drones. Atonal strings and held breaths. The next starts with an organ sound: bass-y rhythms with stabs laid around them, that falls apart to pin point piano and voice, jazzy cymbal, bits of that organ. The sixth steps everything back up with a fat bass-y pulse, rattle-y drums, kettle whistle, woodblock syncopation and voice. Scary sounds come in from the cars in the woods. The bass falls away and all gets proper creepy and we run away. We finish with possibly “Hauling it down to Mexico” which was our choice. A creaking bassline, screams, Bernard Herriman strings, highway running drums. The whole set is a soundtrack of deranged wonder, shifting, powerful & slightly terrifying.

We finish with the return of Rashamon, for his first set at a regular Spirit of Gravity show for around 10 years. Lee starts with a gated shifting synth, big drones underneath, some of his trademark use of film dialogue intact, then off into song-land a repeated intricate synth figure, some Vangelis string synth, before a big bass kicks in. There are some heart-melting melodic lines before the drums roll in. There’s a classic breakdown and everything returns, a bit darker ; a bit more intense than the first time around. The second breakdown is all bass and weird detuned sounds floating around. When everything comes back the intensity is again ramped up, the melodic line subsumed under the newer tonalities. This segues straight into a lighter arpeggiating line, the weird noises tailing slowly off into piano lines and returning first as radio interference then as rhythm. The third track starts with a skipping bass drum and snare pattern with vocal sample, before a monstrous buzzing hardcore bassline comes in. it drops again, leaving just an echoed stab over the drums before returning in a much more subdued form with a melodic line over it; everything locked together, everything rolling. I stop making notes and just nod my head…. The next starts with a piano vamp under-tracked by Trek bridge noises and a high two note motif that gives it just enough melodic structure. Another piano part comes in and the two notes expand out into a full line. There are reverbed drums, unobtrusive; some dialogue I’m not sure is from the room or the speakers. The final track starts by layering up some heavily indistinct drums over that, it keeps the two notes, a swirl of arpeggios twist away underneath, nagging at the shape of the piece, synth-y drones float in, the drums fade away and we’re left with the sequences and bridge noises. Sublime.


I don’t think it’s a sawtooth

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

January 2023
The Rossi Bar

The first show of the year, its cold, the room is full. Onstage is Iplu returning after a year and a day. He presses play and wanders off into the crowd. A drum and bassy break a descending bass, slowly picks up while we find out about Haribo, pies and non-UK brewed beers from the audience. The melody is nicely detuned and tremelo’d.  By the time he’s finished and returned to the stage, the track is winding down. The second track starts with a 4 to the floor and shiny pad that shifts around, nicely before and old style house pause and off into a slightly more melancholic melodic line. The third starts with a skippy beat with a tasty ping and pitch bending mid line.  Another one of them pauses and the rhythm just churns up into something thicker and much tastier. And eventually we get the extremes and proper (sub) bass line against top end piano. Another change to half tempo. The next song starts with someone telling a story about being an asshole in a car against a really minimal backing, no beats, slow space piano. Next track starts with a flexatone, not a physical one, through many effects and plenty of odd noises. Creepy. Gradually everything is just effected into a mush from which you can faintly hear the sounds of the descent to hell. An organ drone, no two, slightly different organ drones. A deep bass line, a squelchy top line, “excuse me”, murky rhythms. The top line goes down to again a slightly melancholic lo-fi whistle sound.  “Feeling Quirky!” a dirty bass, the dirtiest of the year to date, suddenly its tempo halves and Arthur starts talking over it. “I sit in a café listening to Strawberry Switchblade pretending if the weather’s this shit I’m in Glasgow in the 80s”.

Simon Pyke is next up with his first live performance in 12 years. Not that you could tell, he’d obviously been biding his time. It starts with a 4 note granulated riff, several interleaving kinds of drone, a stuttering piano part on several pianos in different ranges, then filtering nicely away into a slightly simpler riff then a drone that modulates straight up high to a lead melodic line. At the same time a slow, slow bass part creeps in and one of the subdued piano parts comes back in. the melodic line is all over the place tonally constantly modulating timbre and pitch. Now we have a Harmonium line. The final nautical part looped and then chopped. A one note piano on the 8s clears the decks and we hear water. The harmonium comes back with a new, higher line. Almost a concertina. Then again more in the middle. A swirl of many organs, church-ish, flurry around us before settling into a pulsating fat, interlayered pad. Slowly it morphs into an organ arpeggio with a big melodic line, the high notes counterpointing the rhythm. The harmonium is back again. It thins out to a paper fine flutey tremble for quite a while before a simple harmonium figure comes in, then repeats with interesting effects applied before disappearing into some kind of rising motif. A melodic line comes in and everything around it detunes away from it, and it drops done into a fat bassy drone. The harmonium again, pumping against big doomy chords that slur into southern gothic songs before bouncing back as a rhythmic counterpoint to the pumping rhythm that’s still feeding in the background. The next passage starts with what sounds like the dulcimer tones taut snare played with knitting needles, this is enveloped in a massive space reverb, to be subsumed into the sound of crumpling paper and piercing whistles. It ends with each slow note detuning into a an endless pitch drop.

Finally to finish off the first show of the New Year, we have Automouse, Kate Reed in overalls with her head in a box with the single vast blinking eye. The introduction is underpinned by a hammering bass drum and a lo-fi bell riff, snares start to alternate with the bass drum; a bar of each, then a bass, I can’t describe it – deep but with that weird cadence so you could hear it on a phone,  its all dirty and noisy, getting more distorted as the tension rises, then suddenly the noise falls away and it sounds ominous, about to break into something still getting tenser. Then it all falls apart into the next track, slower, a big flapping buzzing bass following the four to the floor, some very nasty noises puncturing the rhythm, it breaks down to gunshot snare and a BitCrusher melody. Not melody; top line, and something broken crunching around in there. The snare and bass drum do that alternating thing again. And then a breakbeat and a horrible murky detuned brass riff like I’m standing outside a Wrong Music night down at the Volks in the late 2000s. Everything falls apart around a rearrangement of the break beat then a buzzing bass brings a break played on a old tobacco tin,  and the filthiest bassline yet flattens everything around it, filling every space in the Rossi Bar with its heavy breath. This one appears to have 3 separate basslines playing at once, then it all gets barged aside by a monster clean loud 4 bar drum riff underpinned by a 2 note bassline topped off by some tasty feedback. We get some mid- range rhythmic stabs interlocked with a white noise percussion part that syncopates like a fever dream JAZZ THING. And we get a breakdown the relief is tangible respite, our delirious minds can rest before the hoover starts to berate us. And back into a slow breakbeat and rumbling bass drone. A squeaking gate counterpoint to the rhythm comes in that seems on the verge of modulating into a melodic line as the drums drop out. And eventually the drums dismember themselves into a 4 note bassline. Again noise, clattering, feedback tonal dropping into great squalls and again the BitCrusher playing a half tune. The drums are almost lost in distortion and general racket, but can be felt. Then everything empties out to a groove, soon to be overlaid by noises that sound sourced in age old cassettes of street vendors cries from the 50s. Then we get into a more insistent rhythm track with 4 bit bowed bell scrapes around it. Roaring bass parts, feeding back delays, doubled up snares, the sounds of short circuit sparks and shocks. Everything becomes part of the beat. At some stage around here Kate goes walkabout into the dancing audience (yes, I know – again!) It ends and I’m laughing maniacally.

What another great night.