SOG-BLOG – Page 34 – Spirit of Gravity

Category: SOG-BLOG

the colours flow through me

Posted on July 6, 2007 by admin

Following from last months show, where we had _minimal vector provide up to the minute processed images, we went back to old school slide projectors and incense for what was billed as an evening of twenty first century psychedelia.
The first shot is what we saw (we had projectors on stage, couldn’t get quite enough smoke up for full effect due to the high level of electric fan action going on).

J’m Black played a set with his new loop setup, which seemed to include some breaks and beats that were quite unexpected. An excellent set of improvised pieces, which included some amazing space guitar and a terrific bit of Jazz/Space call and response guitar, with the response seeming to come from the other side of time.

J’mBlack-TakeTheFifth.mp3

The Birds of Death Valley were a duo, and it’s hard to find fault with an act that start their set with a Theremin, so I won’t. A space electronica dub tribute to Sun Ra with robes and shades, the Theremin I’ve mentioned and cornet. And Planet earth in her glory full screen behind.

The Birds of Death Valley-orbital_point.mp3

And to round the evening off ElMaes, a five piece, played “5” in a long version, sitar (Hot Roddy/Same Actor) and tablas, electronics and voices (more voices in fact than there seemed to be people talking). Incense and swirly lights I’ve also mentioned. Didn’t I?

elmaes300=(5+5over5)x50.mp3

Berlin Beat Club

Posted on June 15, 2007 by admin

Bugger London: the visuals by _minimalVector have added a vital piece to the Spirit of Gravity Jigsaw. Check out the picture of Harmonium A Hash Tables above.
Stare at it intently while listening to this piece of aquatic foolery.
Harmonium A Hash Table – Whaleslide
If you only know Steve from his minimal impact work, this may be a shock (Rhythm! Bass! Percussion!). So brace yourselves for a pleasant time.

Terror Wogan returned to The Spirit of Gravity for the first time in ages. Looking a bit better and with meaty chanteuse Sirloin Dion in tow for a feast of Ragga breaks, bent toys and 4o year old effects units. Nice.
Terror Wogan vs Sirloin Dion – Peak to beat

Unfortunately Faoi couldn’t make it.

So in the tradition of the earliest Spirit of Gravity nights, we finished with an improvised collaboration between minimal impact, Terror Wogan and Sirloin Dion. The recording is confused and confusing, droneful and giggly, Steve described the set to me as “Comedy Dronecore” and that seems fair enough.
minimal impact vs Terror Wogan and Sirloin Dion – duppy stalks norn village – seeks origins of sound

Again you can see a little of the visuals in this picture.

Bells

Posted on May 14, 2007 by admin

We have a new host, tying things together and making up for the fact Rashamon is on holiday, electronica superstar and funnyman Lee Hume.

If you really want I’ll put some of his introductions up, just so he gets a soundfile too.

Dan Powell started the evening with a set of electro-acoustic improvisations and new sound processing software. It was mad, like a kids toy train stealing a 1950’s computer.
here’s a track called Bells.
dan_powell-bells.mp3

Following dan was Made out of wool, an act with a special place in the heart of the Spirit of Gravity. After blasting us with a solo set as yellow not yellow at SoG@Wrong, this collaborative set between Jason and Nikki, was a much more subtle beast. The mp3 starts from the point I started hallucinating. Its a track called Bells.
made_out_of_wood-bells.mp3

They said it couldn’t be done. “The Gross Consumer playing at Spirit of Gravity – you’re having a laugh, it’ll never work”.
So proving two things, the broad tastes of The Spirit of Gravity, and the broader musical reaches of The Gross Consumer, we proved them wrong. We love it. Heres a track called Bells.

the_gross_consumer-bells.mp3

And thanks to steve at minimal impact we have a (large) download of the whole of The Gross Consumer set, including feeble attempts at justifying his actions in light of what was on the flyer (that is, it has all the banter).

Ghosts and Aliens

Posted on March 30, 2007 by admin

I’ve been told some people are having problems getting the files to play, if you are, try saving them to your machine and playing them from there.

We have a new camera, and a new Minidisk Recorder, so its all gone a bit art this week. The full size picture of Gus in particular is a rare treat, scary powerful stuff.

Gus plays Bass

Thor and Dan process it – a set of results are here.

minimal impact also process Gus and some of their results are here.

Chevron give us a break from strings and plays a silver keyboard, this should have been the first outing for Chevvers new laptop, instead it was (hopefully) the last outing for the old one, poor broken thing, I’ve never seen a laptop struggle so manfully.

Bela played her Cello and this her new Viol, we were hoping to have a lovely clear shot of it, its quite lovely to look at, oh well.

Bela also played the Saw, and sang, the saw isn’t on our recording as we didn’t mic it up, but as she was processing her voice we did capture that.

Outside the space-age

Posted on March 2, 2007 by admin

A busy night at the marlborough Theatre, starting off with a brief but entertaining burst of unpoesy analogue improv from that fake bureacracy. The picture has Notnick Rilke reclining and Untony’s rather nice van’s just visible from behind the table.

this_fake_bureaucracy-miro_face.mp3
Is their entire set.

Komuso Buddha machines had another special one off performance for us. This time a piece for six Buddha machines and two Zoundz. The Buddha machines were distributed amongst members of the audience who had complete control of them and there was one Zoundz machine onstage with FX and one Zoundz in the audience. Overall a very inetersting experience in 3d sound. Here rendered in Mono simulated stereo.

komuso_buddha_machines-zoundz.mp3

Hot Roddy Bingo. Really needs no description. But that won’t stop me. Brief bursts of Hot Roddy songs, including live sitar. In random order, with bingo numbers called. The winner was Mr Gillitt of Roundhill Crescent who won the ingredients to make pancakes (it was shrove Tuesday after all).

Hot_Roddy_Bingo.mp3

KEYKEEPER+TEMPOS, Henry made an introductory speech about the nature of experimental music making and its current state. Then with some new software tweaked to strangeness, a toy guitar and some household appliances he sang a few songs There is a point on the recording where you can hear someone say “It’s like Danny and the Dressmakers crossed with The Butthole Surfers in a washing machine…In space”
And thats a fair enough set of pointers if you know any of them concerend. For the rest of you its Outsider electro-noise art.

KEYKEEPER+TEMPOS_aubergine.mp3

January Songs and things

Posted on February 13, 2007 by admin

Rashamon and the ghost. i suspect its possible to construct a history of the world from the live versions of !Mates to Some Pilgrim”. But I’m not going to help you to do it by posting the great version from this show.
Instead here is Lees remix of The Uneven Dots song “Assembling at Dusk“.
He likes it so much he plays it out even if it is ‘unfinished’.

Komon gets too songs on the blog, mostly cos we loved Antonia’s cover of “Velocity Girl” so much, and it is so short we had to include one of her own songs too – “Take it as a compliment“. And because we loved that one, too.

And as for choosing one of Twocsinak’s songs, very tricky, too. And then there is the problem of what the name of the song actually may be. So we emailed Joe….

‘ (it) is one of a trilogy of songs, going under the umbrella title “Three submissions for Readers Digest”; it is the third section, entitled “Poetry for the elderly” or possibly “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Eliot)”. If it were to have an individual title, therefore, it would be “Three submissions for Readers Digest – iii) Poetry for the elderly: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (T.S. Eliot)”. But that’s a bit long; also, I tend to give live recordings different names to the actual recorded version. In which case, could you call it “An anagram of toilets, accidentally started an octave too low (live submission)”? ‘

Um, I don’t think I did call it that in the end, cos I couldn’t be bothered turning the spaces into underscores.
twocsinak-3 submissions for readers digest pt III.

That’s all, next month something very different.