May 2022
The Rossi Bar
It surprised me that we haven’t had more people using mobile devices play at The Spirit of Gravity, around 2010 I was convinced they’d sweep all before them, but they never did, we’ve had a few acts use them as sound sources, but Fizzell brings them centre stage as the major part of his tech, with an outboard processing unit and a little mixer. His set starts with filtered and modulated speech, well I assume speech as it has something of the rhythms and patterns of speech but garbled into pure sound. This ebbs and flows until it’s replaced by a sine bass, rhythmic slab of synth pad, and then a rhythm set by an odd loop of a matchbox drawer being popped, and an odd very 80s sounding bass synth line. He gets working on this building up a warbling rumble in the background. There’s a passage of really nice bell like tones against occasional detuned bass notes. It’s a set that chops from this to that, the next passage is like being clobbered by someone with a typewriter, this section actually builds and develops into something layered, lots of staccato lines warping around each other with a songlike structure and a really good tone bassline, and a really funny breakdown that almost gets clobbered by a fat drone. But when the main lines come back in, there are a couple of other nice indirections like that, too. The last section again seems based around chunks of voice based sound sources, this time filtered down to some pretty strange sounding bass tones.
Second on were The Zero Map, their first show since they played well before lockdown 3 years and 3 days previously…. Karl and Chloe set up behind their tables of stuff, stringed instruments, wind instruments, effects, a Theremin a plethora of stuff. Starting off quietly with muted bass guitar string scrapes and odd sounds played through end of a tunnel reverb, they incrementally build, slowly; sooo slowly: looped long sung exhalations, some odd guitar flourishes, drones, quivers, I don’t know whats. Then about 15 minutes in it really starts to amp up, the bass drones take on a slightly fiercer tone, the guitar is just that bit more distorted, the drones louder adopting a bit more bite. There’s a slicing detuned guitar that circles ominously. Some voice rather than singing, some wailing, the Theremin gets a bit of work. Finally Karl (as he always does) gets right into my tinnitus frequencies and I have to block my ears for a while. It’s getting good and thick now, a soup of sound, like falling through 2001s stargate. A proper bass roar from Chloe, some actual feedback from somewhere. Some squalling synth sound. Bit of Harsh noise Wall to finish. Bang and done.
And finishing us off for the evening was Teignmouth Electron. I’d seen Maureen play at Wrong Music’s National noise Day event as part of Polly Shuan Kang Band who were excellent, and don’t think I’d seen her since. Maureen had twin cassette players and effects and a few small objects on her table, she stood behind it robed with her hands wide in benediction. “Without freedom of choice there is no creativity” the voice slips backwards at once point then slips away altogether overtaken by a gurgling toney burble. I can make out voices, but not the words. Resonant tunnels seem to spirit the meanings away. Some stately musical parts push through the murk, barely audible, over lowly clanking machines or whistling factories. There’s a nice little riff on that distinctive Casio organ sound. The voices on the cassette cajole and berate inconsonantly, indecipherably; tube trains come and go behind the walls. There are long passages of unfolding, evolving sounds, star trek fx, passages of loops; repetition. There are uncertain pitch controls, pinch wheels seem oval warbling the recordings. A super slow William Burroughs intones against a return of the Casio part. The Casio is replaced by a new synth part, higher penetrating constantly rising against a plethora of women’s voices, conversational looped and frrrp rewound. Frrrp rewound. Frrrrrrrrrp rewound. A murky guitar riff peeks through and disappears behind some proselytising. How nice. Everything drops down to a single woman’s voice, conversational that falls into a loop. The plaintive Casio returns along with Bill and a hymn. “you are not adhering to the current…” then a jangle of the small table bell and its done.
Muster start the evening off, Dan on small things processed through MaxMSP and synthesiser, if you’re lucky Tony will publish a picture of the frankly ridiculous patch on the SoGBlog; then there’s James seated on electric guitar, played by a variety of brushes, pins, clips, files and a plethora of other unsuitable things. Also fingers & thumbs, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t see a plectrum. Muster fall at the EAI end of what we put on, quiet, spacious and very much from a free improv place. It starts with chimes and scrapes – a very quiet ring of feedback – silence – a more forceful feedback squall. Electronics warble spookily. Clanking, radio voices passed through the guitar pickups, weird tonal radiophonic patches, squeaks. Dan works methodically around his table of things, shuffling the microphone, James a bit more animated: flipping his guitar flat on his lap to crocodile clip the strings or wedge things under the strings, or bringing it back vertically to fret it more orthodoxly or jam the headstock against the small amp for feedback. There was someone in the audience moved to join in for a while a baritone rumbling unverse, not quite comprehensible. Chime box and pinging guitar combine, an odd sproing and unexpected massive detuning of a guitar string. Dan thickens up his output for the final section, James sets his fingers scurrying and lets rip with a proper squall from the amp, a weaving two tone drone from Dan, counterpointed by thumb piano.
Second on the bill is Zoom Around Rainbow. Sat sideways on at his laptop at the back of the stage, right at the screen. He’s enjoying the PA, tweaking the EQ through the set to maximise his bass happiness from the house PA. Starting with a pretty full on textured jet engine roar that slowly builds up with a rattling high hat an occasional bass drum hit slipping in underneath, a full drum pattern gradually pushing its way through. A strangely hooky double pad stab motif slips into your head almost unnoticed adding a vaguely hysterical tinge to things. The drone differentiates itself into a scrabbling set of counter rhythmic figures, the beats morph heralding the next section. Porky hardcore beeps and the drums give it a bit of a 91 feel. The jet comes back and swamps everything in its mighty reverberant roar. New drums, bass, floor toms, no hi hats, the jet engine now in bursts function as a 4 beat on off bassline, melodic content provided by woodblock. Then a pummelling bass drum batters us to the finish of this section. And suddenly they stop and everything washes away blissfully. A swell of bass washes up, a steady firm beat, train rattle percussion alongside, hard long sounds come and go like slowly walking along the construction site of the Lewes Road during lockdown. Its dense where Muster were sparse, getting ever denser. Ever denser. The grinds fade away and more rhythmic parts unfold giving no real relief. Then everything again gives way, this time to space sounds and distorted voices, a rolling slightly, oddly too short drum pattern. Eventually a detuned two not bassline rocks in derailing the rhythm and taking control. Around it swoop pads and squelches. The density falls away. It ends; we are released.
And finally its Vera Bremerton, we had been speaking before lockdown about her coming down to play for us, and now, eventually here she is. She has vocal mics and some heavy duty processing equipment. Possibly a sound source. She starts low key, an odd looping tone, vocalisations, gentle at first, some passing through the equipment unscathed others catching, repeated back at us, verbatim, some mangled, some delayed unfeasibly. Gurgles and shudders. The occasional horrors. This is going to be hard put not to be just a string of verbs. Her voice swoops, closely tracked by some awful electronic banshee, curling against machine judders and machine tool whirrs. She twists some tightly controlled feedback into an engaged tone whale-song, sets an earth hum against it suddenly releasing swarming robot bees against which she sets up some unearthly gurgling. Space ships flicker by sprinkling shimmering trails. She can really do some alarming things to her voice with this kit, processing it into some alien menagerie, or looping vocalisations into plunger rhythms. The thick rhythmic melange calms down into a 30,000 ft. jumbo jet ambience, with unknowable lyrical melodics and childish song-play, suddenly the plunger is back, then gone into a late 20th century modernist soundtrack, unnerving and edgy. Then cascading tones and the return of the bees, a fairly straight melodic vocal refrain, it feels looped but seems different every iteration. A steam belching factory throb underpins everything now. She sings again, now and again the electronic banshee follows her vocal line. The final section has her vocalising a melodic loop and winding distortions of it around itself, bass notes, harsh trebly runs that gets into some pretty extreme areas before winding back out to something fairly lovely to end. “Remarkable” I think I said at the end.
The first unheralded act of the evening was Ninit / Polysicness, who literally agreed to play 24 hours before he stepped on stage, the first of two COVID stand-ins. A background thrum of cassette distortion seems baked into the start of the set, the sound is thick, warm, enveloping in that nicely saturated manner that iron oxide gives you. Barging their way into this comes a murky rhythm and some drums, the wash of background sound dissolves and the sudden clarity makes your ears pick up. Greg is stopped over afar too low table, it looks painful. He suddenly off and wandering round the audience in the creepy see through mask giving delayed words to us. The music canters off a nice rumbling uneven bassline and rhythmic piano-ish stabs giving way to arpeggiated counterpoint. There is some serious pitch adjustment to lead lines giving things an odd eerie edge. A general mutation as we progress through the set, each part built on one piece from the previous. Rhythms change, drums grow lumpy or staccato, holding back the drive or suddenly lifting us forward. In the middle of the set there’s a pause where everything fleetingly disappears save a child’s voice, just enough to give us a bliss of tension before the release of everything coming back and we’re off again. As we move through the sound gradually thickens back up, the parts get noisier. As we approach the end everything gets louder, more muffled. Slows down. Speeds up. More shouting. Riffs revisit. That tape ambience is back. More bass drum. More reverb.
So finally and the only person who knew he’d be playing 6 weeks – or even a week previously we had Alien Alarms. Starting in a twinkling manner that flowed on quite nicely from Monty’s set, with a vocal sample from what sounded like a documentary on that new-fangled electronic music. The melodic parts float over a sparse bass line, that seems to go missing for bars at a time without losing anything, the drums are constantly evolving, this is where the real movement is, the dynamism. Without straying into Aphex style erraticism, they shift, add dynamics imperceptibly, drive us on. The second track carries on the bassline becoming more constant, dropping into massive long slurred tones at one point. Gradually the tempo shifts upwards, the third track takes the longer bass notes, not so much notes as a bar long pitch bent single note at times. Over this is a queasy 16th detuned string part and something about vegetation. Track four gets all Marxist on us over something approaching super-fast drum and bass drums under super slow everything else, like that old joke about people dancing at 2 speeds at D’n’B raves put into very visible action. The final track has some very nice vocoder action, and continues the speed up, with some proper deranged pitch bent, well everything, basslines, pads, melodic lines all meandering all over the shop, the vocoder itself ending up washing out the voice into almost a complete synthetic wash.
Starting the evening of people playing under their own real names we had Martin Chick. Last time I saw Martin play he was surrounded by a load of bulky kit including an old Korg, this he slimmed down to a Modular synth and another box, the inevitable clutter of wires ensuring it’s not too tidy. Starting with a bass pulse on the 8s with bell on the ones, he blends in some white noise snares, warbling tinnitus pitch tones marshalling in more drums. A bit of random pitching ushers in a more minimal section that ends up feeling like a fence post being replaced after a storm. Slowly, slowly, blocks of bass or noise or stem whistle are folded in and left to drift off. The sound empties out; cuts of drum in and out, beep tone, bass teased back, then again out. Those blocks of pink noise back, flexatone. A steam kettle in another room washes out everything, building to blistering boil and end.
Finally we had R. Dyer to end the night. She started with what I suspect was an unplanned version of “Little Victories” with a new set of recorded good moments, they’re as funny as usual, the song as gloriously melancholy as usual, looped soprano sax lines weaving around each other over a low keyboard drone as Becca sings over the top. There’s a lot of new victories so we have a fairly extended outro involving washing up, Coventry, bells… other things. The second track starts with a strong keyboard bass line, organ notes, chimes, a couple of gently muted sax layers, vocals. Little raindrops is like an afternoon spent in the loft of your childhood home. “Canaries” was next, after a chat about the canary resuscitator, they were only retired in the late 80s. Who knew? It starts with a creepy creaking walking pace keyboard part, with some odd fx and singing from the canary’s perspective, an interlocking set of soprano layers, more singing finishing with the song of a toy canary. Starting with drum machine tambourine, unison soprano, I missed the name of the penultimate song. There is a sax solo in this one that really flies, lifts the spirits. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. For “King Alfred’s Cakes” Becca’s harp became detached from its contact mic, so she performs it acoustically, no electronics(!) but it’s wonderful, so we don’t mind. Voice and harp, do we need more description.
So Dolly Rae Starcore stands in at the last minute for someone laid low by The Rona, for which we are grateful, and happy. Starting with a stroke of the Zither and a massive boom off the mic. Arrayed before her on the table a selection of small percussive objects, two large brass singing bowls, her book and the sheath of papers from which she will read. She reads, pings the Flexatone shakes the shakers and reads, she gently strokes the singing bowl which booms beautifully. One of the singing bowls is a quarter full of water which modulates it when swirled. She reads, pings the percussion. The atmosphere builds, some unaccompanied sections, some densely swirled about. Chimes.
