A tribute from Geoff Cheesemaster

I met Steve about 40 years ago in 1980 or 81 while we were both studying physics at Chelsea College, on the Kings Road. We bonded over underground music and soon were living in a shared space and making music. Steve was guitarist at that time, he already had a tape label (Shitola tapes) that had been listed in “The Discography of The New Wave” and was already making lo-fi experiments in guitar music, but alongside the house band (literally everyone in the house at some point), we started experimenting with tape loops, radio interference, numbers stations and such like, but the most interesting areas for us was working with multiple layers of distortion and volume where the layering of harmonics produces ghost voices and EVP effects.

At some stage we formed a 2 piece called The 15th Screen and by 1989 we were trying to fuse our interests in house music, guitar noise and country and western into what we called “Acid Rock”, blending a 606, 2 guitars, a rack of fuzz pedals and cheap effects with brutal singing into something that still sounds like nothing else. That culminated with a session produced by Edgar Broughton, and then we broke up before we could do anything with it.

Alongside this we’d already begun experimenting with electronics, having acquired an SH101 and a couple of Casio keyboards. We set up a studio in our flat and got to work, Steve started an ambient project called Steve’s Boutique and also started working with an old friend, Paul Greendale, on what was to become Ionman. We’d already started a label Beast Baseball records by this time and used this to release a number of singles by Ionman.

By the mid 90s Beast Baseball had folded, I moved to Brighton and Steve moved to a house in the shadow of Leeds prison, where working on his own for the first time he combined all his interests under a single moniker, minimal impact. This was to be his life’s work.

The first cassette he recorded was a revelation. Extreme repetition, vast levels of distortion, brutal noise: I’d never heard anything like it at that time, at one level it seemed to come out of the blue, but equally it was the perfect distillation of all our previous experimentation.

After a year in Leeds Steve married a woman from Brighton and moved back south. I was working with one of the founders of The Spirit of Gravity and naturally enough it was with Steve that I went along to the second night. Malevich played, Waxed Apple too, but I’m not sure of the third act but Henry Collins was playing records at the end of the night. We loved it, and I introduced Steve to Tony and they booked in minimal impact shortly after.

It’s hard to describe the influence Steve had on SoG overall, but his unconventional outlook on structure, his dedication to seeing out his ideas for performance to the limit, his love of noise impacted us all in different ways. Henry Collins described him as the noisiest fuck I know. Lee gave him a Rashamon track to remix and got back something intangibly different, “it’s just louder and noisier, but I can’t see how”. It was live that minimal impact really worked best. The sheer visceral thrill of mindwiping volume was one thing, the humour in trying to get every different part of the room vibrating as he did at the SoG takeover of Wrong Music at The Volks was another key part. Watching people dancing to the delirious mind numbing drones was just gravy.

His last set or work was a ten part piece that I’m not sure he completed, where he had an initial piece that was performed live, then each of the following performances was to be based on the previous one, more density, more layers, more feedback.

Steve stopped making music in the late 2010s after falling ill.

Next steps:

Youtube clip of his Video and audio feedback set at The Dome for the Earsthetic event
minimal impact, SoG @ The Dome December 2013
Live at The Rose Hill on Youtube
minimal impact live at The Spirit of Gravity July 2017

Recordings

Steve’s last album for The Spirit of Gravity (part of the 10 pieces project)
6 | minimal impact | Spirit of Gravity
His track from our second compilation.
Diseased | Minimal Impact | Spirit of Gravity
The Spirit of Gravity tribute compilation
minimal effort | Spirit of Gravity

Earlier music:

15th Screen
The 15th Screen – the beast with 2 heads
The 15th Screen – Bill Syke’s Dog
Ionman
Ionman – Wall of Ringo
Ionman – Sky Blue