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.
So we start the evening with Dan Powell with his mic’d up tray of objects, and eschewing his Raspberry Pi for a shiny new laptop for processing. I couldn’t quite see what he was up to a lot of the time, occasionally is hands moving around through gaps between things. Or picking up something to bong on it. Starting with some scrapes and tones, big reverbs that have note-ish resonances, there are some beautiful space wobbles and synthy warbles that come through over the scrapes and chimes. Some seem sourced from clashes or clatters from his small bits and bobs, transformed by his Max MSP patches out into otherworldly oscillations. It all actually feels oddly unhinged, detuned, deranged – but calm, relaxed even. Interestingly not “right” in the best possible way. Ambient but not in that stoner vibe fashion. There are times it reminds me of the electronics in “Outer space with sounds”, primal but not brutish, something from the deepest unconscious of electronics. Properly unnerving. 
Superficially rocking a similar setup to Dan, we had Nil By Nose with a cookie tin, mic’d up mat and small synth in a tiny box, it’s a very different output, fed through with a tonal line of feedback and distortion we come from a much more confined acoustic space. Thicker and more claustrophobic. Looping percussive clacks and ruler thrums, bringing in traffic from the upstairs street. Although it’s not a looper, it’s a very slowly decaying delay. At one point our masked hero bashes and shakes the tin onto the mat bashing out a rhythm that runs for a few bars, then a flurry of conversation, mangled up with intertwining repetitions, the feedback turned into a windy howl. Distorted thumb piano crushes play compression tricks on the whine. It sounds like someone shuffling office furniture.
Rounding off the evening we had The Founders as This Sound Bureaucracy with their not entirely reliable history of the spirit of gravity. Tony running his usual looping set up, nice circular washes with a rhythm of ball bearings falling down a glass staircase – we had Nick slowly letting us know he was going to be verbalising this evening. He started the set taping a slogan onto the front of the box/table Tony’s kit was set up on, there’s a shift in rhythm and Nick starts his historical tale. This probably the best sound I’ve heard from tony, its driving, Nick sync’d up, pauses working right, changes right in place. My introduction got a nice distorted launch. As Nick gets properly into the Free Butt years, Tony winds down the rhythms and transmutes into a staggering noise pulse “we were fields, all fields” getting its usual appreciative reception. Tony gears everything back up, only thicker and noisier. Sirens. “Stand aside Nietzsche”. Then as a bonus, we get “The Manifesto Of Experiential Music”, proclaimed over laser jabs, raucous trills, noise bolts and general horrible noises. I’ve never managed to work out if Rilke was taking the piss with this manifesto, its accurate to the point of mockery. Tony finishes off the evening with a turgid, lumbering, detuned rollicking rhythm of noise and destruction. While Nick finishes off his tapework in the inevitable fashion.
Back to a full strength roster tonight, and we got off to a good start with a set from Barn, with a laptop and controller plus some bits and pieces, his set seems to be in five sections, with a foil. The first reminds me somewhat of my airboat ride from last month, a nice gritty sound, but his properly generated. This breaks into pulses and thence into something that has washes of almost sea like noise, before the final section leads onto a cascade of electronic tones.
Quinta is accompanied by two other keyboard players, who also double up on saw and stylophone and laptop. This as you can imagine pushes the limits of the Caroline’s setup pretty effectively. They start with an unaccompanied vocal piece about Boudicca, before moving into a song with some Nyman-esque very rhythmic interlocking piano parts all three of them intricately locked . They then get stuck into the peripheral kit for an uncanny waltz before coming back to, I was going to say orthodox, but perhaps a more finely structured piece of tightly knuckled piano. A really good mix of modernist composition and sub five minutes pop song lengths.
Rick is down in Brighton for his first solo set as The Oneirologist, which is (I think) a live soundtrack project. The film is called something about moths and has two lights (from a boat, maybe) to which he makes some quiet noise or drones – its too fierce for a drone, but too quiet for noise – so work that out yourself. Strongly textured tones, and resonant knocks from séance next door. Overall, unsettling, I think.
And to round the evening off, Dan Powell plays his final collaboration of the series, this one with minimal impact. it was supposed to be acoustic, so he has his Bontempi reed organ mic’d up to a fuzzbox and delay, Steve minimal impact has his plastic harmonium from India, through a new Space Echo pedal he found somewhere and is rightly very pleased with. I found some old visuals by Karl so turn the projector round to play them over the duo while they hum and drone pleasingly.