June 2018
Green Door Store

Fallow

Fallow start the evening off, David Reby has a black and white film of deer scans playing behind them, his familiar deer skull illuminated from the inside on a stand at centre stage. Their set starts with heavily reverbed undetermined deer field recordings, some slow guitar notes, slowly dissonant drones creep in, some of those horrible deer vocalisations I promised wallow up among the musical elements as they fall away. Derek is playing keyboards rather than his usual pre-recorded CDJs alongside guitar, and pipes in some stentorian French horn blasts and piano before a templehead beat rolls in. The Intensity of the deer yowls ramps up. When the beats roll back out, we get into a pizzicato that brings us into a lengthy reflective passage before the intensity starts to ramp up with a layered set of hefty drones and we switch into a tritone riff that just builds, then drops and builds again before dropping down to just the bass elements that flatten into a drone that carries the guitar into the ending section.

Organon of the Antivoid

With Zoom Around Rainbow falling foul of a technical hitch at the last minute Organon of the Antivoid stepped in at the last minute with a Youtube mashup. Caleb sits facing the screen, his desktop projected up onto it so we can follow exactly what’s happening. Starting with a TED talk “Are you a good person” adding in tabs and tabs of slowed down YouTube speech, we go a long way before we get to the obvious candidates. In the early stages he adds in some drones – 2 or 3 tabs of it – but apart from that and some tabs of pink and white noise, it’s pretty much all speech and babies crying. However obfuscated. At about 15 minutes he ups the levels, quickly opening a series of tabs as if he’s trying to crash the browser, but it’s obviously a pretty robust setup he has, so eventually he decides to wind it down, closing down the tabs from the latest to the first.

Jobina Tinnemans

So Jobina Tinnemans finishes the evening, with two pieces. As a proper composer she does introduce her pieces in full, the first is based on recordings of voices from the Chamber Choir of South Iceland pretending to be birds that she has trapped inside a number of small jars. It’s a semi improvised piece, with the jars being chosen and Shaken, some Max/MSP processing is definitely going on there, with some of the results sounding remarkably like David’s field recordings. The sound is more spacious than anything else we’ve heard this evening. Supporting the sounds are violin or cello sonorities and synth washes, with a massive foghorn indicating closure is imminent.
She goes straight into her second piece, quickly changing into her swimsuit and hat, this is an aquatic piece it has the bird noises again, but with the drips and reverb of a watery place. Synth sounds give the sense of waves and something impending, before she takes a breath and we’re suddenly underwater – there is no treble, a bass whoomph – exhale and we’re back above. The second time we go under we seem to be in the company of whistling alien cetaceans. The third time they seem to be in a more playful mood, maybe having found a toy piano. The riff they bang out becomes more insistent, bringing steam, noise and musicality along with it. The sense of approaching the surf from underneath.