Tag: Ingrid Plum

A balanced view as summer dawns

June 2025
The Rossi Bar

The evening starts with a banging set from Spheress, he has added a Volca to the minimal setup of TR-08 drum machine and two reverb/delay units. He starts with a feedback loop through the FX which settles down into a noise pulse and then modulates out into bass. A kick on the ones comes in, the bass is modulated, and chaotic hi hats introduced, followed by heavily delayed claps, the bass is driving on, the claps fall over each other in disarray and the kick comes in on the fours and drives the bassline off. The delays bring in an off-beat pulse and the Volca brings a new bassline in. The beat steadies briefly, then falls apart into staccato racket. Stan tweaking away at the TR-08s controls, suddenly the beat is back and driving. We have cascading delays, weird pulses and the bassline falling over each other, then thinning out; back to basics, driving on again. The bassline mutates slightly then a squall of feedback and the Volca is off in a new direction. The feedback returns under strict control and we get a trance breakdown with bass feedback on the offbeat and everything is gone into a squall, the bassline returns slow as you like. A boinging super slow bass drum creeps in. we have noise, delayed snares, a heavily spring reverbed beat like something from mid 80s Public Enemy, the reverb is almost vocoder-ish in its depth. Noises build back in, its pretty groovy in a noisy Cabs-y fashion. The bass drum providing the bass line. Drum FX syncopating away. The Volca gives us a beepy offbeat. Imperceptibly the tempo inches up, the reverb drenched noise swirling away. Someone whistles. Intensity mounts.
The Volca comes in again with a mid range-y stab rhythm, the kick is back on the fours. Delays swirling all about. Feedback pulses on the 8s, hi hats 16s, energy levels are high. He’s working away on the drum machines controls again tweaking, scattering, glitching. The filters go on the Volca.  Some weird loop happens and everything judders. It all drops away to nothing, a slight swirl which is caught then sent back into the FX, feedback then the drum machine gives a floor tom staccato beat, with reverb generated bass and again glitched out drum noises spiralling all around. Everything is in motion against that tom tom pulse. Then that drops away leaving us adrift, the clap steadies us, the bass gets abrupt, suddenly it’s all in place and the toms are back or was it a kick all along – bang! A brief respite, then it’s back to the fours for the finale. Section again the intensity builds over the rock solid beat. And it’s done.


In the middle slot we are really privileged to have Ingrid Plum’s first live show in quite sone time. She starts with an astounding version of “Wayfaring stranger”. She’s set up on a table with a few devices, including a custom circuit board synth. Beginning with full sub-bass drone, she adds in rich crackles and scratches. And then she starts singing pure and clear. A few lines in and a second wobbling bass joins. The juxtaposition of traditional song and 78 crackles & crickets and the electronic tones adds a weird tension increasing the sadness that seems implicit in the song itself. The bass is very intense. After a couple of verses she loops in some humming and gives everything a bit more emotional heft. There are about six layers of vocals cycling under each other and she sets a massive sweep off across the song. The bass drones shift and one ever so slowly aeroplanes off into the stratosphere. Then everything drops apart from a single drone and the vocal loops. A rhythm track of rattling cupboards becomes perceptible, field recordings of voices? Or is it the audience? The bass drones intensify, slowly beating. She returns to the main vocal line “There is no good in me….”  Stark against the drone and rattling shutter. The bass becomes steady then starts pulsing again. a keyboard drone eases in. and a swirl of echoes, ushers in a second set of much higher pitched drones, so we’re pretty full spectrum. Ingrid starts whispering scarily,  ghosting quietly into the microphones. It’s vaguely churchy, but not in a good way. A pointed nasty note fires in, then drops down. The whispering layers up via the looper. I’m scared. The drones start beating against each other all pulsating slightly, the effect increases as more and more notes are added. Then Ingrid starts singing again – long slow “aaaAAAAhhhhHHHHuuuUUUHHHs”. This slowly develops, circling, meandering. Everything becomes steeped in meaning, eventually the whispering falls away, but the drone chord seems to keep building. Then it gently drops away to just the bass note and Ingrids final singing wordless, soulful, forlorn.


And to round off the evening it’s the third visit of Kina: Suttsu and E-Da. Both set up on – or at least near – the floor, so I couldn’t see from the back. They had their usual array of keyboards, percussion, soprano sax, effects and ephemera scattered all around. Also starting off with a drone, but also a whistle and whisp-y synth. A shifty cymbal through delay. It’s all textures. Bass drones filter in, squeaks, some big long reversed cymbal makes everything else drop. A bassy drum booms about. Tabla sounds. Scrapes and squeaks. The delay provides the rhythm, ill defined. Bells bowed and gently ring. There’s an ill-defined presence emerging slowly from the soup. Tape rewind or birds or shakers – just pitched ever so slightly and through shimmering effects. I can hear water, a sine wave, ducks in a flightpath. A sense of trepidation. Heartbeat drums, so slow; b-boom. A build in intensity and the sounds swirl together in a cauldron as Kina unwinds the sax – long notes at first, then odd flurries, the background still ramping up somehow. There is an un-beat of bass-y drum in there. A pattern, but not an obvious one. The drones quieten out, shift and then step up the scales and down, then up. And thicken in a wind tunnel. A bass note. Just one, then the drones fall away, an ending, but E-Da keeps the un rhythm going. Zither flurries flutter away in a loop, a bassline seems to start. Then a new intense set of drones set right off, ramping up in intensity and pitch, E-Das percussion following it. Shakers, sine tone bells, the wind tunnel is back. Star chimes looped infinitely a skronking sax line fierce but subsumed by everything around it. E-Da keeps the framework steady around Kina as she really wails away. I want to start yelling. It’s delirious heady stuff. She gets into some growly low end stuff before getting up into harsher squalls at the top. A big pinging. And somehow it seems to descend into a big bassy synth ball, and a plunging watery hole to end.

Thanks to Jim Purbrick for the photo



A bit intense for this time of year

November 2022
The Rossi Bar

A busy night, starting off with a set by Evey, who runs the Electronic Music Open  Mic nights at The Rose Hill. Starting with a harpsicord arpeggio underpinned by a bassy wash, the harpsicord gets filtered out into something slightly spookier, other noises lurk about underneath, ending with a scream/machine noise that just overrides everything before fading off into reverb. The second track starts with a nicely resonant bassline, something picked and ‘Get Carter’-ish counterpoints this before a sub bass line swings in. Our first hint of drums comes in with a nicely reverbed out snare. The resonant bass is constantly moving, hardening the sound. The third track starts with what sounds like a one note bassline repeated on 3 instruments, that resonant picking sound comes back to pick up the melody line again. A full on churning beat comes in, with a noise drone and the lead line fills out, the noise mutates into a pulsating feedback line. The beat straightens out into a driving simplicity and everything else tumbles along in its wake. The next track starts with a big crushing rhythm, against this an electric piano and the chime work against each other to melodic effect. Lovely. The tempo picks up for the next one, a rhythm track working against the lead line, with a nicely detuned space noise doing odd things over it and a hammering riff building under it. The 6th song is short and spacious, just the chiming lead and some simple percussion. The penultimate track starts with a nice drone, before a intricate rhythm part swirls in under electric piano. The final track has the chime playing A Baion rhythm in a lower register than usual, against this percussion parts grind, a staccato bass drum, almost 80s snare sound, and eventually a 3 note pad riff with some squelching.


Ingrid Plum provides the tasty sound art filling in our beat-y sandwich of an evening, it’s the launch for her new album, “Corporeality” (available via Ryoanji Records) and the first time any of it has been played out live. The first track “Corporeality” starts with field recordings  of rain & birds, thunder, big pinging  drips into a metal bucket, elements of this get picked up into a subdued rhythm track and Ingrid exhales, shells scrape and the singing bowl gently bongs. Ingrid sings, somehow double tracking her voice on parts. The second piece features a special synth built for her, its starts with some pretty tortured breathing from Ingrid, breath in and out looped and rattly, some sampled speech on a slow loop, washes of white noise/drizzle, cassette organ with an almost bass guitar fuzz tone. The tape chirrups, some overtone whistling/singing from Ingrid. The third piece starts with a heartbeat, a gentle bassy drone that ever so slowly modulates, Ingrid breathes, a slow piano part, Ingrid sings. It has a real stillness.  The next song (“Stutter”) starts with a rhythm track of more sharp inhales/exhalations, looped and layered up to complexity. Staccato words “Are. You. You” tremulous vocalisations all churn into the mix. The final song (“The inversion of a shout”) starts with a clear almost crystalline tonal drone, it must be two drones as we can hear it beating against itself, shells again, breaths, what sounds like very distant monks, Ingrid is whispering. Spooky.


And to finish us off, we have Dhangsha back again. He starts with what sounds like a loop off his Monotron delay, but I don’t think he’d brought it, its has that murky, noisy quality to it that’s so appealing. Its chopped up into a more rhythmic part, delay added, twisted. A bass drum, kicks, stammers, and finally gets on that dancehall tip while the Monotron sound finally swirls itself into the ether. Bass comes booming through, almost totally out of the subs, near formless (Aniruddha was enthused by the PA at The Rossi, the way you could really get into the subs). And we hit a noisy groove. Squelching resonances come in, the drums drop, we get filtering, constantly mutating top lines before dropping down to a filthy bass drone, filtered up into noise, then a new bassline. The drums kick in again and we’re off into another groove. Insidious noises join the rhythm and fade away until we’re lost in delay feedback. This eventually seems to form itself into the next track. A bass drum and staccato hi hat bosh on, the kick overdriven to produce a bass tone, dry snare. Delay. Distorted voices. Effects units seem to pick up elements of the rhythm track to warp into new sounds over everything. Everything drops out for the fattest bass of the evening, berrooom, berroom, and back come the drums. This is the least cluttered by noise of his tracks, lean, driving. Until the breakdown, then we get a detuned counterpoint to the rhythm. The hi hats go just leaving us the bass elements, then everything’s back, new voices, tasteful delay feedback. “Insurrection”. The distortion levels increase, we lose the shape of the sounds, and they’re back again. Then finally we lose the rhythm track to several different delay decays and noise. Tasty.




From Heaven to Hell

August 2015
Green Door Store

Kuroneko

Kuroneko Kuroneko were first on, they were due to be augmented by a further player coming down from London, but she was stymied by the Tube strike. Fortunately Ruse23 was on a trip to the old home town so was down here early.

Russ, along with Paul Khimasia Morgan, Adam Lygo and someone I don’t know, step off from HRT’s invocatory setup, although only Adam sports a mask on tonight’s show (Ruse’s is taped to his setup), Paul also has a noise setup, the unknown has a synth and Adam twirls gurgling vocalisations around the room. It’s a tough thing to do well, HRT hedged their bets with black comedy, but playing it straight can be hard to pull off and I think they did. This was pretty scary stuff, you could practically smell the sulphur and see smoke forming in dark corners of the room, Adam’s voice travelling back through time.


Ingrid Plum

Ingrid Plum Ingrid Plum started with her pure voice, reminiscent of her singing in the tunnels at Newhaven Fort last autumn, almost designed to put us off the scent. She also had a cassette player with tones from a recent event playing back through a small (very small) Marshall stack. Almost a toy, but it had two speakers with very different tones and she also used a mic input into it that she used dexterously for tonal feedback. It’s a disarming set that skirts noise and fuses well with her vocal style.


Gagarin

Gagarin Gagarin played a great deal from his new CD, but with the bottom end extended into the depths allowed by the Green Door Store’s Bass bins, and generally toughened up. His visuals were a film of the New Horizons flight to Pluto from the NASA website slowed down to a virtual crawl. The album is a mixture of his field recordings (the Balham garden: birds, trains etc) and scattering rhythms. Not quite the same kind of London sound of his last CD, more like the abstraction of the touch cassette, with more skittering beats, lighter on its feet even with the extra weight of the soundsystem.