Tag: Jo Thomas

Endless travelator

March 2023
The Rossi Bar

Will a member of management please go to the security panel.

A boom arm full of loops of quarter inch tape hangs obscuring our view of Ascsoms as he sits at his tape player and effects. He introduces the pieces tonight as being from a work in progress called “A state of emergency”, a homage to klaxons, alarms and such. And it’s full on radiophonics, a lovely cascade of beeps and whirrs spills out of the PA, occasional tonal swirls, that are eventually swallowed up by a quiet repeating rasp. A fuzzy ill-defined drone hovers away in the background as the swirls occasionally continue and a Tuxedomoon shimmer whooshes through. A buzzing fly eventually realises itself as a thinned-out air raid alarm, pocket calculator tones away. Adam occasionally gets up to refresh the tape he’s using as a sound source. The tones vary, there’s a descending run that ends in bassy delay feedback. A circular saw seems to have defined pitch, everything slurs. One tape seems to have oud playing on, that he picks notes of particular frequencies to highlight that give us a rhythmic patter. Car horns unobtrusively provide a honking beat. A laser battle breaks out in the quietest traffic jam in the world. Stereo sonar pings!  It’s all surprisingly warm & emotional.


Jo Thomas is sat behind a Chapman stick laid out horizontally on the table in front of her. She plays with by hammering on to the strings, her hand like a piano player’s; reaching for the widest chord, she has some field recordings which come in under her sparse bass lines. Rhythmic leaf crunch, gives way to something ill-definably thumpier. I think of the Chapman stick as being a bass, but she gets some nice high notes out of it, including some nicely sustained feedback, which she distorts into a penetrating grind. Jo is also not immune to a little radiophonic warble here and there. Starting subtly then amping it up to overwhelm the field recordings. All the time making runs & rumblings on the stick. She runs for a while on a really nice abstract loop given rhythm by repetition, its quiet with a few notes, rumbles and whistles. We have walking / raindrops / knocking giving a counter beat, then a sudden rush of sub bass and take off rumble evolving into wind-tunnel  roar and improv rattle. Everything drops away leaving the sub-bass to loop away with sparse chords layered over.


Simon James rounds off the evening with his famous Buchla synth, once again the synth set up facing the audience and he sits with his back to us – we can see him working away: patching; adjusting, tweaking. He has programmed up a lot of sounds from his neighbourhood in Shoreham, the harbour, the beach, the wind, the occasional chime. The wind gradually becomes tuned and effected, a drone underpinning it. It drops away to the wind again, lock sirens, the distant warehouses. Distant foghorns boom gently, as we enter a factory, metal is dropped and lifts hum. We enter a world of water, waves against a wall, and Simon in his car talking about the wind of the sea buffeting his car. Lorries running past the bass off their exhaust enhanced by the Rossi bar’s PA. The final section starts with what sounds like a small wind turbine judging by the pitch, tuned up and down and briefly sawtoothed, ghosted with delay and some more proper bass and it suddenly stops to general laughter before recommencing back in the watery pool. Sirens woop and a ship engine throbs and vibrates past



It’s supposed to go the other way!

February 2018
Green Door Store

LeCabLe

LeCabLe

So LeCabLe are set up at the back, they have a long trestle table full to overflowing with gear, a couple of synthesisers, a pedal steel, big old cassette player 4 track thing, pedal steel guitar and more delay pedals than you can shake several sticks at. So Daniel Dickel gets us started with a slow Carpenter synth booming across the room while Paul does indeed get to shake his sticks at the steel guitar. After this unfolds for a while we get another sequence stepping a bit more lightly across the room while Paul layers thin ambiences through it, the occasional thunder roll, or thin digital squeal, or one of the delays bounces something around. The cassette slowly washes this out while Paul works on some more improvvy sounding clicks and scrapes and the synths get muddled up in there, sloshing and whishing about. They end up on some fast detuned bubbling sequence that reminds me of that track on Dark Side of the Moon, with some voices and that’s it.


Blister Pack

Blister Pack

Blister Pack are reduced to a two piece as drummer Graham has cracked some ribs, so in front of a slideshow of him, they have their synths racked up. They start loud as hell with a blast of HNW, full throttle that does briefly manage to get even louder. There are some subtleties in there but by and large it manages to alienate a number of folk straight off to the bar. After a few minutes this unpleasantness eases off into a pretty tonal modulating wall of synth which clears slowly before a beat emerges from the gloom. Which in turn winds down to a synth pattern, radio noises, odd sounds, electronic hums and finally whispers out. In many ways it’s a completely reversed set starting as it does with the climax, but it’s an interesting idea and the second half of their set is certainly the most interesting with some nice exposed circuit boards being jabbed with sweaty fingers and right peculiar sounds and devices being moved around.


Jo Thomas

Jo Thomas

Jo Thomas finishes off the evening, she has a rolling distorted film, that may be a loop or the view out of a bus window in the country. She has on her table a clear box electronic noise machine that occupies her attention for the first half of her set, big old fashioned rotary knobs on the top, while she croaks into a head mic. The machine buzzes, modulates, glitches digital ducks and clanks at us. There are pretty evil low beating bumps and reckless alien swoops. It gets into a gabba pumping beat interspersed with some tones that get right into my tinnitus, before it swoops away somewhere else. There are some empty lumpy rhythms, and machine scrapers, with steam driven motors. For the final section she brings her laptop on, which provides some extra-dimensional qualities. Odd boops, and digitally frayed elements, which morph into shimmered digital sheets of rotary saw atmospherics, organ train specialities and finally a massive drone off between the different layers.