April 2026
The Rossi Bar
Starting with Lorenzo Brilli purely because he has drums and it makes stage management easier. It’s not just acoustic drums, there’s a mic over the kit linked to a laptop and a contact mic’d long sheet of metal, which starts proceedings being gently beaten and processed. Then scraped with wire brushes, the processing migrates this into drones and crackling glitch, enhanced by rattling on the contact mike itself. The drones have a really nice sound, at once tonal and magnetic. He thickens the sound on the laptop, and then returns to the drum kit with a steady beater pattern on the ride. A voice wanders in and then everything halts with a crash. A clacking from the laptop, then he’s on the full kit, a slightly elliptical beat, jazzy timing, little frills. The drones now wash in and out. It’s got a four to the floor bass drum, but everything else grooves around it really nicely, economical. The drones seem to be triggered by something. There’s an ending with a round the kit finish with a massive reverb off the end that turns into a wind tunnel and Lorenzo gets into some free improv drum fiddling, scraping cymbals with the end of the stick, and getting this into some creepy swirls. There’s some machinery and growling fading into some pretty detailed rattling. Then it’s another reset, a choral drone, occasional “Whey” against which he gets a surprisingly clacky floor tom rhythm. And handclaps. The next section starts with mutated throat singing (Bulgarian?), then it’s off into bells, whistles, hums and a steady brushes on snare beat. Jazz-ish. Plaintive. The drums stop and the voices carry on, thickening and warping. He does some fidgeting on the hi-hat that transforms into odd tonal swooshes.
Nanonic has a “non-keyboard” synth, a looper and a couple of effects pedals, here’s a nice synth in a wooden case with brass contacts instead of a keyboard. Nick false starts with a fat buzzing drone, modulating up into some pretty nasty frequencies, then back down into room rattling bass. He gets some pretty foul swoops into the looper and then gets to work on the synth again, with some feral scrapes and reedy foghorn drones. A shimmering delay gets to work white dogs bark near a major electrical plant. There is industrial clicking and a looped owl, the wind whistles over vibrating metal rods. Into this quiet eeriness we get buzzed by spaceships. The wind whistles up for an end to the first piece. The second starts with a fast bass-y pulsing that you can feel flapping about in the speaker cabinets. There’s some manipulation of this up and down, in volume, tempo and tone. It gets a bit buzzy, a very different kind of pulsating UFO sound gets into the looper. The rinsed into a thin high looping whooshing, under which we get more buzzing bass pulses. And them pesky UFOs again. The whooshing thickens up and envelopes everything into a shrieking roar.
Drum and Lace is set up with 2 racks of hardware, Sofia completes the Italian sandwich for this evening, she starts with a firework crackle and field recordings of birds, straight in with wordless vocals and some synth pads. The crackling is joined rhythmically by some alarming short circuit clacks. We check for smoke, but it’s all planned. A nylon guitar arpeggio gently comes in, and some light string stabs. A rhythm proper starts under the track and we can see how the crackles and clacks all lock together. The second track swoops in with a speedy 2 note synth line, overlaid with 80s synth pop complementary parts, including a nice fat buzz followed by some warm emotional pads. Some slow vocals drift across the top underlying how frenetic the backing is. Things fall away under the vocals and one of the synth lines comes back fiercer and joined by some hard drums, another line returns – shifted slightly adding unease. Hissing hi-hats fade in to usher the end. A fast ticking hi-hat starts the next song with an intermittent kick and bass pulse. The pulse speeds up under vocals and a loping lead synth line takes us on into a hard techno section, then a drop. A slow kick brings back out under a changed vocal line, and back into the driving synth. The church bells toll, and a clockwork toy gives us the rhythm to start the next piece. A buzzing bass slurs between notes to give us the bassline, squeaks and strings layer in over it. The rhythm track layers up, bringing in a bassline as the vocals come in. There’s a nice melodic bass-y line that underpins the vocal that she does some buzzing filter work on as the song progresses. There’s a drop down to tapping and odd synth swells and birdsong before a new bassline comes in stronger and brassier to lift us into the final section, a blip on the offbeat, then the bassline transforms itself into a mutating percussive synth and the beat comes in strong and we’re briefly off on a tangent before everything is back and shifts around underneath it.
Purely because of the logistics of fitting his drums and electronics on the small stage we start the evening off with perennial favourite Dale Frost playing a largely new set. The first song starts with vision On chimes ping in counter rhythms before the punchy drums kick in around them, a complementary beat. A mesh. There’s a couple of nice isolated drum breaks just before the chimes come back in. The second song is much more staccato, backing track with partial rhythms, drums filling some more. The occasional proper sub bass. The jigsaw nearly complete. About halfway through the song a pad comes in that seems to add completeness, but it still feels oddly half time. The third comes on like some oddly time-signatured dub track – the “delayed” piano then de-coupling itself to emphasise the off kilter beat. Flurries of hi-hat, weird percussive squeaks. Then a super slow bass note/bass drum gives it some bottom and possibly bringing it briefly back into 4/4 before it all goes a bit loopy again and speeds right up. The fourth starts with a slurred synth that is then triggered by the drums. Big bubbly synths surround it before we get a rattly snare heralding another tricky rhythm. Theres some great bits in this one as things drop in to come back in including a particularly delirious section of the bubbly synth and rhythms all working around each other before the drums stop and the synth spirals off into the heavens. Dale seems to be priming the synths and pads before this final track starts, then it kicks off with a walking bass and hi-hat stalking drums. After a while there’s some steel pan melody driving it on. We get some breaks to emphasise the synthiness before it all lifts off into D’n’B flight, the bass stretching, steel pans lifting higher and higher, another drop then it’s back into flight again, the drums doubling up in intensity, more counter melodies, back briefly to the original version, a grounding. A slow plod into an organ-tastic breather and then back into full throttle for the end.
