December 2018
Green Door Store
Noteherder & McCloud
So our last show at The Green Door Store started with Noteherder & McCloud grey suited as usual, but sadly lacking the drummer we were expecting due to ill health, but still it was a pretty good set (even if I do say so myself). Starting with a monster slow bass pulse soon this was joined by a circling, swirling reverb-y soprano sax. After a while of this the bass switches over to a mid-tempo arpeggio, and the sax takes flight over some aeroplane hums. The bass stops leaving the plane drone hovering, the sax becomes plaintive. Everything drops away leaving Chris circular breathing a lengthy note. A squelching digital mains pulsing starts, Chris shouts into the sax, feedback loops build up in the FX chain and things become hard to source while I laugh. Things get denser and more unfocussed The sax gets pretty serious, weird bass runs happen and nothing is under control. This reaches some sort of crescendo then some lengthy looping 2 note bass line swerves in, derailing everything, the sax gets distant and beautiful, electronics shimmer and decay around us. The high point of the set. After that we get some bass-y noise, some fast arpeggiating and Chris lets rip again.
Buckner Building
Next up were Buckner Building; a table of things that sound, a backing accordion drone and rhythm device, violin and a fuck off huge recorder and a teeny tiny recorder all make a contribution during their set. They open with fiddle drone and plain voice with occasional thickened flourishes of violin and odd rattles and sniffs before we get a scary layering up of voices and whistled nightmares and a sudden switch into medieval dance tunage to confuse us before returning to the stark open folk of the beginning for the end. That pretty much set the tone for their set. Five songs of misdirection, tunefulness and decay, rattling drum machines and drones. The second song has a John Barry-esque section underpinning a song about two Herons in the evening. The third a grinding hurdy gurdy drone and recorder that gives way to an antipodean flute and drum track. The fourth a light fluttering that drops into Tuxedomoon cabaret, the final song opens with a gloriously spooky xylophone part over some unravelling drones supplanted by a heartbeat bodhran that in turn gives way to a 4/4 whistling jig before again circling back to the dark opening drones.
Or
So Or, is Resonant Blue with a percussionist, they’re sat behind a bench stuffed with electronics at one end and rattle an bangy things at the other (and on the floor and other tables next to them). At this point it’s best to say that there is no guitar (in spite of my references to one later on). They push a succession of singing bowl chimes, shakers, bells and some tuned percussion into a looping laptop over a simple bass drum and slow feedback wobble. The layered looping works well with this kind of rhythmic dance music derived groove. Some are on extra long loops that take a while to come back. A fat bass peeks out, and the rhythm parts shuffle round for a while. The whine and a thick mid range rumble wash everything away and some machinery cycles in, we get some matchingly harder percussion and more insistent melodic loops are set off by an axle grinder. It all get s a bit intense. The percussionist yelps. It sounds like someone is e-bowing a guitar in a wind tunnel. At this point some massive south American bassline walks into a bar with an electric whip drum to accompany him. The percussionist works around this for a while, we get some layered up chittering voices that twist into a backward conversational loop that set us up u for the ridiculously heavy bass that takes us lumbering into the next section. The percussionist digs out a megaphone and lets rip and a second fuzzy bass starts fizzing around the first. The Djembe works around the basses taking us into some pretty definite On-U-Sound space. Cascading echoed shells herald the final part, the bassline faster but no less heavy; some backward guitarral squeal melody; rhythm parts more syncopated playing off each other – the percussionist gets to work on the rim of the singing bowl, really working away on that thing. You can see it leaping in his hand. He’s right there with it. The rest is taking care of itself the percussion parts still whirring round, he is right there with that bowl until everything else is stripped away and you can feel that one zone, that tone has completely filled his mind.
Starting the evening were Noteherder & McCloud, who based their set off some recordings of trains and then more notably Tube recordings as we got into the set. It was a slow start with quite a bit of tape hiss delayed and whined up by a bitcrusher into a distant alarm. Chris Parfitt’s soprano sax shouts jumped across that until a rolling, almost swinging bass sequence started up and he got into some really lyrical playing for about ten minutes until it all shredded out into noise and clanging rail screech and than toned down into breath hiss and gurgle.
map71, who have been one of the best things I’ve seen this year, and this was another good one. They took a little while to get right into it, but once they did, it was right there. Andy Pyne’s drumming and synths (a backing track rather than his old keyboard – I couldn’t see) were rock steady, as he takes some Jaki Liebezeit channelling tight beats. Lisa Jayne was a little more animated than sometimes, her left hand flicking as she held her book of spells in the right dexterously turning pages with her thumb. The highpoint came with some DNW buzzing synth, Andy on beaters, pattering out a steady toned rhythm on the toms (even the snare drum has the snare dropped for extra note) while Lisa Jayne intoned her deadpan words.
Matawan are all about the textures, the shimmer. I originally thought one of them had a keyboard on his table initially, but he seemed to have an unused guitar propped against the stage side wall there, while the chap in the middle sat stooped down guitar mostly across his lap as he muddled with his racks of effects at his feet. It was a slow drone build, layers modulating back and forth between the pair of players in what initially seemed an improvised set until you noticed that one of them was loading some pretty specific chords into three tiny Mooer loopers he had at his feet, not that when he played them back it sounded like strumming, but the triad of washing layers they produced as he faded from one to another gave clear indication of an compositional element unexpected in a drone environment.
Minimal impact came onstage bang on 8:15, seated at a tiny coffee table concealing his kit, a massive video of degraded VHS feedback washing in blue/yellow arcs across the giant screen behind him. Starting with a coarse buzz that thickened out into a full spectrum wall of noise before being slowly washed away in stately swathes of phaser and jets of steam as the buzz reasserts itself as a massive insectoid whirr. A low fidelity immersive experience.
Tony Rimbaud’s hand picked quartet, TR Agency, where second on stage for a commercial break. Ron Caines sat on a chair at the front of the stage, nick stalking behind looping collages, breathy sounds, synthy washes and swirling alto, while nick talks about Stuff. And chewing gum (
Static Memories’ Gus and Dan set up right at the back clearing as much space as possible for Mirei Yazawa to dance. She took up most of the attention of the players and us, lit from a lamp low at the side of the stage, with a pale blue block of ice slowly melting across the background. The music was typically beyond description: scraped bow across double bass, chimes and delays, Mirei twisting in response and driving changes in what they were playing, its all Very abstract. Dancer and musicians interlocked tightly.
Noteherder & McCloud had Bartosz Dylewski who had booked the projector and built the screen supplying visuals, and Chris Parfitt came roaring out in a storm of soprano notes primary geometries sliding around behind him. It took me a while to get up a similar head of steam, but there was some grinding sequences I enjoyed and a section in the middle with me howling through the bitcrusher while Chris circular blew squealing overtones on the sax that still sounds pretty damn intense.
HLCollins starts his set in a rattling trio with Nicholas Langley and Hassni Malik from The Vitamin b12 sat in line at a metal baker’s tray, scraping metal objects of various sizes about. Its theatre and oddly musical, and very funny. After a quick session with Henry up a set of steps banging a mic’d metal bin Nick and Hassni leave the stage and Henry moves onto a didgeridoo coffee machine that spits water but makes amazing sounds, he then moves onto a turntable and some balloons and effects for a comedy improv session that gets slowly creepier with a slurring hum playing back against clicks and bumps and occasional bird call for an ambient music for hell’s ante-room.
