February 2017
Green Door Store
Slow Listener
Slow Listener bathed in blue light standing just for us. Fidgeting at his lone black box, collaging drones of pure tone and odd blasts of manipulated clank and fade. A slowly unfolding collage of metal sounds, tones give way to reverse cymbal, gong scrape and jangle. Unsettling, unhuman, oddly – but not cold. Emotionally its quite challenging, sucking you in one minute with its rounded pleasantness before forcing you back with some serious high end chittering and blackboard scrape, that giving way to weirdly gated, pitch shifted voices while some ghost breathes backwards through a plasterboard wall. Ending on an endless sustain bell-tone with a one legged pirate stumbling around the flat upstairs in slow motion.
PSK
“We are PSK it is the only way”. Kev Hough plays long bass guitar notes through some really nasty fuzz pedal while sat behind a trestle table Steve Quixote/Fagan/Psylon provides some electronic rhythms and Pat keyboard and I think voice. Kev also has his megaphone and he’s not afraid to use it, even to reference Theresa May. Steve brings the history of electronic dance music, Kev brings ugly washes of noise and pat 60s organ tones and string synth washes. It works well, Steve’s understanding of the dynamics of programmed drum tracks makes quite the difference. Even when he’s caning the phaser on them. They even have some hooks in there. Possibly even more remarkable at a SoG than the burst of dancing we had a couple of months ago….
D503
D503 drone slowly up from silence seated behind a trestle, Francesco on guitar ringing out occasionally while bass rasp and a trace of white noise slowly firm up, the rhythms more electroshock metronomic here. Eventually the guitar is submerged and as the bass turns to a bulbous pulse the guitar scrapes and flattens out to washes and the whole thing degrades to a 50Hz buzz. Then space winds sweep in and we’re on another build, the hi-hat turning into a robotic scaffold pole thwack around the head before everything empties out leaving endless guitar delays and a whirr of faulty electronics.
Unfortunately Sarah Angliss was ill, but at the very last minute we managed to rope in Tim Blechmann who had spent the day in the studio with Daniel Jones. He’s a resident of Venice on tour in the UK, who codes his own music on the fly (see the video for an example) adding nuances through a bank of fingertip controllers attached to his laptop, it’s an unusual way of working apparently bringing in massive latencies between action and result. The result is a finely detailed set of subtle drones. Set up at the back of the room he started with an almost subsonic bass that pushed around the limits of the Green Door Store’s PA. Slowly the frequency range was increased peaking with some nice distortion before winding down into a church organ finale. It wasn’t as trouser flappingly loud as a less polite person would have made it, but none the worse for that.
Slow Listener has eschewed his plethora of devices, wires and tapes for a single black box of sampler effects and mixer which looked rather incongruous set up at one end of our camping table, so I was a bit worried that we were going to go from one set of digital drones to another. Still the sound seems to reside in the man rather than his kit and this was a classic Slow Listener set. He started stood at the front of the stage orating; repeated semi phrases, verbalised cut ups of nonsensical word strings before getting behind the table to tend his murky art. Some lovely analogue-y sounds merging and warping with reverse gongs and field recordings, before he got into some serious quieter spaces that held near silence with clicks and whirrs, before bringing in a woman’s voice repeating his phrases from the start to bookend the performance. Nice.
Rounding off the evening were SQ, a duo on stage with a visuals artist up in the sound booth playing back oscilloscope transcriptions of the live sound onto the screen. I liked that. Onstage we had a clarinet player who had a laptop processing his sound and another laptop that could also have been processing the same source more interactively. It was very digital sounding, at times the clarinet completely subsumed into the transformations of the kit, at others Paul Spignon getting into full improv mode with chirruping morphs bouncing straight back at him from the laptop, one of the most dynamic interactions of an improviser with laptop processing I’ve seen. My favourite moment came when he had the top off the clarinet and was circular breathing straight into the tube of the instrument his throat and cheeks billowing like some human/bullfrog hybrid gulping strange music from the air around him.
