May 2016
Green Door Store
Broken Star
For various reasons, I’m not doing things at this show, and when I arrive Andrew and Tom have just started the Broken Star set. They set up on the floor of the Green Door Store, so as not to occlude the slide-show of Toms photographs of London. Updated since they first did this show at The Komedia. Tom’s getting some pretty nasty textures from his e-bowed guitar while Andrew switches around between electric piano and organ arpeggios, he hasn’t been wasting the things he’s learnt on his recent shows based around exploring Terry Riley’s mid sixties pieces, there’s some nicely psychedelic work afoot in here, slowly unfolding melodies in strange keys.
Leaver
Second up is Leaver, one of whom toured with Tim Holehouse last year and enjoyed his show with us so much he had to come back to Brighton and spend some more time here. They do short constructed but completely unnerving songs. There’s something very sinister, unsettling about them. They do enjoy the live ambience of the GDS though, Angel at one point fleeing his laptop on the stage to howl around the room.
Ræppen
While he’s doing that Ræppen has robed up and quietly set up to the side of the stage, as Leaver wind down, Tim starts rubbing beach stones together and getting his loops into shape, he starts the throat singing and things really start to get intense,there’s some chanting, and sudden drops each time buildng back to a dense storm of rich textured vocalese.
SQ feat KET
Finishing off the evening SQ feat KET clean the stage standing to each side, Thomas Bjelkeborn on the right, a Wii controller and laptop glitching the voices coming from Koray Tahiroglu’s visuals fed in from the left. Slurred, degraded video of an old Siberian mangled up by Bjelkborn’s software. Its very clean sounding and digital after the analogue murk of the rest of the evening, interesting how much space you can get into something so distorted and messed up.
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.