February 2025
The Rossi Bar

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.

In the middle slot we had Whitstable’s Sophie Sirota on viola and effects. She starts with some long notes drawn into new synthesiser shapes by the effects warping away, some plucked strings into decaying delay and the drawn bow alternating feeding into detailed layers of shifting something. Occasionally a tear of screaming distortion, a mutating murky backdrop of delay gives us a bed on which the rest of the first song is constructed, the way the main melodic part of the track warps from nylon to total artifice as the notes develop. With that main line going on she fills some trembling background into the looper before playing a longer melodic line against the first using the range of the instrument from whistling highs to almost cello-like swirling lows. The background swirls have mutated into ghastly whispers by now, she plays through the long melodic line again, but with delays spiralling sounds off it in all directions skilfully skirting feedback hitting that psychedelic sweet spot quite nicely. The second piece starts with the bow bouncing on the strings, feeding into the looper notes, clicks, laying down a bedrock. A succession of drawn single notes is fed into the looper as well, a second layer to slowly develop an overlapping chord. Its pretty static, some more unobtrusive layers sliding in, ghostly. That distortion that we heard briefly before is back, needle sharp. The repetition builds intensity until her lead line slowly emerges from the fog, melancholic & nostalgic before slowly letting the framing lines fall away from under it until all we’re let with is the pinging original rhythm line, choirs of angels and the viola’s melodic line and then it to is gone, dropping down to just the voice to end.

All electronic, Nanonic swirls in with a contact pad synth of extensive tonalities, some blistering swirls and deep, deep subs off into churning delay. Ghostly wails, hard whistling winds. Drops to beeps or lonesome foghorns. Distant gunshot snares herald a regular pulse and a frankly terrifying sub bass drone. A rhythm seems to coalesce, rattling chains envelop us, a bass line forms, other synth lines force their way in. cymbals, slurring delays. That aeroplane arpeggiator from dark side of the moon. Everything stalls. A distant door slams. Silence. The second piece starts with a slurring synth injected directly into a delay for maximum entertainment. Detailed layers of sound course out over us, spaceships shifting from some interstellar portal, Nick manages to evoke both 50s SF film soundtracks and the latest space music. Atonal beeps then shift us into a more structured (if seemingly semi randomly) segment that then leads into a pretty fast pulse beat. A great red noise snare sound. The rhythm disintegrates before our ears. The final piece is straight into the rhythm, a ticking of stick on metal hi-hat style, with rasping synths and pinging bass lines. Interlocking bass lines. Interlocking detuned synth noises. Delay chatter, a bass drum with a distinctly dancehall gait about its swing, if not the tempo. Some Cabs style reverb distortion, this could be something off a 21^st Century Red Mecca. Everything here is in thrall to the rhythm. It ends with endless layering up, shrieks, machine thrums, feedback. Highlight. Nice.