Category: SOG-BLOG

Drugs, cash and crumble

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

July 2018
Green Door Store

Lorraine Bowen

Lorraine Bowen

It’s hard to believe it but this was not only Lorraine Bowen’s first show for The Spirit of Gravity, but the first time she’d played at the Green Door Store. So we were really pleased to finally convince her to come along. She had about three days notice and did us a wonderful turn with several new songs. Kit-wise she had one of her plethora of Casios on stage and ran with a mixture of backing tracks and onboard rhythms from the thing itself perched on her trademark ironing board and homemade sign. She came onstage to her intro tape and set about generally mocking our regular acts before starting into her first song. After that she bought out her Omnichord and set about demonstrating it to us – I’ve seen her a few times and it doesn’t normally make an appearance – before singing a song about Pizza using it. The next song was one of the new ones about the collapse of Poundland with a nicely distorted bass drum, she could barely keep a straight face. The next song was “The ice cream lady” followed by a song that seemed to be about some kind of sexual encounter in Kew Gardens (at least it wasn’t her song about STDs and tropical resorts). And she finished with a messed up version of “The Crumble Song” taking us through the Casio’s capabilities, messing with the EQ, tempo, dubbing it up generally and getting the strobe going playing it with her boobs (definitely a first for SoG) and messing about with the key. Lotsa fun and good, too.

Midi Error

Midi Error

So after being properly trainspotted while setting up his laptop for the second set was from midi error. You’ve never seen such a gathering outside of OSC as there was peering over his shoulder. Starting with a vocal sample and an off-centre keyboard riff that was give form by the addition of percussion before filtering out to be augmented with something raspily detuned that builds into something horrible before a really minimal bit of techno emerges, again to be subverted by something waywardly exciting. Before again dropping down to something minimal with an interesting marimba ish riff cycling away. This one gets blasted by a flying saucer takeoff. The next one is like a bunch of aliens playing 80s arcade games being zapped by their parents for misbehaviour. He finishes on another minimal techno thing that simultaneously feels like a 60 footer is parking up in your mind.

Ultraterrestrials

Ultraterrestrials

So when Ultraterrestrials start it’s Jared’s socks that are the first thing I notice rather than the pink shoes, although the shoes are nice. Then it’s the two microphones. His voice is the next thing that, rich in tone, American, he talks and its convincing even after you realise what he’s saying doesn’t make that much sense, you want it to continue. Tom and Richard slowly raise something droning behind him on e-bowed guitar and electronic things. At some stage you realise that one of the mics goes back into the effects and his voice is coming back at you in indiscernible ways; the songs ends in the yowl of a child of frozen space. The second starts with gating rhythms from the guitar, bass booms, Jared’s muttering, something like Tuxedomoon happens at some point and the rhythm is happening loudly and there is a strobe, but its not rhythmical and somehow matches the mood of Jared’s stage skulk perfectly. The next one is an uneasy quiet thing, unsettling arpeggios and queasily thin chemtrails. Jared sings. The next one leaps in with a raindrop rhythm and vast bass synths and factory noises, they end on another quiet one with Jared falsettoing over a backward piano and the hellish strings of his effected voice disturb us.

Let’s get skulled up for the drop off

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

June 2018
Green Door Store

Fallow

Fallow

Fallow start the evening off, David Reby has a black and white film of deer scans playing behind them, his familiar deer skull illuminated from the inside on a stand at centre stage. Their set starts with heavily reverbed undetermined deer field recordings, some slow guitar notes, slowly dissonant drones creep in, some of those horrible deer vocalisations I promised wallow up among the musical elements as they fall away. Derek is playing keyboards rather than his usual pre-recorded CDJs alongside guitar, and pipes in some stentorian French horn blasts and piano before a templehead beat rolls in. The Intensity of the deer yowls ramps up. When the beats roll back out, we get into a pizzicato that brings us into a lengthy reflective passage before the intensity starts to ramp up with a layered set of hefty drones and we switch into a tritone riff that just builds, then drops and builds again before dropping down to just the bass elements that flatten into a drone that carries the guitar into the ending section.

Organon of the Antivoid

Organon of the Antivoid

With Zoom Around Rainbow falling foul of a technical hitch at the last minute Organon of the Antivoid stepped in at the last minute with a Youtube mashup. Caleb sits facing the screen, his desktop projected up onto it so we can follow exactly what’s happening. Starting with a TED talk “Are you a good person” adding in tabs and tabs of slowed down YouTube speech, we go a long way before we get to the obvious candidates. In the early stages he adds in some drones – 2 or 3 tabs of it – but apart from that and some tabs of pink and white noise, it’s pretty much all speech and babies crying. However obfuscated. At about 15 minutes he ups the levels, quickly opening a series of tabs as if he’s trying to crash the browser, but it’s obviously a pretty robust setup he has, so eventually he decides to wind it down, closing down the tabs from the latest to the first.

Jobina Tinnemans

Jobina Tinnemans

So Jobina Tinnemans finishes the evening, with two pieces. As a proper composer she does introduce her pieces in full, the first is based on recordings of voices from the Chamber Choir of South Iceland pretending to be birds that she has trapped inside a number of small jars. It’s a semi improvised piece, with the jars being chosen and Shaken, some Max/MSP processing is definitely going on there, with some of the results sounding remarkably like David’s field recordings. The sound is more spacious than anything else we’ve heard this evening. Supporting the sounds are violin or cello sonorities and synth washes, with a massive foghorn indicating closure is imminent.
She goes straight into her second piece, quickly changing into her swimsuit and hat, this is an aquatic piece it has the bird noises again, but with the drips and reverb of a watery place. Synth sounds give the sense of waves and something impending, before she takes a breath and we’re suddenly underwater – there is no treble, a bass whoomph – exhale and we’re back above. The second time we go under we seem to be in the company of whistling alien cetaceans. The third time they seem to be in a more playful mood, maybe having found a toy piano. The riff they bang out becomes more insistent, bringing steam, noise and musicality along with it. The sense of approaching the surf from underneath.

I have life on other worlds

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

May 2018
Green Door Store

Binnsclagg

Binnsclagg

Binnsclagg started the evening off with what was probably the best set I’ve seen them do. They have a certain reputation (they claim completely undeserved) for power tools, noisy chaos, found poetry and leaving a hell of a mess. None of this was apparent. Verity and Karl had an oil-drum table each of things with acoustic or electronic intent, and set to work about them; psychedelic warble, cassette voice, rattle, thrum, grandmother’s clock. It’s quite spacious unlike the super-dense harshness of the last time they played. They even take turns to read. There are rhythmic sections, which quite confused me. They play chimes against thin feedback and distant jazz while Verity reads, its rather lovely, which I wasn’t expecting to write. It ends in pings dissolving into giggles. As it should.

Ned Rush

Ned Rush

The meaty filling in the sandwich was provided by a nice AV set from Ned Rush. He was running a modular synth, and linked that up to a laptop to create some kind of generative visuals. A lot of the visuals had that kind of kinetic thing going on so you constantly feel like you’re travelling into the screen. In the absence of having videoed his whole set I won’t reference his visuals again. The sounds started with small tonal blips and hums, scatter glitches and tiny squelches. It’s the most freeform thing I’ve seen anyone do on a modular, managing to avoid the tyranny of clocking or LFO. This is followed by something where he gets a hum and white noise loop going, with an acidy squelch with a growl that becomes a bassline. This deepens in intensity and rhythmic intent, like some odd hyper-interlocked rave where someone has stolen the 909. He slews in these odd concrete sounds and nasty drones to keep you off balance, and the breakdown when it comes almost makes you stagger sideways with its glitching detunedness. The final piece really pushes it, like something from a chill-out room of a party where the ketamine has been laced with strychnine and half those present are travelling backwards through time. Great stuff.

Johanna Bramli

Johanna Bramli

And finally we had the return of Johanna Bramli, also playing against visuals, she’d taken down the screen show they were ghostly against the black curtains. Starting with a slow humming tick rhythm and organ layered with wordless vocals she was the otherworldly manifestation of the film she was showing. The piece mutates slowly, some piano, odd voices, external sounds, some singing. In many ways this is the kind of thing I wanted from Laurie Anderson last time she was here; proper haunted, mysterious, emotionally haunting music. She breathes and plays some single stringed DIY instrument, thin feedback tremors wailing across the room, underpinned by a monstrous block of bass that pulses monolithically into the room while god moves chairs around upstairs. A head itch rhythm stealths into the song and tines ping, then it all shifts suddenly – lightweight arpeggios echo back around the room and the bass battering is gone, there is some singing before it dissolves into rain, and a bubble bath of small synthesizer an organ drone and more wordless vocals through to the end. Bloody lovely.

Three, Two, One

Posted on by Spirit of Gravity

April 2018
Green Door Store

Innixi Fix

Innixi Fix

To start the evening is Innixi Fix, billed as a three piece but playing as Jack on his own (he found out at 5:30 in the evening that this would be the case). So he set up on the floor with his guitar and electronics array. He starts by banging a loop of a clobbered string percussion part into the kit, supplemented with small flourishes giving it a clockwork feel. Before fattening out with balalaika twangs, reverb and then haring off down a blind alley of plics and ant-scurry thuds. Which devolves into a series of radiophonic space ping echoes. This goes on for not quite long enough before a tube train smashes through it. Which in turn gives way to an almost acoustic sounding passage of single noted loveliness which again evolves into some radiophonics mixed with gratuitous delay tweaking. It settles down into a more reflective passage before we get the Foghorns and heavy goods trains.

Andrew Greaves

Andrew Greaves

Andrew Greaves was also supposed to be playing with others in this case the percussionist was ill so Andrew fell back onto his electronic percussion along with organs and delays. The percussion ticks while Andrew played I think two pieces from his new album, which are long semi improvisations in some scales based on Indian Raags, played with extraordinarily long delays, and the occasional bass tone. The organ parts repeat, almost, slowing down and speeding up. Hypnotic is about the only way to describe it, I was quite in phase with the whole room by the time the first piece ended. He wound it down quite nicely and did the changeover to the second part pretty seamlessly. This continued the arpeggios and riffs style but with some longer, slightly slower parts woven into them. Both hands working together along with some suspicious looping technology and some more prominent action from the bass. Although again, it wouldn’t be called foregrounded. About a third of the way into the second piece the hi-hats tip over into woodblocks and rim-shots. Towards the end they trickle out just leaving the dynamic stasis of the organ figures worming into your consciousness.

Map 71

Map71

So Map71. A real drummer and one poet. Lisa Jayne, slight, static, book of words glanced at, pages thumb flicked occasionally. Andy Pyne a perpetual movement machine, elbows, knees, sticks, head, feet. The first track is drums and words alone, a circular patter around the kit, around the kit, around the kit. Anti-noise. The second is an older song. Starting with a cheap synthesiser riff before Andy and Lisa kick in. The electronic insistence rises during the song. The third song starts like “Summer breeze” closed hi-hats in threes, uneasy words. The fourth song is new I think too, starting with a staggered snare pattern “freak radar collision” Lisa’s word come at you in obsessional bursts. Every few bars everything stutters. Another new song follows, slight piano echoes, brushes occasional Kick yr ass drum. Lisa less declamatory than usual. The rhythm is still in her voice. Back with the favourites “controversial dance moves should not be attempted” buzz bass, half speed drums. A song about shopping. Hah. Lisa speaks between songs, I think this is a new thing. They still are the most charismatic act to grace the GDS stage. The final song is a tightly wound arpeggio that takes an age before the drums kick in. The tension mounts constantly, even when parts drop out. Insistence.