October 2015
Green Door Store
The Birds of Death Valley
To start the evening we had the return of The Birds of Death Valley for their first show in an age. Dom was on pretty good form on a chair centre stage with iPad and bass guitar, stage right had Howard on recorder, venerable Wasp and some other bits and pieces, and flanking the oil drum table Ben on whistle, kettle trumpet, pipe and unused slide cornet. They started with a fairly abstract song of floating buzzes and analogue-y drones, before the kettle and a bassline get into a more rhythmic mode, the recorder tipping us over into more fragile almost Takako Minekawa area.
F.Ampism
Next up was F.Ampism with his electronical cassette collages. On this form he has to be the best person doing this in Brighton at the moment, a stunning set, multi layered and constantly moving, there were some really interesting textures; voices, percussion, and an urgency – no sitting back and letting things wash over the audience, a constant evolution of audio images, evocative and rather mesmerising. Something about the quality of the sound put me in mind of the soundtrack to Black Orpheus, but I can’t quite say what.
Caines & Eldridge
Finally we had Alice Eldridge & Ron Caines celebrating the launch of “Rothko Veil” the latest release on our Spirit of Gravity label (spiritofgravity.bandcamp.com/album/rothko-veil). They recorded the album in 2011, and this may have been the first time they’d played together since and it really felt like something special right from the start. They started with “Sukran” one of the themes off the album, and it was a really good choice . Alice’s thrummed cello almost a bass part circling loop like while Ron’s lyrical playing really set the mood for the rest of their set and gave him a great starting point to work from. They had the themes for the evening on music stands and use another two from the album and two new ones. Alice going through chamber music sonorities and rhythmic parts to drones and over the bridge harshness, while Ron really let fly as the evening progressed.
Second up is Andre’s Elbow, Dan Powell and Tony Rimbaud, the soundcheck was excellent, Tony processing Dan’s small percussion and throat singing to lovely effect; a rolling thick exotic mosaic. The set itself is marred with some tonal feedback that seemed to get deep into the effects chain and won’t go away, and as a consequence they were too distracted trying to dispatch the thing to really gel. I’d like to see them do it again, as when they had everything back and under control Dan had some whistling vocal drone and singing bowl going on and it finally started to show the promise of the soundcheck.
Rounding of the evening were Deemer; Dee Byrne and Merijn Royaards down from the big city. Dee plays saxophone and Merijn had a stack of old acid boxes; then, between them, they had some old portable CRT style TVs and a whole lot of processing kit. It was a set that felt full of opportunities and at any moment could go shoot off in any of a number of directions – there were elements of jazz, some suppressed 303, some noise things bubbling up through magnetic sensors in front of the TVs – the frame hold lines buzzing through them. And they did visit a number of these places in a remarkably coherent way. Dee plays with a number of the improviser’s we’ve had down recently and they both pay a great deal of attention to what’s going on around them.
Kuroneko were first on, they were due to be augmented by a further player coming down from London, but she was stymied by the Tube strike. Fortunately Ruse23 was on a trip to the old home town so was down here early.
Ingrid Plum started with her pure voice, reminiscent of her singing in the tunnels at Newhaven Fort last autumn, almost designed to put us off the scent. She also had a cassette player with tones from a recent event playing back through a small (very small) Marshall stack. Almost a toy, but it had two speakers with very different tones and she also used a mic input into it that she used dexterously for tonal feedback. It’s a disarming set that skirts noise and fuses well with her vocal style.
Gagarin played a great deal from his new CD, but with the bottom end extended into the depths allowed by the Green Door Store’s Bass bins, and generally toughened up. His visuals were a film of the New Horizons flight to Pluto from the NASA website slowed down to a virtual crawl. The album is a mixture of his field recordings (the Balham garden: birds, trains etc) and scattering rhythms. Not quite the same kind of London sound of his last CD, more like the abstraction of the touch cassette, with more skittering beats, lighter on its feet even with the extra weight of the soundsystem.
Gilli Bloodaxe was first on, backed only by Al Strachan as Foz (who usually supplies slide whistle and other honking interjections) had Spanish lesson that night. He did make the second half of the set, though. We had everyone set up in rows for a change with no milling about, which is a change for the Scope although some of the latecomers were a little more hard to deal with as a consequence – especially if like Foz they heckled. Anyway Tony was on fine elliptical form, telling his punning shaggy doggerel tales, it was a little understated without Foz whoopsie-ing it up. Al had some unusual loops long with his more usual cornet and synth. It was very musical. And appropriately we laughed like drains. Tony ended with an epic, we knew it was an epic because he told us before he started it.
The second act was Isnaj Dui, Katie had a brace of flutes, a looper and some pedals. One of the flutes was a lovely brass and dark wood bass flute with a loop in it not dissimilar to the contra-bassoon Thomas Stone had a couple of months ago – it’s also just as wonderful sounding. She did a number of pieces bouncing off loops with obviously carefully prepared parts, from some highly structured pieces with rhythmic structures to more free flowing lyrical pieces.
Hugs Bison had obviously spent the two days in Brighton well – the video was great, including some excellent footage of one of the rides on the pier that looked like CGI-rendered blue and yellow Lego up on the screen, really glowing. They did a live audio collage of interviews and field recordings with some previously written stuff and live improvisations, it switches from choppy loops to some quite stately organ music, piano parts and rumbling drones.