January 2015
The Scope
The Four Heads
There are already a good number of people in when the Four Heads start. Dan is set up with singing bowls and an odd single stringed instrument at the back also mic’d up and playing quietly back through the PA, Geoff is perched on a stool just inside the door playing his ukelele through a cheap delay to a quiet amp on the other side of the room. The idea is an immersive sound that isn’t overwhelming, so the uke washes back and forth with occasional plonks, and Dan gongs and pings with his singing bowls, and bows more or less everything he can see.
Laborotoro
Before Laboratoro play we move people around a bit so that Xelis has some space on the floor. He has reflector dishes with microphones (and pickups?) suspended from the ceiling feeding thin wires to Ed who is set up under the Caroline of Brunswick’s screen. Xelis talks and sings into the dishes the sound is processed by Ed’s Max MSP patches into arpeggios, or noise or something… There are field recordings – bird song and bunker sounds – and they both play a range of trumpets and hunting horns, Ed has a couple of drums he sticks or pats with beaters. Xelis dances and prowls, too. It’s good to see that they’re still not managing to do anything straight.
Duncan Harrison
The gap between sets is far too long but we keep the wide open space for Duncan Harrison. He balances his mixer on a stool, puts on dark glasses (after apologising) and starts talking about and from Henry Miller & Henry Rollins. He has some text in the middle of the floor and a cassette recording of some of it, he reads the text; standing, kneeling, crouching – after a while of this he presses a button on his mixer and we’re engulfed with a not loud but very unpleasant squall of feedback so that it feels like someone has unplugged the speaker on reality. You can see Duncan continue talking but not hear anything distinctly. He comes over to Agata who has been taking photographs and whispers in her ear. The horn player from Birds of Death Valley leaves the room visibly distressed: it is very unpleasant. Duncan shuts it off and I don’t remember if he reads some more or just stops.
duck-rabbit
duck-rabbit are set up on a table at the “stage” end of the room, Tom Taylor playing a keyboard loaded with crunchy step sounds from Dungeness beach, and one of Joe Wright or James Opstead playing a weird joystick controller thing slung round a neck, and the other with a non-keyboard controller controlling a box synth I’d not seen before. the results are somewhere on the line of free improv and abstract electronica, Tom’s fingers bashing impressively around the keyboard bringing forth all manner of horrible noises. This mismatch is even more pronounced on the third improvisation where they replace the Dungeness sounds with those from a Widnes scrapyard.
Tourian was next, Fabriccio set up on a chair under the screen, with a laptop, home-made almost toy-shoppish wooden box with big round buttons and a mic through fx, wearing a black and white Mexican cowboy shirt with a black hood over his head. He played down some pretty full on noise, screaming through the hood into the effects chain and generally letting rip with a hearty grace. The human origin of some of the noise added something to the electronic and digital harshness of the rest of it. 
Giving us some respite from the density of the rest of the evening Ripshaw Catfish (Cath Roberts on baritone sax and Anton Hunter on guitar) shoaling with Static Memories (Gus Garside double bass and Dan Powell guitar into laptop/effects) was spacious and studied. I was expecting the baritone to be deafening in the room, but Cath really kept it down to breathy levels with, I think a knock on effect on everyone else. Static Memories have been playing a lot and this was probably the highlight for me, some deft playing, some deft not playing (a hard trick) the two sets of musicians blending well and picking up that emergent shoaling behaviour quite nicely.
Finishing off the evening were Nyogtha, apparently they’d hung a backdrop which I didn’t notice (a big old thing with a goats head and stuff on it seems) and had two guitars both smeared through effects into thick pastes of drone, with over-reverbed vocals (my fault) and a drum machine that heavily featured a gong. 
The first stage style set is Breaking Robots who seem to be the [beep] collective’s house band, Natasha Thoday with some kind of odd box with bits that slide in and out , wheels, controllers, she seems to be aggregating Zacarias and Sarah who have more instrument looking devices. Anthony Arborialist is controlling visuals (a job he maintains for the night). For the soundcheck Natasha had been thrashing the PA with some heavy bassdrum techno, but the actual set is a melange of weird noises, glitch and strange electronica.
HUM are set up behind a long trestle table on the stage, Mark, Heloise and Olmo, bits of kit, microphones, toy synths. In fact it makes me think of the missing elektrocreche. To start off Heloise sings a low key intro, which gets washed into pure atmosphere for a while. Then Mark hollers and wails and it all spins into echo and murk; Hapshash lurching rhythms and psychotic repetition. Electric tranced shamanistic thud.
Mai Mai Mai is right at the back of the stage hidden next to the screen, in a mask that makes Toni Cutrone look like Cerebus. His set is a crystal clear sound of electronic tones and field recordings of storms, a nicely tonal contrast to the thick soup of HUM. Some PA Juddering bass is particularly pleasing to me.
The evening started with a new duo of Paul Khimasia Morgan and Dan Powell. Dan had his laptop and a scattering of percussion and Paul had a tape player, zither and some jumble of things. Quiet and elliptical, rattling and humming. 
Robert Barry / Bobby Barry / Monster Bobby introduced his book, explained some pieces and what the book was about. He performed three pieces which were more loosely based on his scores than following them. Lots of processing and electronics.
nil set up an impromptu kitchen for Culinary Music, mic’d up the boiling pan and shopping board. Chris Parfitt is so wonderfully deadpan, a career in silent movies was sadly avoided. Dan has a lot more ham. But not literally.