July 2014
So, the first Scope, quite a success.
2 sites from nil, 2 sets from Captain Poopdeck, and one from The Zero Map. Some Elektrocreche action and plenty of milling about.
And Lissajous figures, Karl has been programming them up for me.
Nil
The Caroline of Brunswick upstairs room is L shaped with a section missing the rather fetching sticky carpet. This is nil’s home for the evening their pile of things scattered about as you would expect, toys wine glasses small instruments, clinking and pinging and rolling and blowing things of every description. Their first set was very intense; quiet, intricate, serious. We closed the window to keep out the random drifting of music from the smoking yard. At some point they do something that makes someone in the audience laugh. Dan picks up on this and continues it. Its most alarming.
Nil’s second set is a little more relaxed than the first. Scattered and funny involving hiding under aluminium foil and some mooing. Audience participation as well, if you were so inclined.
Captain Poopdeck
Captain Poopdeck took the helm on a table mid-room, Djellabah-clad beats and lots of number related samples, he has some fine new equipment and has spent a deal of the evening reading the manual for some of it. Which is always good to see.
His second set is a stormer, he’s upped the uniform stakes, with a nice yachting hat and pilots shirt. We throw a blue light on him which suits and he gets down to some top rolling beats and bass with, oddly, more counting. English eccentricity combining with deft electronica to marvellous effect.
Zero Map
The Zero Map set is the pivot point of the evening, two projectors throwing flames and custom animations around. Chloe’s voice is more prominent than at previous SoG shows. It has some triple octave dropping device on it and she plays a lot of theremin with a Blade-Runnerish stripe of light across her eyes. Karl’s guitar delays in a set that spirals in a nicely psychedelic manner.
HazanDaz (Howard Spencer and Dan Powell) came out with nylon tracksuits and a quick blast on a whistle, and sat down at a table on the floor like a couple of school kids. Howard had his old wasp, recorder and some small devices and Dan had his laptop and a collection of small things. I was expecting some world cup related daftness, but what we got was some nice chirrups and drones. I could hear the occasional football commentator, and some samples of recorder to echo Howards. So not daft, but enjoyable. The world cup all seems so long ago now. The bane of topicality.
Meatbreak was somewhat noisier, much denser affair than the footy chaps. Although it slides in unobtrusively with some rumbling bass drones before layering some weird trebles and squelches and then some industrial throb beefed up with distorted pulses of distorted bass drum ending with some space squelch.
“Some old stuff, some new stuff and some extemporisation” said Sarah Angliss at the beginning of her set and that pretty much sums it up. She had a new modular synth set up stage front, which although she had to teeter on the edge of the stage to get to it, added some noise and random elements. The carillon, recorder, Hugo and (for the first time in an age) the Crow, were all present along with some penetrating bass and sweeping space noises. So, kind of Sarah Angliss in a spookier, squelchier, slightly more abstract 12 inch form.
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.
Pale Graphs were originally intending to have visuals and for the soundcheck they did, unfortunately circumstances put paid to anyone other than me, Steve who does the electrocreche and Matt the soundman seeing it (it was good, too). Slightly diminished, Pale Graphs did his actual set single handed bathed only in red and green light rather than the digital goodness. His set more than made up for it though, stepping up a couple of notches: detuned basses, switching beeps and full speed skittering rhythms.
Baby was Will on Flute and guitar joined on this occasion by Adam Bushell on vibes and percussion. Adam had the motor going on the vibes for maximum tremolo space effect, before bowing the end of the blocks to get some eerie sound. Will started on flute before switching to acoustic guitar. There was plenty of space and plenty of listening and subtle interplay between Adam and Wills guitar harmonics. The vibes were surprisingly loud.
TCH played as a duo with Mytrip, an Italian noise artist, Tim starting bluesy flourishes on his acoustic while Angel has some droning tones. Tim switches round to electric guitar generating some noise and building towards a monster doom drone through a shedload of effects before biting into a wall of harsh noise and letting it hang before switching back to acoustic for the subdued tail. Although they were in the middle of a tour together this was their first actual collaboration and it worked really well.