Spirit of Gravity, Marlborough Theatre, Brighton, Tuesday 21st November
The Reasonable
Men
A crowded Marlborough stage for The Reasonable Men: Keyboards and FX, electric
guitar and tone generator, acoustic guitar and FX, and computer. Quiet space
sounds, over-reverbed guitar that puts me in some mind of Steve Howe circa 1975.
The acoustic guitar makes no guitar sound it's so effected, and the computer
supplies the motorik grooves (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorik)
that occasionally slip above the horizon. It's subtle and gently interlaced,
and there are highlights like when the guitarist starts using the tone generator,
with the gleeful expression of a 5 year old boy with a new Darth Vader action
figure.
Monster
Bobby
It's been so long since Bobby graced our stage, it's not true. But he was
as fabulous as ever. Insisting that as we are an electronic music night he wasn't
going to play the song I requested before hand "It's unaccompanied guitar",
Bobby put his deliberately low-fi loops to work, tuning the filters on the fly
and occasionally accompanying himself on a quarter sized Casio Keyboard from
his impressive collection. Highlights included an epic "I heard you moved away",
a version of "The burning sensation of early diuretics" that with its detuned
accompaniment was about as far from the Pipettes cover's tuneful cheeriness
as its possible to get, and a new song called "My band" (I'll forget some of
the words, and no wonder: a funny helter skelter of lame excuses from old bandmates).
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Minimal
Impact
Minimal Impact, played a subtle, subdued and strangely truncated set. None of
these are things that I would normally write about for Steve. For which you
might want to see the review of SoG at Wrong Music when it appears. But we did
all dream, just the same and Caleb wrote his down. I heard drones conjured out
of heavily effected farmyard noises, and topically Russian brainwashing techniques,
bass and midrange washes more coarsely grained than usual, subliminally altering
our consciousness.
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Caleb's
dream
Minimal Impact graced the stage bathed by a solitary amber spotlight. A CD deck
some FX and created a Tokyo Temazepam backstreet of fine eastern rain falling
on tramlines and neon. Icy blasts of Nasa class bass tectonics. Playing at a
cinema in your head soon.
As usual mp3's of parts of all three sets will be available at the SogBlog (spiritofgravity-brighton.blogspot.com/).