GRAVITATIONAL
PULL
Dispatches
from the Spirit of Gravity / Edition 54 / April 07
·
Happenings:
DAN
POWELL / MADE OUT OF WOOL / THE GROSS CONSUMER
Marlborough
Theatre, Princes Street, Brighton
8.30-11pm,
£4/£3 concs.
Dan
Powell
a.k.a. the notorious c.h.a.v. the mixing it
favourite returns for elliptical sound wrangling.
Dan Powell brings toys, gongs, bells and possibly a whistle. He adds a
microphone, laptop and chucks the lot in an outsize blender. Blending for
around 30 minutes he then drinks in the results and so can you, if you
really want to.
Made
out of wool
Tapes, hiss, chants and mutilated percussion from girl/boy duo – like a
butterfly egg hatching.
The
Gross Consumer
Trying to make noise he wouldn't want to listen
to with drum machines, samplers and a real lack of talent.
For
details of future Spirit of Gravity events, go to www.spiritofgravity.com/.
·
Greetings:
Coming
up:
The Festival event is just after the festival ends. Tsk,
typical. National Noise Day 31st May features several members of the
Spirit of Gravity Collective: sound installations at the Hobgoblin during
the day, and then mayhem at the Volks Tavern
at night. Should be fun. The collective will
also be represented on the National Noise Day CD. A new Spirit of Gravity
compilation will be available soon, with music made by collective members
inspired by films. The new Hot Roddy CD
"One Liners" by the artist also known as Same Actor is available
directly from the Wrong Music website (www.wrongmusic.co.uk
- go to the store and you can buy it there).
·
Reviewings:
Spirit
of Gravity
at the Marlborough Theatre, Brighton,
Tuesday 27th March 2007
A
sandwich of manipulated proper string instruments with a chewy noise
filling.
The first really beautiful evening of the year, I love it when it's
daylight on my walk down to a show. Starting early for maximum effort was Gus
Plus, this was in two parts, Gus Garside plus minimal impact and
then Gus Garside plus Dan Powell and Thor Magnusson. minimal impact
working unusually as a two piece did their analogue thing and almost
managed to bend Gus' double bass playing to the drone and pulse that is
the trademark mi sound some problems with a noisy lead seemed to keep them
from really swamping the sound but it did occasionally start to roar and
darkly implode as it seemed it could.
Gus plus Thor and Dan was a much subtler beast, Gus' plucking, bowing
being picked up, slowed, looped and skewed by the laptop powered pair.
Picking up from the performance at Safehouse (www.myspace.com/safehousebrighton)
where they had worked individually with Gus this time the pair melded well
as a team and formed Gus' abstractions into some interesting shapes. A
crackly lead provided a rhythm track for a while, slower strokes of the
bow warped down into alien communications or off at strange tangents at
one point all three had fingers thrumming in time.
After the beast of a double bass and the brace of shiny laptops, Chevron
(www.chevvers.com)
broke out the last performance from his trusty battered and barely
surviving mac. With the metal casing broken
off the lid and cracks across the screen, things didn't seem easy. The
sound source Chevvers was using seemed to be
some kind of odd toy-like keyboard with a handle, but I couldn't see it
which he was warping into odd phrases or icy blasts of filtered racket.
Starting all abstract then bringing in a human beatbox
shuffle with some sharper synthetic buzzes, before a breakdown brought in
a preset rhythm track with laser shots and white noise pulses and then
cut/cut/cut/end.
It's hard to believe its three years since Bela
Emerson (www.cellobela.com)
last played for us. Even harder as I can't actually read my notes, but I
don't need to, the crown of the evening was provided by Bela
with an absolutely stunning set. This was Bela's
first performance with her new instrument, a Viol, along with the cello,
musical saw and voice. The Viol she used to introduce new passages, most
effectively I thought during the piece we have on the Sogblog
where she lay it across her lap and plucked it
like a guitar. If you've not seen Bela before
(and if you haven't you really should) what she'll do is play a passage on
the cello and Viol into her pedals and then pick a section for looping, on
top of this she'll add counter melodies or tap the instrument body for
percussion figures or pluck the strings, building up a layered backing
track that she'll play a longer line over (at one point she played a
wonderfully ethereal passage on the saw), then moving on from there maybe
picking up from something in one of the older parts she'll move on,
reconstructing old loops, adding new ones. The method may be well known
now, but Bela is a fearsome improviser and
blessed with a great ear, and the Cello has a tonal range that well suits
this kind of approach. The track on the Sogblog
was the highlight for me, starting with the Viol, adding Cello and voice
(humming, think Edda Dell'Orso
(www.myspace.com/eddadell39orso),
it all merges wonderfully into a lightly textured piece evocative of the
best Italian or Brazilian sound of summer.
As usual the Sogblog has mp3's at spiritofgravity-brighton.blogspot.com/
with all new art photography this month.
Yours
as ever
El
Maestro Con Queso
Editor.
Gravitational
Pull is the
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