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GRAVITATIONAL
PULL
Dispatches
from the Spirit of Gravity / Edition 63 / December 07
Happenings:
DON
TEMPI / MINIMAL IMPACT VS. I’M DR BUOYANT / THE SAMOANS
*
* NEW VENUE * *
The
Three & Ten, 10 Steine St, BN2 1TE
8.30-11pm,
£4/£3 concs.
A
speciality Christmas Spirit of Gravity with festive turns from several
members of the collective but headlining the legend that is Don Tempi.
Don will be playing advertising Jingles from the summer of 1981 on his Casio
Keyboard and comes highly recommended by Hot Roddy aka Same Actor as
"Definitely the funniest thing I've seen this year" and if that's
not a recommendation I don't know what is.
Also appearing will be minimal impact and I’m Dr Buoyant who have
both been working on Christmas antics, and have decided to pool their
talents.
And then rounding things off will be the freeform collaborative effort "The
Samoans" who will be celebrating the late Hunter S Thompsons book
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" with a set of chaotic tomfoolery.
All in all something a little different to the usual serious fare.
Visuals will be provided by _minimalVector and proceedings hosted by our
resident electrocomedian Lee Hume. In a Santa suit.
Don't forget we're at our new venue "The Three and Ten" on Steine
St, just off St James' St and The Old Steine.
·
Greetings:
A
compilation of specially commissioned Christmas tunes is also available via
Chris “Same Actor”’s friend Andy –
featuring Chris in Hot Roddy guise, minimal
impact and Noteherder and McCloud, and many
others. CD-Rs are available from Andy at aen1mpo@yahoo.co.uk.
·
Reviewings:
Spirit
of Gravity
at the Three and Ten, Brighton,
Tuesday 20th November
November
was electro-acoustic month
With
5 days to go to our Electro-Acoustic extravaganza I had an email from Bela
Emerson to say that while on tour in North America she’d been taken with
appendicitis and was now in hospital in Vancouver. Which
meant that Bemass wouldn’t be playing, as the
Swedish 2/3’s didn’t want to travel to play without her. Fair
enough.
Bela
is back in Brighton now, and will be out and about playing around the time
you read this.
That
was a blow, but kind of balanced by the fact we were moving into our new
venue. Indeed we were the first to play. So lots of running around working
out which light switch did what and where are the leads. Stuff like that.
It’s
a nice venue the Three and Ten. The door to the upstairs theatre can be
tricky to find, but that’s balanced out by the fact that you can actually
get a drink between acts. Easily.
So
for the first time in our new home we dimmed the lights and let Dan
Powell, namer of the Spirit of Gravity,
start proceedings.
Dan
was set up at the back, with _minimalVector
doing projections to the front. A thin tremor of glass harmonica,
accompanied by a trembling spot on the screen opened his set, the processing
thickened the sound and the spot replicated into a starfield,
rotating slightly as bells and gentle whistles were added delicately into
the mix along with the occasional red star and geometric constellation.
Overall the effect was like a delicate cactus dream under a desert sky.
Same
Actor set up on
the floor of the low stage with his sitar and laptop in the sights of _minimalVectors
camera feed. Chris played three structured jams, interestingly there seemed
to be two distinct phases to the pieces, a loading phase where it was as if
he was filling up the laptop with sound, priming it before it could cascade
before us into unexpected whitters and sharp
slips of sound. Same Actor defies explanation in many ways: a soundscape
unless its structured, brimming with little hooks unless its amorphous,
there are patterns of rhythm, riffs, washes of sound, melodies and hints of
exotic life.
Bailing
us out for the second time this year ‘J’m
Black pulled a Safehouse Wildcard
Electro-Acoustic Ensemble in two days. Featuring ‘J’m
Black on Castrol oilcan guitar and electronics;
Monty Oxymoron on keyboard; Alasdair Willis on Saxophone, voice and some
other things I couldn’t see; Alistair Strachan
(for the second month!) on Trumpet and electronics, and Matt Grey on
Saxophone and bamboo flute.
They
started with Monty making some sterling space noises, with textural reedy
breaths from Matt and Alasdair, ‘J’ms guitar
abstractly twining round them before picking up into a pseudo sequenced
rhythm that gave rise to a Sun-Ra inspired space jam, with the saxophones
interplaying with the trumpet, Alasdair put down the saxophone to make other
noises, and Monty switched to more orthodox jazz chords on the keyboard
building to a cacophonous finale of elbowed crashes and much wailing and
gnashing of teeth that gave rise to quite a debate afterwards about Jazz, improv
and electronic music.
Mp3’s
and pictures from Spirit of Gravity events are on the SogBlog,
(spiritofgravity-brighton.blogspot.com/),
and there are videos on the Spirit of Gravity MySpace
page (www.myspace.com/thespiritofgravity).
Yours
as ever
El
Maestro Con Queso
Editor.
Gravitational
Pull is the
official newsletter of The Spirit of Gravity Collective, though the
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