JOHN FRANCIS FLYNN/ SOUND PLOTTING (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GO AL FRESCO)

JOHN FRANCIS FLYNN
Rooftop, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-On-Sea
Sat 15th Aug

I confess that the notion of a summer rooftop gig at the De La Warr is what first took my fancy. So, while I had of course checked out Irish folk singer John Francis Flynn on-line before clicking ‘Buy’, I had a less-than-full idea of how he’d be live.

Despite there being no house lights to dim, there was no audience announcement or any other sign the show had started. Instead he eased leisurely into his first number. So small were the beginnings I don’t think many were aware he’s started for some while. Now Flynn looks remarkably like a ’Lord of The Rings’ character. In particular, the one who looks like a warrior prince and, in the second hour of the third film, turns out to be a warrior prince. But rather than some full-throated roar, he sings in an understated, intonatory, gentle-giant fashion, barely moving.

And most of the set, rather than attention-grabbing, was longish numbers which spun a slow magic on you. He plays acoustic guitar, alternating with tin whistle. (Or, as he proudly pointed out, two tin whistles taped together. I expect they call that the Jimmy page tin whistle in the trade.) And was joined by a clarinetist and a droney/ambient keyboardist who doubled on drums. A Dublin base usually means traditional Irish instruments which no English tongue can possibly pronounce. Not here.

The instruments were, at points, looped and treated. But never in an ostentatious, show-off fashion. Had you asked any of the songs whether they were modernised or traditional, I think they’d have shrugged the question off without interest and just carried on. Which always seems the best way.

Then, when you started to think he might have overplayed the slow and mesmeric card, they shifted into a full-voltage rocked-up version of ’My Son Tim’, complete with whoops if not full-throated roars. The clarinetist even swapped to electric guitar, without any shouts of Judas.

My one complaint would be that the drums at times felt mixed too loud, as if they were what we’d come to hear. When they first broke in, I almost jumped!

Support act Iona Zajac had a richly evocative voice, fairly built for folk singing. But her songs only at times lived up to that voice. The best number was a traditional, saved for the finale, where she was accompanied by droney squeeze-box.

Having attended because of the open-air setting, it was something for those surroundings to melt away and be replaced by the world of the songs. There’s the sense with folk music that it’s all still steeped into things, and if we find a way to tune out the workaday world we’ll start to hear it again. I am probably getting carried away now, so had better stop.

A different version of ’My Son Tim’. They got a violin, but we had a rooftop…

Then from one outdoor gig…

SOUND PLOTTING
Stanmer Organics, Falmer, Sussex
Sat 20th Aug

“Set in the verdant sprawling plots of Stanmer Organics”, it says here, “Sound Plotting will be a day of site specific sound art, interactive installations, deep listening, sound walks, improvised music and pop-up performances.” It’s by Lost Property, the collective who previously took over a Napoleonic fort in Newhaven to stage similar shenanigans.

The idea, they confess, first struck them during lockdown when outdoor settings were literally the only show in town. But it’s a good one, which has you running about like a white rabbit, amid a host of other rabbits, dipping your expectant head down a whole bunch of holes. Pretty soon you become almost accustomed to the sight of laptops perched on tree trunks, or speakers hanging from branches. And if not every rabbit hole took you to a Wonderland, then these things are always more than the sum of their parts. Wandering, exploring, is a large part of the fun.

Venturing to see Gagarin in what the programme called ‘the willow dome’ I discovered it to be a dome of willows, which you entered like a teepee. As they swayed in the breeze they created a dappled light show on the ground, nature’s instillation piece. I often contend that ambient electronics work best when you’re not sure whether they’re sourced from natural sounds or not, it seems to create a sweet spot. And the set worked better for me the nearer it got to that sweet spot.

Paul Khimasia Morgan’s set was similarly slow-moving and ambient, but (from what I saw) more based around picking up tones from contact mikes. It’s music which always seems to slightly elude you. The more you try to focus on it, the more it drifts away just past your reach, as if floating on the summer breeze. Which of course only makes it more involving to listen to. (Older readers may remember Morgan put on the Aural Detritus concert series.)

In the midst of all this knob-twiddling and miking-up of things, Jo Burke stood up and sang some a cappella folk songs. And, for that matter, sang them well. Somehow she combined the best elements of professionalism with amateurism, the sense that this stuff is our common property. Much of being a good folk singer may be holding the notes just long enough, so you get the choral-like semi-drone effect without it feeling affected. While at the same time you could feel the old songs doesn’t require reinvention or rejuvenation, that people are simply still singing them, the way they always have.

Baby Hair have a name that sounds like a folk remedy and offered, according to the programme, “minimalist trance pop and ritualistic performance”. They reminded me of the old Marc Bolan adage about pop songs being like spells, as they recited words, struck triangles and blew haunted recorders, until you didn’t know whether to find it charmingly enthralling or sinisterly enchanting. Lyrics were reduced to a few babble phrases, repeated until they became mantras. It took us all somewhere, even if I couldn’t really tell you where.

However, while it’s clearly part of their mission that things have to go on too long, past the three-minute pop-song limit like exceeding the stated dose, they still went on a touch too long. Always leave ‘em wanting more!

So, where will Lost Property be found next? Inexpertly taken photos by me, including the culminating procession by Thee Bald Knobblers.

SUNBURNED HAND OF THE MAN (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES RESUMED)

(Cafe Oto, London, Sat 20th Mar)

The last time I saw self-styled ‘free rock music’ collective Sunburned, nigh-on fifteen years ago, I wrote such a mini-review I may as well quite it in full: 

“This band has a cool idea (or at least an idea I took from them), to take the trajectory of the Sixties San Francisco sound and reverse it. While the original bands got more into the studio and ‘proper’ album releases, why not take it the other way and explore the ‘improvised happening’ angle instead? 

“The results were mixed, but with high points. The band seemed to need a beat going for something to play against, and sometimes floundered without this. And the ‘happening’ elements (brandishing lighted crosses etc) just seemed the wrong end of hippy – ostentatious and self-consciously ‘meaningful’.”

And stuff I’d heard on-line since then I’d liked more. And they have such a floating line-up, it’s unlikely two sightings will be similar. Besides, I haven’t been getting out so much lately…

Indeed, many of the details differed. But what was I to come away with but the same mixed response?

It was in a way summed up the the two vocalists. (Neither of whom, I think, were there last time.) One went in for the ‘outsider’ style often found in free impro music, guttural moans and wails which sound as much a stranger to standards speech patterns as singing conventions, surely too unmediated to be directed in any way, yet too perfectly matched to the music to be anything else. Further enhanced by his live electronic treatment of them.

Rarely were discernible words used, and when they were it was with destructive Dada intent. At one point he recited the well-known Karen mantra, “I want to speak to your manager”, until it truly became a mantra.

While the other vocalist recited his lines theatrically and ostentatiously, like the wrong side of Jim Morrison had broken free and gone solo. Yes, you were clearly not intended to take these altogether seriously. Still didn’t help.

Curiously then, the points where the two overlapped were effective in the extreme. Perhaps because they were doing such different things there was no risk of competition.

The guitar and bass were often restrained while insistent, contributing tones or pulses, sometimes just etherial shimmer. Which would sometimes build up behind the combined vocals, culminating into a cacophony, a soundtrack for the end times.

The accompanying film show had none of the standard morphing psychedelic colours, and was more devoted to juxtaposing images of flying with those of crashing or falling. The opening sequence was of a truck going into a giant-size shredder, a fairly audacious opening statement!

The gig was, I think, a siren attempt to draw you in before deranging all your senses as much as that truck got it. There’s a ‘devil clown’ vibe to it, enhanced by lines about melting faces and all the absurd gestures, such as the drummer sporting a horse’s head as he plays. The band name may be a reference to the price to be paid when gaining wisdom. (Well, either that or I’m just getting carried away.)

Yet again I’m reminded how strange it is that people think psychedelic music is all pastoral and twee, like fairy tales for grown-ups. Whereas it’s more exercised by the desire to drive you out of your senses. And being driven out of your senses every now and then is good for you. Free rock music!

'SILENCE'/ GNOD/ THE NECKS (GIG-GOING + BRIGHTON-FESTIVAL-ATTENDING ADVENTURES CONTD.)

‘SILENCE’
Black Rock, Brighton, Fri 24th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

Teatre Biuro Podrozy (aka Travel Agency Theatre) is an alternative theatre company, operating from Poland since 1988. The publicity reminded me of those Nineties-era performance outfits that came out of squat culture, such as the Mutoid Waste Company or the Dogs of Heaven, some hallucinogenic blend of Hieronymus Bosch and Mad Max set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Yet squat culture was essentially extinguished by Britain, by the simple if brutal expedient of extinguishing squatting. But the Mutoids themselves left the UK for less oppressive climes, so perhaps all that survived elsewhere…

This outdoor performance was described by the progamme as concerning “the continuing story of refugees and migrants caught up in a spiral of war and the dream of escape”. They specified this was in relation to the Middle East, but I was soon wondering whether that was being filtered through a Polish experience of history, a country in Sylvia Plath’s phrase “scraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars”.

The fiery wheel from the publicity image soon appears and becomes a defining metaphor for what followed, as settlers were plagued by successive waves of marauders. The first batch (seen in the illo) look Medievalist, but are soon replaced by a more modern army - as if we’re watching history on fast forward. While the settlers inhabit the stage the marauders often raise themselves off the ground, through stilts or wheels.

The performance well employs the physicality of the theatre. We’re well used to upsetting images shown via a screen, to the point they don’t upset us any more. Whereas you have quite a different reaction when the smell of real fire reaches your nostrils.

But the circularity of the fiery wheel, while driving force, also become a confine. It’s a short show, less than an hour. But to escape repetition each iteration has to add new props. Which at times make it one of those theatre shows where everything is doubtless symbolic of something or other. (Those metal poles, presented by the marauders as if a gift? Not a bleedin’ clue, mate.) Not performed with direct sound, the show had to be highly choreographed, which might well have added to this ritualised sense.

But there was an effective ending, largely through presenting so seemingly prosaic an image. The settlers, presumably realising their only choice has become to flee, made paper boats. A Council worker in high-vis then ambled on to hose the stage down. It’s an open note to end on. Was this the boats finding a tide so they might set sail, or just being washed away like street litter? Something no refugee can know before they start their journey.

It has not, to be honest, been a great Brighton Festival. I found there was less I wanted to see than normal, and from my admittedly limited perspective general attendance seemed down. It’s not that stuff was bad, so much as promising but with promises that were continually not fully fulfilled, the cumulative effect of which is frustrating.



GNOD
Patterns, Brighton, Sat 25th May

Gnod are a band I’ve meant to catch live long before now. But somehow events have conspired against me, and things got to their thirteenth year before it happened.

The gig starts with the double drummers predominant, pounding a circular motif around which the rest of the band arrange themselves, almost like the Butthole Surfers. But the combined force of three… yes, three guitars soon kicks in in earnest. Gnod are, it would be quite hard to miss, a heavy riffing band. Their riffs are powerful and yet unpropulsive. They effectively hang in the air. They’re not just heavy, they’re dark and viscous. Tracks don’t progress so much as thicken.

There are vocal sections, but they don’t really seem the point of the exercise. The music itself does the talking. The set runs all the tracks together, joining them by patches of feedback, which adds to the overpowering sense. The set seems a single thing, a black monolith.

Though at times they lay on repetition to insanity and beyond, just like Sabbath back in the day they’re able to throw in unexpected changes. Guitars gang up in the onslaught but can turn against one another, less counterpoint than counter-forces in grinding tectonic plates of sound. It feels entirely unpredictable at the same time it feels unescapable.

Getting all carried away in the heady atmosphere, I came to see the set as like falling into the power of underworld demons, being smashed into pieces then reassembled in a different order. And, reading a few online reviews, I don’t seem the only one to go in for such fancy talk.

They have a (kind of) religious name. But perhaps more importantly like Swans, who they to some degree resemble, their music isn’t just powerful but overpowering, essentially oppressive. Yet, like Swans, people often talk of it in quite spiritual terms. It’s like the act of surrendering to its onslaught is in itself quite blissfull, as you trust it to take you where you need to be.

Nigh-on thirty minutes of earshred from London the following night…



Then after something that could scarcely be any more of a Saturday let-rip, along came Sunday and...

THE NECKS
St. Luke’s Church, Brighton, Sun 26th May

If I’d not had the pleasure of knowing Gnod before now, in happier news I’ve managed to catch the Necks numerous times, stretching back to Lucid Frenzy’s Ye Olde Print Days. (Even if I missed the last show.) They come self-described as “one of the great cult bands of Australia. Not entirely avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor jazz, the music of The Necks is possibly unique.” As ever the trio provided two long, improvised pieces separated by an interval.

The first was perhaps the classic Necks experience, slow to find its way but progressing like a trickling stream with soon becomes a surging torrent. Lloyd Swanton’s hands on his double bass neck proved almost a timeline for the piece, initially providing brief snaps on the upper neck, slowly migrating down before finally starting with the bowing. Much of Chris Abraham’s piano was quite Minimalist in nature, short phrases played circularly.

Yet, however good it is to hear more Necks, the second piece was more unique and so the one which really made the night. It got going much more quickly, with Swanton bowing from the start. Abrahams played longer, more rolling melodic passages while Tony Buck largely kept to percussion. Combined with Swanton’s slow, measured bowing the effect was mesmerising.

Despite originating in Jazz, surely one of the more urban music forms, and in Sydney, not the smallest of towns, nature analogies do seem to lend themselves to the Necks. Partly to do with their unhurried pacing, partly to do with their music having a kind of understated might.

And the very last sighting, in fact, I was comparing their sound to wide open spaces. Which well matched the first section of this second number. But like a river the Necks can take strange curves. And from there it grew sharper and tighter, like a panorama shot across rolling hillsides which then shifts into close focus. (And if that seems a curveball, wait until you hear what happens mid-way through their latest DC, ’Body.’
There are several bands who could be said to match John Peel’s description “always different, always the same”. But the Necks must be prime among them.

A nigh-on seven minute excerpt, a mere smidgen of a track in Necksland…



… plus the trio in fine form in their home town. Forty-plus minutes duration, but worth staying for…

Coming soon! Blog hols...

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE FESTIVAL

Various venues, Brighton, 26th-28th April

Just when you thought it was safe to take off those noise cancelling headphones… and two and a half years since the last outbreak of international experimental sound shenanigans in central Brighton… Colour Out Of Space is back! Now for the eighth time!

As said over the previous outing, the three days run the full range “from acts you willed to be over to those you never wanted to end.” And, having willed more than a few things to end this year (some played up quite highly in the programme), I won’t be reliving the memory here. With thirty-five acts in total (excluding talks, workshops, installations and a film show), covering the whole thing is hardly possible anyway. Mostly it’ll be stuff worth mentioning in dispatches which gets mentioned in dispatches.

Well, mostly…

Perhaps a minor gripe, but at times I confess I find this scene’s blanket audience approval a little indulgent. When so much that’s being created is highly experimental or entirely spontaneous, or highly experimental and entirely spontaneous, I can see a need for a supportive audience - one willing for things to work rather than fail. But default approval isn’t the same thing as blanket approval. Trying is good, but succeeding better.

Mostly this music doesn’t feature words, even when it involves vocals. And looking at a couple of misses might explain why that might be. The “I’m alienated me” vocals were the worst part of Wild Rani’s set, to the point you really wished she’d let the music do the talking. While Natalia Beylis’ vocals… well, more of a voiceover… felt kind of normalising, with their all-too-obvious swipes at the self-help-self-actualisation industry. Perhaps vocalisation risks banalisation, when we’re actually dealing with things too basic to be said. There’s a reason, after all, why Munch didn’t paint ‘The Speech’.

While conversely, with the Charles Mitchener duo (above), for one long section the vocals consisted of forcing a simple phrase from a reluctant throat, where the inability to articulate became not a barrier to overcome but the point of the thing. The result was a free jazz set which I actually liked! (If that sounds an odd title for a duo, it’s a team-up of Neil Charles and Elaine Mitchener.)

Then again, Glands of Eternal Secretion’s set didn’t get into gear until the second section. Where he gave up scraping tins with kitchen knives (an action which proved to have diminishing returns), to tell an absurdist narrative, no more reducible to sense than the music it accompanied.

Olivier Brisson didn’t just collage together sounds from a range of sources, including tapes, samples and live sounds. His set seemed to combine different ways of listening, from composite sounds to close listening to - like a movie ranging from cinemascope to microscopic view.

Whereas, though equally composed of samples, Red Brut seemed to smooth them together, blending them into something which always seemed to make some sort of sense. (If one you could never actually describe.) In the distinction between Dadaist collage (rough, juxtapositional, abrasive) and Surrealist (presenting the strangest of things as if somehow credible), she was definitely in the second group. Though apparently she also drums in a No Wave band, this set couldn’t have been any more sublime.

Laptop artists can sit so still on stage you find yourself believing they’re transmitting music by the power of thought alone. Then there’s others who, without touching anything as mainstream as an instrument, couldn’t be any more hands on. The show had the smarts to place Jérôme Noetinger’s (above) tape manipulations in the middle of the auditorium, and I got to sit fairly close.

I always get these details wrong but it appeared to me he was live-recording direct onto tape, while also manipulating its sound with magnets, found objects and so on. (I also watched him set up and, archetypically Gallic, his first action was to uncork, scrutinise the label and sip from a bottle of red before touching the first bit of equipment.)

Though where you’d place Af Ursin in that range I’m not sure. He played bowed strings against metal plates. At least as far as you could tell, as he stood behind the plates, blocking off any view of him above some very rock’n’roll-looking ankles. One hand many have been playing bass and the other treble, but that was about the only concession to standard musicality. The result was spectral if anything ever deserved the word. You’d tune in to the point where relatively small shifts seemed magnified. If was one of those sets which convinces you consensus reality was only ever a hoax, and is now breaking down all around you. At least for their duration.

As a gag, for their booklet photo, the Elks superimposed their heads over a group shot of Metallica (above). Knowing little of Metallica, and generally being happier that way, I knew not of this. (I also believe everything I read on social media.) So, spying slouched figures in ripped jeans, I assumed a noise band.

In fact they hovered at the limits of perceptibility as much as Af Ursin. Two wind players barely breathed down their instruments, accompanied by two electronic know twiddlers. The music happened not by outright statement but by the barest hints and whispers. My over-poetic analogy would be coming across an ancient tablet, the script upon it sand-blown and the strange characters barely discernible, but all the more compellingly mysterious for that.

The show had the smarts to programme two complementary opposite acts for the Saturday night finale. White Death’s set was almost as if broadcast by sonar - warm, fuzzy and resonant. It was the musical equivalent of being read a bedtime story, simultaneously comforting and bracingly adventurous. The performer was notably pregnant, which led to musing how that might have affected her set.

…shortly followed by Bill Nace and Twig Harper (above). Nace produced wave after wave or bowed, treated guitar, while Harper spoke in tongues over the top. Not music which immersed you in it but which struck you powerfully. If White Death took you below the waterline, they were all stormy surface.

As said after the third outing, it shouldn’t be assumed a festival such as this covers the ’edge’ of music, as if inhabiting a narrow margin where only one thing is on offer. It’s the very reverse, demonstrating how closed-up our conception of ‘music’ normally is. You generalise at your peril. But it was noticeable how many sets felt mediumistic, in one way or another. Inaudible voices were in regular supply, often in foreign languages. (Perhaps not to the performers. But we’re going with my subjective reaction here.)

Of course those who hear messages in short wave radio static from their dead Auntie Mable are being hubristic, assuming the universe must be full of decodable messages meant directly for them. But we can apply the principle more generally, where the purpose of tuning into the ether is not to receive some specific thing. but make us more reflective. I believe Huxley’s phrase about cleansing the doors of perception may have already been claimed by some band. But if it hadn’t, it would fit in well around here.

The three days finished with Tomutontto (back from the fourth outing), playing what could only be described as dance music for the faerie folk. To which people responded with yer actual dancing, not always a COOS staple! Yet in another way it was a fitting finale…

For COOS has a somewhat Brigadoon-like existence; vanishing from sight until you believe it will never visit our Earthly shores again, and you probably just imagined the whole thing anyway, then reappearing unexpectedly to circumvent all our common laws and customs. Will there be a ninth? It’s probably like one of those movies ending with the hushed line “will we ever see the like of this again?”

JAMES CHANCE + THE CONTORTIONS/ LOST PROPERTY ARTS COLLECTIVE (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

JAMES CHANCE + THE CONTORTIONS
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 16th March

None less than Simon Reynolds claimed that by “combining [James] Brown with Iggy [Pop], [James] Chance invented punk funk.” Legend has it that as the Eighties New York punk scene hated disco with a passion, finding it wishy-washy and platitudinous, his primary motive was simply to wind them up.

Though his take was unique. Talking Heads smartly espoused the very image every other dance outfit tried to suppress, the uptight white salary worker trying to loosen his tie for the weekend. Conversely, Chance took funk’s raw punch and married it to punk’s swift upper cut. Against David Byrne’s bespectacled nerd image, Chance collided punk with showbiz - with slicked back hair and Fifties suits. Band names varied, but tended to the classic Person and the Band formulation. But Chance and Byrne did something in common, both were white folks taking on a black influence their own way, without trying to merely imitate it.

Commercially, of course, one of these worked better than the other. The last time David Byrne played Brighton it was the Dome, I couldn’t afford a ticket and was told afterwards he was rubbish. Chance doesn’t even fill the smaller Haunt. His name seems a little more legendary than known. In fact, it was only spying him honking his horn in a recent BBC documentary on Basquiat, that I realised he was still around.

Truth to tell, it’s an oddly uneven set. I found the frequent cover versions just derailed momentum. Even when they were tracks I liked, such as Gil Scott Heron’s ’Home Is Where The Hated Is’. Chance’s voice doesn’t seem up to them, less in terms of singing ability than diction and phrasing. They seemed the sort of maketime venture you’d embark on if you didn’t have enough of your own material to fill a set. Hardly the case with Chance, which made their inclusion all the more puzzling. At such times I was reminded of seeing Ed Sanders playing with the next generation Fugs, an older star relying on a younger backing band to carry him through.

And yet what was especially odd was that when things worked they really worked. It had the involving dance-floor readiness of funk at the very same time it sounded askew and discombobulated. Though Chance is a free jazz fan, there’s only one total wig-out - right near the end. The sound may well be best summed up by the lyrics to his best-known track, ’Contort Yourself’, “Now is the time to lose all control/ Distort your body, twist your soul.”

The guitarist seemed especially gifted, able to come up with inventive breaks and flourishes, at one point just tapping the neck to shake the strings, while always keeping the beat.

Listen, for example, to ‘Do The Splurge’ and try to tell me this is not a fine thing…



James Chance & The Contortions - "Do the splurge" from Agata Urbaniak on Vimeo.


LOST PROPERTY ARTS COLLECTIVE
Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, Fri 15th March

Lost Property, the folk who put on the famed Fort Process festival, explain this event thusly: “In the spirit of the creative happenings of the Sixties, Brighton Arts Lab is a new bi-monthly event, serving up performances, spoken word, workshops, film and exhibitions. Each event is themed around different aspects of creativity.”

Jobina Tinnemas’ set seemed more effective than the earlier one at the Radio Three Exposure festival. An engaging character, she worked better in the smaller venue. She’d cheerily explain the workings of her kit and sources of her samples, as if we’d all been invited back to hers. I was less keen on her final piece, however, which brought in overly familiar regular dance beats

Unsoundproofed central venues often suffer from street noise. Yet Anti-Pattern (aka Al Strachan) smartly summoned and incorporated it, by placing a microphone outside the window. Playing in the main corridor, essentially one long window, the street outside became effectively one giant visual to his work. You had to keep telling yourself the sounds weren’t inbuilt.

Ed Briggs started out with some fairly regular organ sounds, which could have passed as a stab at Bach, only to then take off into realms unknown. Two players worked one organ. At one point, as one worked keys and the other pedals, it sounded in no way like a single instrument. The set was only marred by an outbreak mid-way of Industrial Satanist vocals, which seemed straight out of Eighties cliche-dom. (You know the sort of thing. “I will tar your very soul. I will scratch your car door up and down, and not even say I’m sorry.”)

Fettucini Spicer improvised while facing off against one another, rival sonic arsenals set before them, like Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in some Surreal duel.

Stone Cornelius’ miked-up-knitting piece seemed mere gimmickry to me. But overall, the success rate was high and the night had a good feeling to it. The Phoenix Gallery works well, not only taking it away from regular rock venues but, multi-roomed, able to keep the action going. More seems promised, which we can only hope for.

Jobina Tinnemans…



Jobina Tinnemans - "Varesotto" from Agata Urbaniak on Vimeo.


…Ed Briggs, though here called Black Tiger…



Black Tiger from Agata Urbaniak on Vimeo.


…and last, but not least, Antipattern with cameo street sounds…



Antipattern from Agata Urbaniak on Vimeo.

JOHNNY MARR/ ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE/ DAMO SUZUKI/ THE SEEN (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

JOHNNY MARR
Brighton Dome, Fri 9th Nov

I first saw the now-legendary Smiths in this very venue. They finished the gig with ’Meat is Murder, the first time I ever heard that track. Naturally enough, it seared itself into my still-young brain. It was not just a great gig, but one of the gigs by which other gigs should be measured.

No matter how often it’s done, it’s still weird to see them used now as a signifier of that era. Because back then they seemed the very antithesis of all about them. As wrote Simon Reynolds in ‘Shock and Awe’: “The Smiths represent the common people, all those marginalised or left behind in the enterprise-culture Eighties.”

In sound and look they represented a a kind of template outsiderhood. You belonged if you were gay, straight but sensitive and unmacho, celibate by design, celibate despite your most strenuous efforts, not necessarily celibate at all and pretty much all the rest of it. The message was - to us, the outside is the inside, uncool is our cool. In the words of the song “You shut your mouth/ How can you say/ I go about things the wrong way?”

But of course a lot has happened since then…

The first thing Marr does on taking the stage, before speaking, is a quick flurry on his guitar. And he is of course not just a great but an exemplary guitarist, with a signature style you recognise in just a few seconds. Tony Curtis’ description of Marilyn Monroe’s walk, “it’s like jello on springs”, pretty much covers it. He studiously avoids show-off displays and cliches. And while he does run into solos these days, they’re always short and sweet.

At which point it occurs to me I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him sing. (Despite this album being his fourth. Sometimes things pass me by.) Whatever you might say about Morrissey these days, and let’s take all that stuff as read, he had one of the great character voices - a classic case of Not a Good Singer, But A Great Singer. Marr’s voice is admittedly less strong. At best there’s a Bernie Sumner purposefully grey quality to it.

And this is most apparent, inevitably enough, with the Smiths songs. ’Bigmouth Strikes Again’ may well need the big mouth behind it. But there’s a powerful version of ’Headmaster Ritual’. ’How Soon is Now’, effectively the Smiths anthem, already quoted up above, concluded the main set. The vocals are perhaps more intonatory. But it’s based around a pulse over which other elements are orchestrated. It’s effectively an extended remix of itself, the ’I Feel Love’ of outsiderhood. Not a recipe for a live number. Yet somehow it becomes little short of heartstopping.

He also manages a storming version of Electronic’s ’Getting Away With It’, which I’d previously dismissed as filler. Though admittedly the other Electronic track was filler.

But the gig’s about, and dominated by songs from, his new album ’Call the Comet’. Not all tracks are memorable, but some shine. There’s the jangly, exuberant post-Sixties sound you’d expect, but elsewhere things are sharper and punchier. One, which in police parlance I now know to be called ’New Dominions’, verges on electrobeat. Marr without Morrissey is revealed to be more Mod than Indie, focused and cool rather than effusive and exuberant.

The gig may be summed up by his warning that i-phones needed to be charged before breaking into ’There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.’ Then, after the obvious finale, seemingly unable to resist, calling out “let’s do one more!” He could have done that a few times over without much disagreement.

I believe I may have mentioned 'How Soon Is Now'...




ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE
Patterns, Brighton, Fri 2nd Nov

Psychedelic warlords Acid Mothers Temple are of course no strangers to Lucid Frenzy’s shores. Because, after all, who could pass up another chance to see them? All you can really be sure of in advance is that psychedelic freak-outs will be involved, and they’ll play some version of ’Pink Lady Lemonade’. (Essentially, their theme number.)

Ever shifting, they have a new vocalist. The most remarkable thing about which is that she’s actually a vocalist. At times the vocals are even given space to dominate the number. (I’m not clear whether Cotton Casino, credited on the new album, is a pseudonym for Jyonson Ysu, credited for the gig. It gets tricky when those line-up shifts combine with their love of wacky pseudonyms. Whichever, the gig seemed to involve more singing than the album.) An early number floats past like a cross between Black Sabbath’s ’Lagunae Sunrise’ (if you don’t know it, Sabbath’s least Sabbath track) and dream pop. At other points she chants and wails like a dervish.

Guest artist Geoff Leigh, of Henry Cow fame, (who’s not on the new album) started off playing more than a little tentatively on flute, as if unsure what his contribution should be. But he became more involved as the gig went on, and fared better when pumping on sax for the more freak-out sections. (His default instrument, so I’m told.)

The gig somehow felt like a completely spontaneous event while also a carefully orchestrated study in contrasts. A stripped-down groove just seemed to getting tighter and tighter, before breaking into ’Pink Lady Lemonade’. (Told you that would come up.) The finale, which I now know to be be ’Cometary Orbital Drive 0011’ started with another of those mesmerising mantra riffs the band seem endlessly possessed of, before building a huge free-form freak-out around it.

It’s something of a cliche to describe psychedelic bands as sonic cosmonauts. But Acid Mothers Temple do genuinely earn the analogy. They’re fast becoming to psychedelic music what Miles Davis was to jazz.

Speaking of ’Cometary Orbital Drive’, from Norwich two nights later…



DAMO SUZUKI
The Con Club, Lewes, Sat 3rd Nov

I’m not sure now which I’ve seen more out of Acid Mothers Temple and ex-Can frontman Damo Suzuki. But I keep coming back to both for the same reason, the utter disregard for predictability. I always say, when you’re tired of trance-out, long-form musical improvisations with shaman-chanted vocals, you’re tired of Damo Suzuki.

This outing features many of the same players from Zoff as previously, though not an exact duplication. And, perhaps for that reason, things kicked in more quickly than at other time.

The previous gig had gone through peaks and valleys, picking up a head of steam, pushing forward, then gliding down the other side. This time, though it had its share of dynamics, it involved more subtle shifts and gradations. As often with improvised music, you’d hear something sublime rise up but have to accept it would shortly be gone again, and contented with the way it would just be replaced with something else.

Then for the finale everything did pick up that head of steam. In his Can days they called those pulverising riffs Godzillas, presumably for the way they’d mightily strike aside all before them.

Alas, what got going quickly was also quickly gone. They played for less than an hour, which with little doubt left the audience wanting more. But perhaps that’s a disadvantage of this type of music. When the players themselves can’t tell what’s about to be unleashed, it’s all but impossible to plan things out like that in advance. You have to take what comes.

This time there is footage from the gig. Of course you really need to hear the thing as a whole, but it might give you a flavour…



That’s two Dictionary Pudding gigs into two successive nights. And two dollops of evidence that the good folks there don’t just put on notable headliners, but endeavour to fill their bills as best they can. (Even if a tardy show-up like me often ends up missing the support acts.)

Supporting AMT, it would be tempting to describe the Hare and The Hoofe as having asked the reality-warping question “what if Prog could be fun?” Which isn’t quite right, for while they tend to perform song cycles they’re beat-driven affairs packed with verve and energy, with few to none Mellotron solos. They’ve coined the term “popepretta” to describe them. They come complete with absurd stage costumes and vocals reminiscent of the theatricality of of Gilbert and Sullivan.



Supporting Damo were Adrena Adrena (as covered a while back) and Chop Chop, with their edgy but catchy off-beat funk, as if insistently repeating only a fragment of a melody behind stream-of-consciousness lyrics. The singer seemed a mixture of wildly agitated and effortlessly cool. Their only merch was a lyric book, with a download code for the music, suggesting he may primarily be a poet.



THE SEEN
Onca Gallery, Brighton, Wed 7th Nov

Part of the Aural Detritus Concert Series

“Three’s a crowd” may well be a maxim invented by and for impro musicians. The genre relies on players listening intently to one another, no-one having any notion what those others will do until they’ve done it. Which makes it easy enough to see why the more manageable duos - okay, sometimes trios - predominate.

Mark Wastell, conversely, has thrown such caution to the wind, and has been convening the large impro ensemble the Seen since 2002. (You have to say ‘convened’ rather than formed, as they never play with the same line-up twice.) Intrigued if this would even prove possible, I watched some clips on-line. And concluded they worked by building up a drone-like wall of sound, which each player thickened rather than added an individual line.

As it turns out, I was quite wrong. Though there were (count ‘em!) eight players the performance started out quietly, and ethereally, a composite of fragmentary sounds. The introductory section seemed to me to be made entirely by contact mikes, though I’m always getting that kind of detail wrong. It creaked, ratted and shook, like the door opening to the spookiest of haunted houses.

From there it sometimes did build up into that wall of sound, but not in any even or schematic way. Moving through various sections like taking the scenic route across itself, it included feedback, full-on ambient sound sources and stuff that might have actually come from some kind of instrument. It was numinous and exploratory – like exploring the rooms of some old mansion, your every sense stimulated and alert.

They played for a little less than an hour. And what wasn’t quite enough for Damo Suzuki would normally be a much longer time for a full-on impro outfit. The large ensemble, rather than turning into too much confusion, kept things both effective and moving. Pretty much every player dropped out at some point, awaiting their moment to come back in. So however much there were highs and lows in terms of dynamics, musical quality was pretty much a constant.

From elsewhere, from last year. Though it was enjoyable, if something to a challenge, to try and match players to sounds at Onca, this shadowy underlit venue does more to match the mood of the music…



Coming soon! More gig-going adventures...

FORT PROCESS/ HUGO TICCIATI'S 'LOOPING TIME' (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

FORT PROCESS
Newhaven Fort, Sat 22nd Sept



So happily, perhaps the only music and sound art festival to be held in a Napoleonic fort got a sequel. (Actually a second sequel, alas I gormlessly missed the first occurrence.) Again it promised to “cover the cornerstones of improv, experiments, dance and noise”. With multiple events going on simultaneously, I can only concentrate on a few highlights here. Someone else’s path might not have crossed mine at all.



Most accounts I read from the last event focused on how brilliantly inappropriate it was for such an event to take over a venue based around war defences. Perhaps “make weirdo music not war” could be its slogan. But as I watched a sound installation emit spectral bleeping from the fort’s ramparts(‘Arpeggi’ by Mike Blow, handily pictured) I think I find it more splendidly appropriate.

Perhaps I just spent too much of my seventies youth watching ’Doctor Who’ and the like. But those were the days when budgets for location shooting stretched no further than Surrey, while the Radiophonic Workshop was at the show’s disposal. So the alien was often conceived of as a sonic aesthetic, strange sounds that required decoding. While the military provided the role of controlling parents, locking the weird away from us, causing us to seek it out. (Perhaps significantly, another of Blow’s installations, ’Arpeggi’, “uses hacked ex-military hardware to create music.”)



Many installations worked interactively, as what Blow called “automatic music”, collaborating with either the audience or the venue. In Adam Bastana’s ’A Room Listening To Itself’ (also handily pictured) microphones were arranged radially, to pick up from speakers. To add some audience involvement I lightly tapped one speaker, to hear a drum roll slowly spread round the room.

At other times it was the other way, the venue seemed to interpret the work for you. The sub lows of Disinformation’s ’National Grid’ were smartly located in the deep Caponier tunnels. So, while the indicia spoke of links between the grid network and the human body, I thought more of the echoes and resonances in caves which are supposed to have stimulated the first human music.

Maria Marzaioli’s ’PWM’ used four audio loops culled from improvisations. With each loop of a different length, new combinations were constantly being created. But, particularly with the use of recognisable instruments, it was almost impossible not to listen to as a ‘real’ quartet. This time the work may have influenced the setting. For I found the sound bleed (particularly between the indoor works), not distracting but enhancing of the overall effect - as if the whole festival became one meta sound art work.

The programme described Ore as the “originator of the truly singular genre Tuba Doom”. Ah, those genre tags always start off as a gag! But give it six months and at a gig you’ll run into some bozo insisting he was into Tuba Doom before anyone else. In fact, he will probably turn out to be me.

Wandering, soaking stuff up, I stumbled upon their set mid-way. A tuba and trombone player were working just slightly out of time with one another, creating an enticingly ‘bent’ effect. Already pretty minimal, that actually proved the dynamic centre of the piece as they shifted into unison for the finale. It seemed forever half-emerging out of drone, as if something shifting into view. Minimalist in the Morton Feldman sense, where the sombre meets with the serene. If music like this doesn’t progress much, it’s because it marinades. Like a fermenting spirit its taste becomes stronger and stronger.

Franco-Finnish trio Ritual Extra were similarly minimal, in fact so slow to start you wondered if they’d resolved to play only for the super-patient. (Compared to these guys, the Necks plunge straight into the deep end.) Luckily, the wait was worth it. The drummer struck his cymbals softly but so rapidly as to produce a shimmering tone. While an acoustic guitar took up a more percussive role, strumming and thwacking, as clear-voiced folk chanting sailed across the both of them.

The absolute absence of any performance element was striking, each person’s movements economically concerned only with playing. The singer sat stock still, gazing into the middle distance, shifting only his mouth.

Alas this time I missed the ending, heading off as I was to see Rhys Chatham. Who marks a different strand of Minimalism again. Having previously worked with La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Glenn Branca, tonight he was playing alongside only himself. In ’Pythagorean Dreams’, he’d switch between guitar, flute and some kind of mini-trumpet, looping down layers of himself as he went. The effect was rather like that game where you keep placing one hand atop another, ceaselessly giving off the effect of building up to some crescendo. Minimalist and musically rich at one and the same time.

I romantically imagined each loop had some in-built half-life, so nothing decayed away but each new element added to the expanding richness of the underlying sonic loam. He was probably just fading them down himself as he went, but that’s what I liked to think.



I’d watched some vidclips of AJA (above) before the day, which at the time I dismissed as “just a performance”. And true, her noise electronica is serviceable but bog-standard beat-bashing. (Certainly nothing to compare with Ewa Justka’s merciless intensity from the last event.) But, when you see it live, you can only conclude - what a performance! This time rather than work with the setting her act burst beyond its confines. Despite playing in a small and crowded room, lacking even the most basic stage, she came on as if she had Iggy Pop in her blood.

Noise music is notoriously for being ‘manpainy’. Think of the characteristic hunched pose under hoodie and over microphone. By way of cheery contrast, AJA sports - and fully inhabits - the most outrageously flamboyant costumes, from which she engages fully with the audience. After Tuba Doom perhaps we’ve hit on another new genre - Glam Noise.

In may day, women would often tell each other the expression “nothing better than having a good cry”. Yet of course there’s something better, and her whole act seems intent on proving the inherent value in having a good scream. So, despite all the volume, or more likely because of it, it’s a wholly uplifting experience to witness. The programme described her act as “cathartic”, not a word they were using in vain. And in this day and age, it’s often appealing to discover something where you do have to be there, which isn’t YouTubeable.

Overall Fort Process is one of those labours of love and (the right kind of) lunacy, put on by afficionados for afficionados, just to see the thing happen. It’s proof corporate crap hasn’t colonised the whole of our lives just yet.

Photo of AJA from the event’s website, other snaps mine. More where they came from here.

Some proper photos from Agata Urbaniak here

Last time I managed to post a video of the previous event. So let’s keep that tradition up…



‘LOOPING TIME’ BY HUGO TICCIATI + O/MODERNT CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Kings Place, London, Fri 21st Sept



This concert, part of the Time Unwrapped season, focused on string-based Minimalist music.

‘Shaker Loops’ (1978) , while an early work of John Adams’, is regarded as something of a classic, and rightly so. It contains many Minimalist elements, including a basis in a pulsing beat and an ability to keep things simple. In the second movement, a double bass plucks at a solitary string at regular intervals.

Yet, perhaps in retrospect, it’s easy to hear how he was already moving into Post-Minimalism. An earlier version in Adams’ own words “crashed and burned”, partly because it restricted itself to a string quartet. Adams responded by ramping up the number of players, first to a septet and (as performed here) a full string orchestra - “thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power.”

But rather than Post-Minimalist it should be thought of as Just Romantic Enough. The reference to the Shakers, a religious group from the American Pioneer days, already gives the music more of specificity than normally found in Minimalism. What amounts to a violin solo appears midway. It very much builds to a climax, even though it continues from there and ends somewhere much closer to the beginning.

And what could be more Romantic than imitation of nature? Adams has said himself the first movement in particular was inspired by the rippling of water, the surface refracting the sunlight caught by those amassed shimmering strings.

But ultimately, as is typical of him, Adams makes the unlikely combination virtuous. Much like nature, the piece belies our constructed notions of what’s simple and what’s complex and involved.

Angel’s Share by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur, was a UK premiere. As anyone who’s seen the Ken Loach film knows, the title refers to the amount of whiskey which evaporates during distilling.

The piece is full of ideas, and has some great sections. It opens etherially, with the violins and violas creating the most disembodied sounds. Quite late on, it suddenly breaks out into a folk dance rhythm. Yet overall it didn’t hold together. I found it kept slowly losing my interest, then doing something to suddenly grab it back, only to lose it again a short while later.

While the other three composers were still with us, Perotin’s ’Viderunt Omnes’ stems from the Twelfth Century. The ensemble entered from all four corners of the auditorium already playing, and segued surprisingly neatly into Philip Glass’s Third Symphony.

Symphonies may be antithetical to the strictures of high Minimalism, and indeed Glass didn’t embark on any until the Nineties when he was already leaving that behind. (This was composed in 1995.) It does make a good companion piece to ’Shaker Loops’, there’s even a violin lead in the third movement. (The programme uses Classical terms, such as “chaconne”, which I don’t claim to understand.)

But it remains a blend rather than a break, Glass finding a sweet spot where Minimalist mantras combine with rich and resonant melodies. And the Minimalist spirit may be retained most in it’s unhurried pace, creating something stately without any pomp.

THE COSMIC DEAD/ PREOCCUPATIONS/ STEVE EARLE/ FORT PROCESS DISPERSION/ RADIO 3 EXPOSURE (SUMMERTIME GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

THE COSMIC DEAD
Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Thurs 12th July

On my second sighting of the Cosmic Dead, I remain as convinced as ever of the virtue of their collision of space rock with noise. (And before anyone starts, I know officially space has no sound to make noise in.)

Among the many reasons to despise New Age music is it’s fondness for star field backdrops, like they see the universe as some giant chill-out room complete with twinkly little lights. The cosmos… the actual cosmos is vast, unknowable, full of convulsive forces which would tear us apart in an instant. The drummer’s T-shirt promises “the light will devour us all”, which seems to sum the whole thing up quite nicely.

In fact since last time the band have had their own upheavals, and now sport both a new drummer and keyboard player. They start, perhaps unexpectedly, by singing and playing along to the pre-show Abba track over the PA. They then launch into a full-on noise number, with just a repeatedly chanted mantra vocal at the centre of the primordial chaos. This proved a baptism of fire for some, and numbers had thinned out before that track was done. Each to their own, I suppose.

Things coalesce a little more after that initial big bang. The penultimate track even has something of a groove, with the singer spinning seemingly spontaneous words about seagulls. (After someone in the audience kept shouting about them.)

Then the final number is lumbering, monstrous and very definitely riff-led. As if the sonic assault wasn’t enough on it’s own the band, while playing, dismantle the crowd barriers and venture out into the audience. As they handed out mikes to budding primal screamers, I assumed things would only degenerate, plunging into ear-shredding chaos until the plug was pulled. But they somehow managed to regroup back on stage and hammer that riff back into shape.

Which seemed to sum up the whole thing. They’re illustrating very much the opposite of the steady stake theory of the universe. Creation and destruction not as opposing poles but ebbing and flowing tides of energy. You’re probably wondering if I’m going to go on and say it was both lucid and frenzied. The answer is yes. Yes I am.

Lo-fi but from yer actual gig! Watch out for your lugholes…



PREOCCUPATIONS
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 14th July

Preoccupations channel the music of the post-punk era, to the point be they could be a Factory signing who somehow fell through a time vortex and found themselves in contemporary Canada. There’s the freak disco of A Certain Ratio (as sighted only recently and in this very venue), to the point that when they spot a mirror ball aloft they ask for it to be lit up. But there’s also the haunted spaces of Joy Division and the “raining shards of glass” guitar sound of Keith Levene.

The guitarists often swap over to keyboards, though you’d often not know which was chosen sight unseen. Band member Scott Munro has commented “my ultimate goal would be to make a record where nobody knows what instrument is playing ever.”

They use cross-rhythms, the drummer in particularly could often be playing in the opposite direction to the rest of the band. (In, you know, a good way.) But the rhythms are themselves often pretty off-kilter, which makes for music weird down to it’s very marrow. The result sounds spectral and visceral at the same time, like a hand passing through a wall that still punches you in the chest.

Most people will know about the controversy over the band’s original name. Now they are no longer trading at Viet Cong, there doesn’t seem much reason to still bring the thing up. But in a way it shows how dodginess differs through the generations. Sixties anti-war activists would often uncritically champion the Viet Cong, in order to neatly divide the world into Yankee Imperialists and freedom fighters. Whereas now the term’s just become a sign, detached from any context and interchangeable with other signs - the way the coins in your pocket are interchangeable. And the only thing worse than bad politics is no politics.

Different venue but same tour…



STEVE EARLE + THE DUKES
The Dome, Brighton, Tues 17th July

Despite his high reputation and multiple years of service, I wasn’t previously very up on American country artist Steve Earle. In fact the catch-up nature of the experience reminded me of seeing Richard Thompson in this venue seven years ago.

So much so, in fact, I’d be tempted to call Earle the Richard Thompson of country. Both have been making music since the late Sixties (’68 and ’67 respectively). Both gigs focused on recent material but kept up a high hit rate, despite Earle playing the best part of two hours. Both gigs focused on roots music, but weren’t so exclusive as not to pull on several roots. Earle took in rock’n’roll and blues, including a cover of ‘Hey Joe’.

Earle is regarded as a more political songwriter than Thompson, something that comes up in his choice of emblem (a skull combined with a hammer and sickle) and his ’tween-song chat. (He is, it transpires, not the greatest fan of his current President. Can’t imagine why.) But rather than polemics he mostly writes character songs, which is often the best way into politics anyway, so even there the difference isn’t so great.

There was a strangely familiar deja vu effect where I’d keep imagining I’d heard songs before. Even if I have heard more Earle than I remember, it couldn’t have been in those numbers. I suspect it’s more a mark of their rootsiness, they work in so well they feel like they’re already in your blood on first hearing.

I may be remiss not just on Earle but Country in general. After the Thompson gig, I did manage to catch up on him at least a little. Whereas, several years back, after seeing Emmylou Harris (again in this venue) I vowed to start digging into her catalogue. But alas life intervened. There’s neither enough hours in the day, nor days in the week. Hopefully, I’ll have more luck in Earle’s case. If anyone has a favourite album to recommend…

From the gig! Yes, really, from the gig…



FORT PROCESS DISPERSION
De-la-Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sun 15th July

This “dispersion” was described by organisers Lost Property as “an all day building takeover at the historic and magnificent De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill”, as a warm-up for the full-on Fort Process in September.

Among all the noise assaults and musical experimentalism, The Legend of St. Winiborde was something of a surprise - though a welcome one. It was effectively a throwback to 1972, when folk music, left field strangeness and children’s TV didn’t seem like exclusive categories. It was a part sung part narrated fable, somewhat in the tradition of Oliver Postgate. The music went from charming naive melodies, illustrated by both the calm measured-voiced narration and the slideshow of simple lino cut drawings, to stranger instrumental sections.

Ostensibly it was quite a conservative story, how the natural harmony of a society is disrupted by someone who dares question things. Yet the evil apprentice figure became semi-sympathetic, perhaps even the protagonist. In other words, even his disruption became part of the natural order.

Whereas Plurals most definitely were leaving behind standard instrumentation. Two of the trio had guitars, but used them sparingly and as input devices, rather than as primary instruments. They also utilised radio voices, though I’m not sure whether they were recorded or plundered live from the airwaves.

The most common complaint about this sort of music is that it doesn’t go anywhere. But that’s just imposing rules on it from other genres, which don’t apply. First, it did develop, in the sense of shifting gears, building sounds up until they mulched into a drone, they graffiti-ing noise guitar on that wall of sound, before returning to the more ambient beginning.

But more importantly, it’s not intending to go anywhere so much as open up a space for you to get lost in. The band’s name surely comes from adding things together, not taking them forward. But there’s more to it than that…

Recently deceased Steve Ditko, genius comics creator (hurrah!) and Objectivist tub-thumper (boo!) took as his credo the phrase “a thing is what it is”. And if that sounds confining then fortunately its not even true on it’s own terms. Metamorphosis happens in nature all the time, and failure to notice it is Cro Magnon thinking calling itself common sense.

And a great appeal of this type of music is that a thing doesn’t have to be what it is, that it can’t be broken back down into notes like a sentence into syllables. Particularly with the addition of the radio voices, it had a liminal ‘between stations’ feel. Even what you hear you only semi-discern, like spying the shapes of objects in the fog.

Pursuing the radio metaphors, Johanna Bramli was less on my wavelength. Her set had its moments but was marred for me by some saccharine la-la vocals, which I just found New Agey.

The visuals, on the other hand… There’s no absolute need for a visual element to this type of music. The only thing I’d say is when there isn’t, arranging things in a traditional audience/ performer face-off becomes a bit redundant. But when there is, it should be done like this. Anything suggesting the tropes of rock videos or even any kind of narrative is clearly out.

This focused on “the brink of nature”, as the indicia said to an otherwise unremarkable exhibition elsewhere in the De La Warr. It’s the point where the natural tips into the abstract - roving close-ups of the pattern of tree bark, rock surfaces or the tide lapping on the shore. It’s not about introducing the foreign but reframing what you already see, finding the strange in the familiar.

The one thing you could say about this warm-up, without fear of contradiction, was that it was quite definitely warm. The De La Warr was essentially built for days like this, when the Channel becomes a turquoise colour field you could almost mistake for the Med, and ‘the English Riviera’ almost becomes a viable concept. (I took a few snaps, which I’ll post at some point.)

And Bolide were to conclude the afternoon playing from the outside bandstand. It would have been splendid to soak up their sounds and the sun from deckchairs, in such salubrious surroundings. Alas they were beset by sound problems, meaning half the band couldn’t hear the other half. (Something of an impediment for improvised music.) 

It concluded with someone audibly exclaiming “Thank God that’s over!”, who turned out to be a band member. Still, a grand day out overall - with the full Fort Process yet to come. It was a highlight of last year’s season, so hopes are high.

St. Winiborde and Plurals, though neither from the Dispersion…





Us true obsessives then hung around, littering up the normally neat De La Warr past sundown, awaiting...

RADIO 3 EXPOSURE
De-la-Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sun 15th July

Exposure is a series where Radio 3 tour new music venues to broadcast… well, new music. I think I have previously seen precisely two events which might be described as new music at the De La Warr, one of which was earlier that day. Café Oto it ain’t. But no matter, it’s a decent venue.

I only really took to one track from Jobina Tinnemans’ set, ’Silt’, where strummed strings were combined with some almost Goblin-like otherworldly vocals. In general, her work seems to stem from specific places and aiming to convey the weirdness of the local landscape. But that track, written about and first performed in Iceland, seemed the only one to genuinely stir up something.

Conrad Sheldrake’s shtick was to turn samples into songs - combining sound files as though they were instruments, one as the bass line, another the rhythm track and so on. He’d often run through those samples before launching into the song, foregrounding the elements which made up the collage.

His first song was dedicated to Carroll and Lear, and generally things had a comedic, absurdist edge to them. Which is something inherent in pop music anyway, waiting to be drawn out, the thin line between “Awop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom” and “Goo goo g’job.”

I kept feeling I should have liked his set more than I did. He was doing the sort of stuff I’d normally go for and was executing it effectively. The only formal drawback was his less than characterful voice. But, at least to me, he somehow failed to achieve lift-off. There was perhaps too much of an emphasis on cleverness, which can mar the bright clear pictures of pop songwriting.

It may well be that neither were natural live performers, so we were not hearing them at their best. (Rather summed up by the description of “sound artist Jobina Tinnemans performing a piano-based set”.) There’s something almost animist to electroacoustic music, as if sounds are held to embody a spirit, and so work like spells upon the listener. Whereas once the sound is detached from its source it becomes like a butterfly on a pin, something merely aesthetic.

In Sheldrake’s case, the set may have worked better had the sound files had been linked to film clips. By seeing those sounds produced (even if not live) may have linked them more with their source in our minds. But you have to take what you get.

My heart did not leap at the news Trevor Watts and Verion Weston played free jazz, a genre to which my general reaction is “respectfully disagree”. But parts of their set ventures into blues and soul, at times played surprisingly straight, at others put through some kind of organic distortion filter. True, at others, they veered back over to the other side of the highway. But I fared better than my expectation.

In the end, none of the three acts really grabbed me. Each seemed in it’s turn like the other act, the bit I was willing to sit through before my thing came on. So the night was neither a resounding success nor a crashing failure. Based on this exposure, I’d say the state of new music is fair to middling.

You can hear the whole thing on Radio 3 from Thursday.

Coming soon! After that surprise burst of music stuff in a normally relaxed July, the gig-going will now abate for more than a month. At which point the September spate will most likely arrive in earnest. Until then…