GILLA BAND/ ORCHESTRE TOUT PUISSANT MARCEL DUCHAMP (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

GILLA BAND
Chalk, Brighton, Sun 23rd Oct

I last wrote about Dublin-based noise rock outfit Gilla Band after they appeared in this very venue six years ago, back in the days when things still went by the old names. They were then Girl Band, it The Haunt and my blog was… okay, some things never change. That was for their debut release and they’re now up to their third (‘Most Normal’). But its quality not quantity, innit?

Two Gillamen swap between guitars and electronics, though you’d be hard pressed to tell one from the other by sound alone. They can play audaciously stripped-back lines, sometimes just tones, colour fields not as serene Rothkos but shrieking hues.

Perhaps unusually for a noise-based band there’s a string dance music element, further evidence it shouldn’t all be seen as happy-clappy hedonism but willing to engage in sonic abrasion of its own volition. They’re professed fans of the Contortions, where No Wave cross-bred with disco. And the finale’s their storming cover of the Industrial Techno track ’Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?’. Last time they opened with it, and it’s effectively become their identifying song.

Which leaves the singer Dara Kiely often contributing the most melodic element. True, his penchant for frenzied Malcom Mooney-style madness mantras isn’t going to get him calls from Coldplay any time soon. (One lyric lists the various manufacturers of “shit clothes”.) But you could imagine more Death Grips-style vocals going with that music. He’s enough to keep them attached to something like regular rock music.

Famously they started out while still in secondary school, as an Indie band modelled on the Strokes. That’s never really quite gone away, and it serves them like a gift. Rather than flying off into free noise or falling back into white boy blues, they’re able to go further into what they were already doing, with greater and greater intensity.

None less than the Guardian called this new release a “turbulent masterpiece”. And it’s true that Kiely has been open about facing mental health problems, which he does seem to have used for musical inspiration. But at the same time it’s a common error to see music just as displaced autobiography, one which can steer you away from actual listening. And there’s a definite sense of humour to it all. Even if you missed it in Kiely’s lyrics it’s there in his voice.

Let’s compare them briefly to two other noise rock outfits who have showed up here. Show Me the Body had a much more angsty vibe, a sense that down these mean streets a power noise trio must strike up. While Lightning Bolt conveyed the sheer exhilarating thrill of throwing up a racket.

It would be temptingly easy to say Gilla Band exist in some midpoint between these two, like the Change UK of noise. But I don’t think they’re anything so fixed, they’re more able to straddle both spaces at once. Like the proverbial glass of water which can be half full and also half empty, all depending how you look at it.

Kiely was meet ‘n’ greeting the merch queue after the gig, demonstrating a highly Irish ability to treat a long line of strangers like long-lost friends. I made some quip to him about the meaning-defying lyrics. “I don’t know what they mean,” he replied, “but I believe in them.” And I think I probably do too.

From Leeds…

ORCHESTRE TOUT PUISSANT MARCEL DUCHAMP
The Con Club, Lewes, Sun 16th Oct

The brainchild of double bassist Vincent Bertholet, Orchestre Tout Puissant (“All Powerful”) Marcel Duchamp “mix free jazz, post punk, high life, brass band, symphonic elements and kraut rock, [and] make a transcendental, almost ritualistic music.” They’re named part in tribute to great African ensembles, and in other part (of course) to the arch-Dadaist.

Not kidding about that Orchestre tag, quite remarkably they have more members than words in their name. The most recent release and publicity photos features twelve members, but I counted thirteen on stage, including double drummers, twin marimba players, electric guitar, strings and brass.

Though to my mind they’re more an ensemble than orchestra. There are times when they play with counter-rhythms. But mostly they use their amassed numbers to all leap upon a groove. Their credo being “the more the merrier”. There’s a few points where they allow a second’s pause before the full outfit kick in, perhaps not a new trick but an effective one. The result is a set which feels pretty much all highlights.

The vibe they give off is some Arkestra-like collective, who practice eleven hours every day at the commune and then take turns to stir a big pot of mung beans. But, for a Swiss-based band they seemed to have a fair few English members, including the two main singers. Most vocals were choral and harmonious, floating over the music. Their unshowy ‘unrocky’ nature gives it much of its engaging quality.

But also… one of those singers turned out to be Jo Burke, last seem singing a cappella folk songs in a Sussex field. Her declamatory open-tuned cry made perhaps a strange fit the the syncopated beats. I couldn’t say why it worked, but it sure seemed to.

There’s a virtuous combination between their constant inventiveness, where you have little to no notion what might be coming next, and the infectiously uplifting quality of it. Perhaps the ‘Marcel Duchamp’ and ‘Tout Puissant’ parts of their name represent those two elements. Probably not, but I like to think so. I can’t be sure, but I suspect that even I might have been smiling.

A slightly different (and don’t tell Rees-Mogg but less English) line-up to the UK tour, but still very much worth a watch…

HEY COLOSSUS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

The Hope + Ruin, Brighton, Fri 15th July

Hey Colossus’ return to our shores was twice delayed by the dread C-word and, soon as they’re on stage, they gleefully tell us in that time they’ve become “progressively worse”.

They kid, of course. But they do differ from the way they were last I saw them, admittedly back in 2015. They’re still about unleashing the full force of three guitars at once. But there’s less of a noise punch, and more of those pulsing riffs. (We need a portmanteau term for music pitched between riffs and pulses. Which probably shouldn’t be ‘priffs’.) At times it got so trancy I came to think of Neu!

Which is better? Despite my love of all things Neu! I think maybe before was better. But the new stuff’s so good it’s almost arbitrary to classify. It’s not even like awarding gold and silver, more like separating silvery gold from goldy silver.

Like previous gigs, for the second half of their set they shifted to heavier stuff. Though a little internet sleuthing suggests all tracks were from their last two releases, apart from one all-new number. Then for the finale they effectively combined the two, with a long, mesmeric piece. Which more internet sleuthing suggests might be called ’A Trembling Rose’. We may still be in the honeymoon period where just getting to see these long-delayed gigs feels blissful in itself. But this would have counted as a great gig at any point.

…and special mention for Brighton noise metal band Pascagoula, who ensured the support slot was nothing to skip. Powerful bass and drums ran the riffs, leaving the guitar free to go off, to unexpected and yet complementary places. If you went to the bar for them, you missed out.

…and, speaking of that new number, though from Nottingham…

“TURN MY HEAD INTO SOUND”: MY BLOODY VALENTINE’S ‘LOVELESS’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

Noise Will Set Us Free

My Bloody Valentine are now chiefly known for two things. The Brian-Wilson—like quixotic quest that lead to the recording of ’Loveless’, which nearly bankrupted their label. (Alas not entirely succeeding, leaving Creation still able to release Oasis albums.) And their tooth-rattling live performances, particularly on ’You Made Me Realise’.

And, at least in part, fair enough. The one time I saw them in their original incarnation they played a shortened set as part of a package tour. And still had time to play the extended version of ’You Made Me Realise’, with it’s mid-section of free-form noise. Though I probably got off lightly. There were nights where, no lie, the track would stretch out for half an hour and do structural damage to the venue.

And it was in noise the band found itself. They were originally just another clutch of Indie no-hopers, much as Joy Division before them had started out as second-rate punks. Figuring they were going nowhere they booked a final tour where they resolved to turn up the volume. Which they may well have originally meant purely as a fuck-you gesture. Guitarist and main man Kevin Shields has subsequently spoken of a desire to kill their own songs. They had, in the words of a later song, Nothing Much To Lose.

But noise seemed to offer possibilities. Because volume doesn’t just amplify the sound, even if that’s what it’s intended for. Inevitably, it changes the sound. You can treat those changes as interference, and try to minimise them, like people normally do. Or you can play into them.

And Shields then devised a style of tremolo playing which worked with this, soon dubbed ‘glide guitar’. Some say it came about after he’d needed to borrow a guitar, which happened to have a tremolo arm on it. Musos can ready about this here should they want. Suffice to say that, by bending and distorting the notes, it worked well with volume.

It’s true enough they came to be as influenced by others who had taken up noise before them, such as Sonic Youth and the Jesus and Mary Chain. But discovering the possibilities of noise for themselves, that may have been vital.

The ’You Made Me Realise’ EP in ’88 marked this change-over, handily marked by being their first release on Creation. (All that was before can really be regarded as juvenalia.) And from that point to this day reactions inevitably split into two contrary camps: “Is it supposed to sound like that?”, and “Who cares, when it sounds so awesome?”

Except, crucially, they never entirely tore up those Indie roots. It was like a swoony Dream Pop outfit and the most abrasive noise guitar band had been carelessly double-booked, but somehow still found a way to get along. Tracks sported Dream Pop titles, such was ’Blown a Wish’ or ’(When You Wake) You’re Still In a Dream’. 

And as ever there’s more to Pop that music snobs make out. Though music journos sooner reached for Sonic Youth comparisons, Phil Spector’s lush, epic soundscapes are as much an influence. Even now there are those who insist ‘masculine’ Rock is superior to ‘feminine’ pop. While Shields’ and Bilinda Butcher’s vocals, sometimes swapping, at others never quite overlaid, sailed over such restrictive distinctions.

Shields would insist he was influenced by Hip-Hop, despite never using Hip-Hop beats and at a time when any Hip-Hop/Indie crossover was effectively nil. What he borrowed, I suspect, was Hip-Hop’s habit of pushing disparate elements together and watching them collide, like fitting together pieces from different jigsaws. Making ‘wrongness’ work for you.

As an example listen to the opening of ’Soft As Snow’ and try and guess where and how the backing vocals will come in. Which you can’t do. They’re crazily, creatively counter-intuitive.

A great deal of great music doesn’t stake out the extremes (“the heaviest album evah” and all that), but mixes up the colours until new shades are made. And MBV would be a prime example, blissed-out and blistering all at once. Sometimes their music would be fragile wisps of things, murmured vocals floating past your ears. At others it was like getting wired up to the mains. And they’d jump from one to the other mid-track or, fairly often, do both at the same time.

It was delirious and intoxicating, like getting the punch and seeing the stars simultaneously. If we need a soundbite description, let’s go with ‘woozy noise with tunes’. Shields was after “the most beautiful songs with the most extremeness of physicality and sound.”

Though I doubt it was ever consciously intended, the music epitomised the philosophy that nothing is ever truly solid, essentially itself, separate from the rest of the world, but everything is fluid, changing and morphing. Brutal noise will eventually become serene, dreams are never so distinct from nightmares, love turns to heartbreak, and so on.

Now musically speaking, I’d come of age in the early Eighties. When Post-Punk had been stridently forward-looking, disdainful of the done-before. Which was inevitably succeeded by its polar opposite, music which was quite happy to have its roots showing. And as the Sixties had been the era most effort had gone into walling-off, it became the most brought-back, in scenes such as the Paisley Underground. To water the roots or cut yourself loose from them, that had come to seem music’s inevitable divide.

Then MBV came along and managed to look back as a way of looking forward. That Sixties psychedelic sound had in its day not been quaint or retro but been pushing at the limits. So now was the time to take up that baton and push harder.

A classic example would be vocals. Sixties beat groups were forever battling old-school engineers, who were insistent on making vocals prominent and distinct so listeners could hear the words. Whereas the bands wanted them to be made part of the rhythm. So MBV pushed down the vocals even further, setting them amid the other instruments, just another sound source.

Leading on from which, could you claim their sound was psychedelic? It’s not something you’d say of the bands which most influenced them. And, inevitably enough, Wikipedia labels them as Shoegaze, plus the charmingly oxymoronic Noise Pop. But psychedelic music plays with loss of form, epitomised by those liquid wheel light shows, in order to project a disorientating sense onto the listener. Which tended to work best when there was some semblance of form left to attack. Relatively straightforward song structures and simple tunes were bent and twisted, almost beyond recognition but never quite. Which sounds very much like… well, you may be ahead of me.

Abandon All Spatial Metaphors

What was effectively their first album, ’Isn’t Anything’, came out later in ’88. Later described by Mark Fisher as “a great album, for sure, but it's the sound of a band still escaping from rock. No doubt that gives the album a sense of drama that is absent from the anti-climax that is ’Loveless’. ‘Isn't Anything’ has more jagged edges, a terrain whose variegation makes it more palatable to rock tastes. ’Loveless’, by contrast, is a world with no edges, a world of deceptive similarity in which it is easy to become lost (for to locate yourself here you must lose yourself)… everything is smeary, bleary, blurred, slurred. Listening, you're drawn towards images of what is neither solid nor liquid, but viscous: honey, molasses, clotted blood…”

And Simon Reynolds was just as right to say it sounded “the same as before, only more so - more lustrous, languorous, inchoate, phantasmic… They've never been more them.” Escaping from planet Rock? After take-off, achieving orbit is simultaneously a complete breakthrough and a logical next move.

’Isn’t Anything’ still has semi-coherent lyrics (well some of the time) and a semi-recognisable band photo on the cover (albeit already blurring at the edges). But the band had already been replacing choruses with hummed vocals or instrumental breaks. Now, they were doing away with with such things altogether.

Similarly, the standard hierarchy of instruments of the traditional rock band is simply jettisoned. The album should come with a warning - “abandon all spatial metaphors all ye who enter here.” (i always associated that with the way the sleeve was in unassuming lower case, much like this sentence, something carried through to their track listings on i-tunes today.)

Fisher went on: ”Rock's propulsion and compulsion, its scurrying towards release, is suspended, perpetually deferred, captured in a dilating tension… regular sonic laws do not hold (you find yourself unable to say whether the album is trebly or bassy; the sonic geography of high and low is smoothed into indifferentiation).”

While Reynolds called in “[not] 'rock' so much as magma, a plasma of sound that barely conforms to the contours of riff or powerchord.” Fisher compared it to Turner’s squalls of brushwork.

And if that doesn’t sound much like a band album, we were to discover later it wasn’t. Shields wrote as much as he had on the predecessor, all tracks bar one. But by this point he was also recording almost all the instruments himself, so fixated on getting things down the way he wanted. Debbie Googe doesn’t seem to have played any bass, despite getting credited. Moreover, Shields would often leave months between his laying down one instrument and another, a long way from Rock notions of immediacy and band tightness.

Further, ’Isn’t Anything’ is a series of tracks which combine to make up a great album. ’Loveless’ is more a great album which doesn’t really reduce to a series of tracks. There’s often interludes which seem to belong to neither one track nor the next, more to the album as a whole, working like conjunctions in a sentence. The result is, it’s one of my most-loved albums and I’d be pushed to name half the tracks from it. And very few of the words.

In short, ’Loveless’ is the album where the band most got to sound like themselves, which should surely be the aim of every band. But all this means its achievement is heard best in the context of its predecessor. Listening to ’Loveless’ alone would be like watching ’2001’ by jumping straight to the Stargate sequence. Of course you can, and in one sense you’re cutting the chase to get the goodies. But in foreshortening the journey, what do you miss? And most creators are like that. Each new work can stand alone. But it’s so much richer when seen as part of an ongoing narrative, and you’re so much poorer to wrench it from that narrative.

As the band brought out two innovative albums with a hefty gap between, and then (for the longest time) no more, this seemed to create a space for others to occupy. Pretty soon their wake had spawned a whole genre, soon dubbed Shoegaze. With most of the bands as cluelessly copyist as the original my Blood Valentine had been with Indie.

But as ever with genuinely innovative bands, their actual influence radiated wider, happened more slowly and wasn’t always so transparent. There are for example few Post-Rock outfits who don’t bear the MBV DNA. Like those live performances of 'You Make Me Realise', this could be an album whose influence never actually ends…

It even sounds good played backwards at half speed. No, honest!

SHOW ME THE BODY (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

Green Door Store, Brighton, Sat 26th June

Show Me the Body hail from New York City, and mix hardcore punk with noise rock and sludge metal. (Wikipedia adds Hip-Hop to the mix, but my ears heard less of that.) A combination handily demonstrated by the visual aid of the singer’s close crop and guitarist’s multi-follickled locks. Effects pedals, often the preserve of Post-Rock, are used as a de facto keyboard. Though their sound is also achieved, rather wonderfully, with the aid of the banjo.

Given that those styles work by marshalling the force of repetition, this outfit switch things up with some alacrity. It gives the music a skittering quality, like it can’t quite be grasped. Like that Kung-Fu master who’s struck you in three separate places before you’ve even moved. But at other points they go in for the slow fuse, tracks building in intensity before plunging into the riff. At which moments the mosh-pit stands poised, awaiting the Sword of Damocles to fall.

Yes, the mosh pit… In one of his few audience comments, the singer remarks that last time they were here no-one else was. Whereas tonight I became afeared the mosh-pit would fill the venue, with no far wall left for us frail Fifty-somethings to flee too. But while there’s mosh-pits which seem Ian arena sport, to which the actual music is incidental, here everyone seems to know each track by heart. The singer often passes out the mike, with pretty much everyone singing their assigned line then obligingly handing it back. (Their early gigs were apparently held not only in basements, but alleys and under flyovers.)

Lyrics fly by you, as they will normally do with this sort of thing. But less than penning rebel anthems they seem more concerned with bottling and then uncorking pressure-cooker urban angst. Which of course has a rich history with New York bands. Going back to the famous Suicide quote: “People were coming in off the streets… where they were hoping they’d be escaping and all we were doing was shoving the street back in their face again.”

Even disregarding the lockdown impasse, this must have been one of the most high-energy gigs I’ve been to in recent years. Possibly since Death Grips. (Now nine years ago. Bloomin’ Ada!)

After the most recent Godspeed gig, I commented on how Punk can often feel a poor fit for our era. It’s not that there’s less to be angry about, but that there’s too much. As things degenerate further and further, Punk becomes stuck in an arms race of outrage, which inevitably leaves it outpaced. Reagan-level outrage no longer seems inadequate in the Trump years. What makes this trio different? 

Partly by mixing Punk with other styles, creating a kind of cocktail effect. But mostly, it’s not because they play louder or faster, or any of the usual things. It’s that they sound more volatile, as if held together mostly by trajectory, like extemporised incendiary devices just about going off in the right place at the right time, like incandescent fury barely turned into music. They somehow seem at perpetual risk of fizzling out, even though they never do.

Forty-five minutes on onslaught later, they abruptly announce the show over. Like a summer storm which came out of nowhere, then finished just as fast.

From Detroit, rather than Brighton. But near in time, okay…

'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?”

TERRY + GYAN RILEY/ RAKTA + DEAF KIDS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

TERRY & GYAN RILEY
The Old Market, Hove, Sun 14th Apr

The man with a greater claim than any other to be called the Godfather of Minimalism now performs in a duo with his son, Gyan. While Gyan sticks to guitar, Terry shifts between different keyboards. The pieces are, I’d guess, semi-structured improvisations.

Though he’d often with instruments mid-piece, the best tracks for me were the one where Terry took to either the electric piano or melodica. Those seemed the moments where what you think of Riley came most to the fore, dervish chanting or some other form of eastern influence. At such moments Gyan’s regular usage of pedals and switches would become more abundant than the notes he was playing.

For the penultimate number, clearly unafraid of learning new tricks, he played some kind of iPad software. The results were quite different to everything else in the set - ambient, floating and free-form. And, to me, the highlight.

Unfortunately, at least for me, he mostly played the grand piano, And the traditional instruments seemed to rub off on the music. There was nothing wrong with it, it was just overly familiar. I found myself thinking more of Django Reinhardt than John Cale, Prandit Prau Nath or others from his actual list of collaborators. The result was a gig which, whenever it seemed to be taking off, would return to taxi-ing up and down the runway.

I’ve now seen Riley twice, and felt a little let down both times. I’d imagined part of the problem last time was the large ensemble, but was now little more impressed with a duo. Perhaps, after having transformed music at quite a fundamental level, we should leave him to doing whatever he wants in his later years. (He’s now eighty-three, let’s not forget.) But perhaps what he wants is not a thing for me.

From Paris, with melodica…



RAKTA/ DEAF KIDS

The Hope + Ruin, Brighton, Mon 22nd Apr

The name Rakta means passion or energy in Hindi. The group are a psyche band hailing from Sao Paolo in Brazil. Though a trio involving guitar and drums, it’s the keyboardist and singer who takes the lead. They can rely quite heavily on looping, but instead of layering sound they lay down a bass track to perform atop of. (I thought at the time the looping was effectively replacing the bass, though it seems they sometimes perform as a four-piece.) Vocals are distorted cries, chants and screams, past all intelligibility.

With the keyboards so dominant and the emphasis on full-on repetition there’s time where the sound borders on dance music. It takes the ceaseless insistency, but instead of evoking euphoria it instead goes for derangement. They seem ever-able to ramp tracks up midway, just when you though they’d reached peak psychosis they’ll surpass it. They run one track into the next, joining them together with more spacey interludes, which adds to the sense of urgency.

Perhaps the only drawback with them is, with everyone behind an instrument, there’s effectively no front-person. They smartly downplay any audience engagement, not speaking on stage and performing in semi-darkness. But it might gain an extra impact with an abstract filmshow, or similar.

Deaf Kids are also a trio from Sao Paolo, also run their set right through, also use distorted vocals and also marshall the power of repetition. Except where Rakta were spectral they got decidedly heavy,

They may have drawn the short straw going on second. When they couldn’t quite match Rakta it gave them a slight taint of ‘not as good as the support band’, though we should probably see this night as a double headliner. When, after a more archetypally average band, they’d have shone brighter.

They don’t just use riffs but the most pared down of riffs, as if broken fragments of longer musical pieces. The effect is similar to hearing just a few words from a sentence, you instinctively wait for the thing to be resolved, giving it a sense of anticipation.

And when not riffing, rather than retreat into something more conventionally ‘musical’, they’d assault their effects pedals directly - unleashing free noise. Like much modern music, the dispensing with conventional song structures is like getting to the birthday cake without having to chew your way through all the sandwiches. If Rakta were like some id-version of dance music, their clattering and echoey noise at times evoked industrial dub.

Both from Manchester, Rakta…



…and Deaf Kids…

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.

OZOMATLI/ QUJAKU/ PHILL NIBLOCK + TIM SHAW (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

OZOMATLI
Concorde 2, Brighton, Thurs 23rd Aug

So I finally catch up with Ozomatli live, even if it took their twentieth anniversary tour for Mr. Tardy here to do it. Describing the band’s actually easy for once, as they’ve done it themselves and it’s even placed upfront on their Wikipedia page. Locating their sound in their native Los Angeles, they say:

’You drive down Sunset Boulevard and turn off your stereo and roll down your windows and all the music that comes out of each and every different car, whether it's salsa, cumbia, merengue, or Hip Hop, funk or whatever, it's that crazy blend that's going on between that cacophony of sound is Ozomatli, y’know?”

As band members ceaselessly swap instruments the shifts and turns in musical style make for a gig that always feels like it’s being propelled forward, while always coming across as organic and arising from the players rather than being self-consciously eclectic.

They have a reputation as a political outfit, initially intending to form (I kid not) a workers’ union. This doesn’t much come over live, bar the occasional quick intro to a song. It does seem a little strange to find that a band best known for their live shows should omit what seems an integral element. But then there is something appealing about music that’s political and good-timey. Given the state of things, there’s plenty to be angry about and of course we have a right to that anger. But we’ve got the right to celebrate resistance as well.

Though it’s quite a different style of music, the gig echoes something I came across when seeing Goat, unrelenting energy levels; “The gig's pretty much at… fever pitch the whole way through. They're quite unrelentingly up.” In fact so irrepressible is the band’s spirit, that when a phantom hum invades the PA they decide what key it’s in, and instantly start jamming around it. Complete with a vocal which plaintively wonders “where could that hum be coming from?” It actually proves a highlight of their set, so maybe they should request hums more often.

For the closer, as I believe is a tradition of their shows, they pick up their gear and relocate to various points in the auditorium. As they moved they’d trail audience members behind then, snaking in a great conga.

A slightly random clip, but a good one of the band on home turf…



QUJAKU
Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Brighton, Mon 27th Aug

Qujaku are self-described as “Japanese rock band [playing] psychedelic gothic dark shoe gaze [with] post rock vibes”, and are fronted (slightly inexplicably) by a lookalike for late Seventies Bowie.

They seem to wait before starting up, as if channelling something. They then go into a slow, soundscapey intro with a bowed… uh, bowed something and rung bells. Though the thumping riffs then drop, this intro kind of permeates the rest of the gig and gives proceedings a ritual feel.

Riffs are somewhat like houseguests. They’re going to stick around for a while, so you want to be sure not to pick the wrong one. Qujaku display a talent for finding mantra riffs, the sort of riff you want to hear over and over again. Their riff repository is also satisfyingly varied, from the slow and pounding to the agitated.

But they’re also adept at curveballing riffs, first getting them white-hot and then bending them into different shapes. At such points the second guitarist then turns back to the bowing or starts to pound a drum. It’s the upside of heavy riffing married to the upside of post-rock, giving a shot to your reptile and a stimulus to your Cro-Magnon brain.

The Bowie lookalike concludes the noise-fest by blowing a kiss to the assembled throng. Slightly inexplicably. In a good way.

The only real drawback of the set - and I know I always say this - is that there wasn’t enough of it. These aren’t short, snappy songs, the numbers are like potions you need to leave stewing in the cauldron awhile. But, with two support acts, they played for less than an hour. Bands have a natural set length determined by their music, which can’t be reduced to a meaningless mean. Sunn O))) played for two hours, which didn’t seem too long. Qujaku don’t necessarily need that sort of length, but they operate on timescales which take more than an hour.

This vid starts just as the intro section ends…



PHILL NIBLOCK + TIM SHAW
Cafe Oto, London, Fri 31st Aug

So next I was off to see a gig dominated by electronic hums and pulses. If Ozomatli had intruded with their Latino-tuned trumpets, the circle would have been completed. But they must have been busy elsewhere…

To try and explain Tim Shaw by a distinction, he’s quiet different to Cosmo Sheldrake, who assigned samples the respective roles of instruments. In fact Sahw's set did not, I don’t think, include any musical samples. But it did, I think, include organic sounds, albeit heavily treated. The effect become more like coloured shapes on various pieces of transparency paper, being shifted, shuffled and overlaid in different combinations. It produces new shapes and colours, until you’ve forgotten what you started off with.

Shaw’ set wasn’t divided into movements, as in classical music, but passed through distinct sections. While Phill Niblock performed five quite separate pieces, even if he ran them all together. Though there are those who claim this music to be samey, each piece was quite distinct in character. (Some more than others, as we’ll get onto.)

Despite each piece inevitably being shorter, they were much slower to evolve - at times feeling like their evolution was happening in Darwinian time. Duration became part of the experience.

His music’s comprised of murky drones and rumbles he refers to collectively as “tones”. Each one seems straightforward in itself, though blurry at the edges. It’s in the interchange between then at the magic happens, as subtle shifts come to have magnified effects. It all seems poised at the borderline between the liminal and subliminal, where you can’t quite perceive what he’s doing.

Where people go wrong, I think, is assume this is some sonic backdrop, an aural mulch out of which flowers will appear if you wait. But it’s in that ‘backdrop’ where it all happens. The metaphor of stepping into a darkened room, and the initial monotone revealing more and more shades and distinctions the longer you stay, I’ve used that many times by this point. But it’s the best metaphor I can think of, so it’s getting recycled again!

As often with drone-based music, what sounds rough and atonal can tip over into the serene. In fact in his second piece this was given centre stage, and the effect was quite tranquil. The music seemed to shimmer rather than move. Some of those tones may even have started life as notes - yes, actual notes!

But it was the fourth piece which was the densest, and perhaps the most rewarding. Broad rumbles provided perhaps not a backdrop but a surround for sharper sounds. It became like a sandpaper raga.

These four pieces already lasting over an hour, I figured we’d had our lot. Yet Niiblock started a fifth. It commenced with rumbles so low, so faint they could have been coming from the next room. Fifteen minutes later, with the room now mostly empty, I started to wonder whether this was going anywhere after all, and cut my losses. Are those that persevered still there now? We may never know.

Nibloch, who started as a film-maker, normally plays to a film show. Apart from the somewhat eccentric closer, this was the night’s only weak point. Reportage film of what looked like South Sea Islanders was too distinct, too of something to work with the more mysterious, suggestive music. (And yes, with Johanna Bramli I liked the visual but not the music - truly, there’s no fully pleasing me!) Before the show, a series of stills which looked to be from the same source were flashed up. With their merest hints of narrative connection, they may have worked better than a continuous film.

Precisely what makes this music appealing is precisely what makes it challenging to review. If you heard these pieces at different times, you’d not just react differently you’d quite likely actually hear them in a different way. The effect becomes individual and introspective.

Again, a fairly random clip. But again, worth watching…

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…