Spirit of Gravity, Marlborough Theatre, Brighton, Tuesday 17th October

Last month whimsy made me review the show in reverse order, this month it should be volume levels that would do it..... But I won't, so first on stage we had.....

nwodtleM
Sean's last show in the UK before he set off back to the land of Moose and Beavers, and his fourth show for us, he put some special effort in for this SoG show, so instead of his customary garbling of beats and 80's hits, he put his twin (four?) cassette decks to work creating an almost drumless noise collage, starting from a feedback whine and quickly ranking up to a full throttle white noise roar, then subsiding again with tidal washes of bass and diverting snatches of other things: music, talking, babies, singing. All pitched at disorienting speeds and apparently tracking back through time in places. It was loud and murky, a rather confrontational start to the evening, exciting and disturbing in equal parts.

Chris Cobilis (www.chriscobilis.com)
From Perth Western Australia, Chris was a quietly different kettle of fish as it turned out. Sat behind a laptop with a zither and very small electric guitar he started the show with some observations on seagulls (apparently Oz Seagulls are much smaller), then he started wobbling the unevenly legged table holding the zither, nudging it, moving it, scraping and banging it up and down with the Zither ringing. After a while of this he captured the ringing and looped it gently bringing us into the main part of his set, creating near songs out of bits of guitar playing, environmental sounds, the zither, occasional singing, it just flowed from one to the other calming us down from Nwodtlems roar, and finishing of with some pretty tricky looking, quietly played jarring guitar chords. Called back for more, we had some more observations on Australian culture (Chopper Read (www.myspace.com/markchopper, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Brandon_Read , Steve Irwin etc) and that was that, possibly the best encore ever.

Celled
Having wound down from the neighbour annoying start, Celled manage to unwind us even more. It was a fabulously relaxed set from the collective members also known as Sold. Howard sat behind the largest keyboard I think we've ever had on stage making the gentlest echoed piano chords and controlling a computer, while Dom made gentle rushings and warblings on the old Korg beast and tweaked the effects units. For the second song (an unrecognisable version of "Sunglasses") they were joined by muted Cornet player Ben Inman. The three songs slowly unravelled, as did my stress levels, and we finished the evening practically at a whisper.