Spirit of Gravity at the Marlborough Theatre, Brighton, Tuesday 21st February

J'm Black (of the Safehouse improve nights at the Open House www.freakbeatreactor.com) was kind enough to bring flowers along for the evening. Which you can see also see.

Hot Roddy (www.hotroddy.com): Chris showcased his new Sitar for this show. So new, he was late soundchecking as he had to go into town to pick it up. Nice Sitar. Lovely case, too. Hot Roddy is the persona Chris uses when he's working with beats, so apart from a brief period where he couldn't contain his excitement and did a section of Same Actor style live laptop processing, that was what we got, Sitar, beats and notably some Banghra influences. Apart from his Elvis set for the Christmas party I think this was the first Hot Roddy set at the Spirit of Gravity since 2003. So we get Tunes rather than Soundscapes, beats rather than rhythms of tapping, scratching and penny dropping. All sitar, and pretty damn poppy really. There is a Hot Roddy CD coming up on the Litmus label, which will be a nice complement to his recent Same Actor CD.

Register (www.registernoise.co.uk ): New to the Spirit of Gravity, Register promised smearing drones and shimmering guitar loops. And it was a pretty good description. It sounded to me like all the sound sources used by Register originated somewhere on a guitar, but unlike previous guitar based visitors to the SoG LRS (www.lrs-web.co.uk) who approach things in a precise pointillist fashion, register will take the guitar note, sustain it, loop it, drown it in reverb and echo and generally get the whole thing bouncing back from the far end of the cavern of dreams. Ideal music for long train journeys.

Faoi: Due to a laptop breakdown, unfortunately Faoi couldn't make it.

Permanent Bag System: Due to a Wrongness breakdown, Permanent Bag System couldn't make it either, but they did send along Billy F*cker as a willing substitute. Instrumentation was a miniature (toy?) Yamaha sampler, cheap drum machine, some effect pedal to murk up the sound and a disco mixer. All trailed around on the floor at the back of the stage. Fantastically improvising around noises recorded live into the sampler (no disks for this one) it was good to see someone in such harmony with his inner railway enthusiast, bouncing these distorted muffles over a knock-knocking train-track beat.