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GRAVITATIONAL
PULL
Dispatches
from the Spirit of Gravity / Edition 93 / June 10
·
Happenings:
Next Spirit of Gravity gig: Thursday 24th June 2010
VIV
/ ZERO MAP / THE WARRIOR SQUARES
The
Komedia Studio Bar, 44-47 Gardner Street,
Brighton, BN1 1UN
Time
8:30 - 11:00 Cost £5 / £4
ViV
- Brighton based pastoral improv
Zero Map - Karl from the A Band
The Warrior Squares - St Leonards electronica
Warrior Squares
The Warrior Squares are a Hastings based trio of seasoned improvisers
utilising electronics, instruments and a tree they run a long standing
night at The Rooms In St Leonards and have
recently performed with Geoff Leigh (Henry Cow etc etc).
ViV
ViV are not a singer songwriter but a 5
piece featuring guitar, flute, vibes, cornet drums and electronics, ViV
(in their previous Vole incarnation) performed an outstanding set at the
Spirit of Gravity's last
show at The Little Marlborough Theatre. Music rarely gets this gorgeous,
even at SoG.
Zero Map
The Zero Map is Brighton Based duo:
"If
one word can be used regarding Zero Map's music it would be
'de-constructed'. It brings the music more justice than the word
'recycle', as recycle means 'use again' and 'deconstructed' means, to me
at least, use old stuff to create something new. This is what we hear on
Zero Map’s 30 plus minute long album 'Found on The Streets'. Stuff
from nowhere and everywhere gathered together and out comes five
interesting pieces of collage music. Instruments,
sound effects, voices - all from the source of the duo Chloe Wallace and
Karl Waugh, the experimental nuclei of Zero Map. The centre piece
of the album, the second track 'Bee's Queen' occupies half of the
album's length. If the shorter pieces are more strict and concentrated
around some sounds or ideas, this one is a complete melting pot showing
how insanity and sanity are two sides of the same thing with sounds
surrounding every inch of the atmosphere of the room, It's noise and musique
concrete, it's a lovely nightmare soundtrack that not even Tim Burton
would dare to use. The cover is individually hand painted and numbered
copies, with front cover collage artwork by The Zero Map made up of
items found in the Streets. Label? www.apollolaan.co.uk
of course." - Terrascope
"Never less than engaging, and often
very lovely" - The Wire
Visuals by _minimalVector
There
will be the elektrocreche available
for any unaccompanied toys who will be looked
after during the intervals by our professionally trained team of
volunteers. And anybody else that wants to bring along a sound toy to
play with.
For
details of future Spirit of Gravity events, go to www.spiritofgravity.com/.
We
have video and audio on the Spirit of Gravity mp3 blog
from all our recent shows at spiritofgravity-brighton.blogspot.com/
There
are other videos on the Spirit of Gravity MySpace
page at www.myspace.com/thespiritofgravity
We
now have a Facebook group where you can be
kept up to date with shows and information:
www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=75568366205
There
are also downloads available of some complete Spirit of Gravity sets at
www.archive.org/details/the-spirit-of-gravity
There
are now also some of _minimalVector’s
films featuring Spirit of Gravity acts and guests at the Vimeo
HDTV page
www.vimeo.com/thespiritofgravity
·
Greetings:
Details
now in on our September gig:
Dr
Eugene Chadbourne:
(John
Zorn, Shockabilly, etc, etc, etc).
Gus Garside and Dan Powell: Double
bass and electronics (OMSK, Arc).
Slash's Wormhole:
Henry Collins' psychedelic sonic abstraction.
Due
to requests we've taken the unusual steps of making advance tickets
available for this show, available at www.wegottickets.com/event/82883.
We will of course still keep some available on the door.
·
Reviewings
Spirit
of Gravity
Roots and Culture night
at the Komedia Studio Bar, Brighton,
Tuesday 18th May 2010
Pimmel
are a Lewes based conglomeration based around composer Andy Saunders and
as people were coming into the room they were already embarked upon
their epic "Piece for Massed Fuzz Organs". It started with 5
or 6 organ players lined up in front of the stage, and as it progressed
several more joined in, along with vibes, synthesiser, bass, Chris
Cutler’s drums and Andy on Fender Rhodes. It swells and fades before
loping finally into a Canterburyesque groove
given odd jazz shapes by the electric piano. At around 45 minutes it may
have been the longest thing to have been played at The Spirit of
gravity: a record that wasn't to stand for long.
In the intervals Caleb
Madden had set up a pared down version of his House Music
Installation from the Delaware pavilion. Bass drones provided by fans
washing back and forth over suspended microphones and TV / Gameboy
video feedback feeding a couple of sonic transducers. It gave us some
very sonic bass drones and juddering stammers of mid-range noise.
Adam Bushell then performed Alvin Lucier’s
"I am sitting in a room" using a pair of mp3 player recorders
and a microphone up on stage with him. If you aren't familiar with this
piece what happened was that Adam read some text into the room and
recorded it and played it back into the room, then recorded that and
played that back. The sound quickly bifurcated into a treble and bass
version of Adams voice before surprisingly quickly hitting a tipping
point and morphing into an almost unrecognisable melange of UFO ringing
and bass washes. A really interesting piece to see performed.
More House Music.
For the Sogchestra, we recruited some
members of The Safehouse Collective, Pimmel,
some Spirit of Gravity members and stray volunteers to perform Terry
Riley’s "In C" on a range of instruments from Double
Bass to Ukulele and Korg to Casio VL Tone
and the by now ubiquitous Adam Bushell on
Vibes. It's a great piece to play and the performance ebbed and flowed
as it does, some rhythmic passages, some nice quiet places and one
memorable part where Carrie's violin soared (sonically rather than
literally) across the top of my head quite distractingly. At a pretty
brisk 50 minutes, this stole the record for longest performance and drew
a deal of admiration. For me it was an intoxicating thing to play, right
at the limits of my abilities, total concentration for that length of
time made me quite light-headed.
We'd like to thank everyone who took part and also a special thanks to
Adam Bushell for the hard work and patience
in getting our performance together.
And then we drank up and had what felt like the best segment of House
Music, with the Gameboy / TV combination
warbling rather than juddering, possibly due to the change in ambient
lighting.
El
Maestro Con Queso
Editor.
Gravitational
Pull is the
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