Justin Walter - Unseen Forces

Justin Walter creates beautiful, gentle waves of organic sound by modulating his breath through an analog synth.



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Hisato Higuchi

This Japanese guitarist creates fragile, whispered, blues full of gentle ghostly notes and tones.

 

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I'm Being Good | Bad Orb | Liberez - Power Lunches, London 24 September 2011

Arrive. Buy beer. Wait. Grinding out the time. Flying solo. Nothing to do. Sit. Drink beer. Wait.

A man comes round. He says the first band are on. Downstairs. Rehearsal room doubling as a gig venue. Liberez at the front. A four piece. Violin, guitar, vocals, drums. There use samples too.

Thuddy rhythms, repetitive riff patterns, eerie bowing, and mumbled, haunted vocals. One tracks reminds me of early Pram. The rest are like I don’t know who. They’re unexpected. They’re good.

Back upstairs. Buy beer. Hit the merch table. Wait. Time grinds. Back downstairs. Bad Orb is a lone woman. Table of wires and gizmos. You know the drill. Droney bland soundscapes. Indecipherable murmur whisper. Adds nothing. Piano and accordion come into the mix. Yeah, definitely better. The rooms hot. The set ends. Upstairs. Cool off. Buy one last beer.

I’m Being Good. Saw their fourth ever gig in 1992. Maybe 1993. Oil Seed Rape also played. Think it was the Beachcomber. The pubs long gone. But I’m Being Good still play gigs. I still go to them.

Noisy, mathy, knotty, rock. Simultaneously primitive and complex. The sound they’ve had for awhile. Fan will love it. Antagonists will loathe it. Newcomers could go either way.

They finish. Upstairs. Out into the night.

Preferred drink: Budvar

Neil Campbell & Michael Flower | Morgen Und Nite - Cafe Oto, London, 25 February 2011

It’s nearly two months since I’ve been to a gig. It falls to Morgen Und Nite to end the drought.

A duo, he plays guitar. She plays, I don’t know what you want to call it, a box - all leads and knobs. They play a slowly decaying psych guitar noodle. Embellished with electronic flutterings and tonal sustains.

The guitarist plays through a total of 13 effects pedals. Barefoot, he operates them with disturbingly prehensile toes. It’s like watching Christy Brown play guitar.

Morgen Und Nite then play a second piece of undulating oscillation and the open drone of traffic speeding through a tunnel. This piece doesn’t coalesce into a whole. It feels disjointed and uneven.

The evening climaxes with two legends - Neil Campbell and Michael Flower. Admittedly legends in a micro genre, but legends nevertheless. They launch straight into a force 9 psychedelic rock tumult, playing over cheap keyboard looped beats.

Deeper into the set Campbell moves to keyboards. They hit a trance inducing groove, playing within a blank primal raw Stooges like repetitive riff. The mothership had definitely achieved lift-off.

Preferred drink: Kernel's London Porter

The Lowest Form of Music | Smegma | La Forte Four | Morphogenesis - Beaconsfield, London, 22 October 2010

The Lowest Form Of Music seeks to celebrate the work of the Los Angeles Free Music Society. The 3-day festival includes performances by original artists and those inspired by the experimental ethos espoused by the movements key players.

Morphogenesis open the evening. They’re a UK configuration of four artists including Adam Bohman and Clive Graham. Instrumentation is predictably eclectic. Bohman has a table of rasps, files, assorted ephemera including a pine cone. It looks like someone's emptied the contents of a shed onto a table. Someone on the other side of the stage is amplifying a pump blowing bubbles through a jar filled with water. It’s not so much music as sound constructions. We get the chirps of cyber bird calls over the sound of tape rewind and modem whirl. Despite the disparate elements the sound is cohesive.

The same cannot be said for La Forte Four. Apparently this is their first UK performance for 28 years. Whilst the array of instruments and their invention is admirable their set doesn’t work. If I am honest it is frankly a racket. I appreciate the dedication to the unconventional. Blowing into metal piping, amplifying children’s toys and bowing polystyrene packaging is admirable in it’s quest for discovering new sounds. But if the resultant noise is an incoherent, ungainly, awkward, potpourri then the experiment fails on its own terms.

Smegma headline the night. I saw them some years back in 2006. It was my first encounter with them and I was blown away by their mastery of genre convention and avant-garde experimentalism. Tonight, though, I am utterly under whelmed by their performance. I am at a loss to interpret their set. It’s an indecipherable, uninspiring, turgid murk. They play for barely half an hour. They are reluctantly, and unaccountably, urged back for an encore by the audience. Against my better judgment I stay in the hope that I’ll hear some of the inspiration that I previously heard. I am unfortunately left disappointed.

Preferred drink: Fullers 1845

Transient Constellations All-Dayer - The Windmill, London, 16 October 2010

The Windmill looks as if it should be derelict. It’s days as a community pub have long gone. It is now a 7 day a week music venue. A characterless 60s building it’s windows have all been boarded over. Inside resides an all pervasive gloom. The walls are inexplicable painted in greens and oranges, as if it had some brief interlude as children’s playgroup. Ancient and current gig poster adorn the walls. It’s a grubby cave of a venue. I love it.

Today’s it’s hosting the Transient Constellation all-dayer. The bill promises noise, gabba, and grindcore.

Kicking things off are Cheapmachines. Standard static ear bleed. The highlight is the bit which sounds like a malfunctioning motorcycle revving.

Pollutive Static are the sound of waking up at 3am on the sofa to a static snowstorm on the TV because they’ve stopped broadcasting programmes.

Next there’s a wall of noise from Digitariat with screamo vocals. It doesn’t work for me.

Deepkiss 720 ups the confrontation ante with an ear wax shattering digital assault. A bright light flashes away at an epilepsy inducing speed. The sounds seem to be created on something that resembles a portable barbecue and a sound board.

There’s more wall of noise antics from Betty. However, again this set doesn’t engage me. Maybe it’s because it’s not loud enough as I don’t need to put my ear plugs.

BBBlood are the sound of amplified aircraft cabin noise. They even manage to get the crowd going. There’s sporadic head banging and several people throw their head back and gurn. I assume this to be in appreciation.

Gland’s set is aborted after 2 minutes due to crowd trouble as a few moshing audience members seem to damage the kit beyond repair.

Gymnastic Decomposition are legends in the invented genres of happy grindcore and haikore. They’re like listening to a cassette copy of ‘Scum’ on fast forward. It’s stupid, insane, and will never be popular. These are probably the very same thoughts which motivated these men to make this music. And for that we should be eternally grateful.

I didn’t watch Skat Injector. I was brutalised by them. Abused, used and discarded with callous disdain. The singer is dressed in a white dress and a blue wig. His face is wearing black plastic mask that looks like it’s been partially melted. The drummer is wearing a skin tight gold body that also obscures his face. He’s wearing a black dress and a top hat. The effects guru looks like a burns victim as something that looks like surgical gauze is pulled over the face. They play a filthy-dirty gabba grind, a scum-zoid sound of neo-bondage torture which they vomit forth for the audience to lap off the floor. Audience mosh insanity ensues.

The aural assault continues with Nwodtlem. Gabba, hardcore, and jungle mash-ups are spliced with surgical precision to video footage which is sometimes incongruous, sometimes harmonious.

Atomck then play a blistering set of grindcore. The sound is superb. Blasting drums, a superb down-tuned guitar sound and the obligatory screamed vocals. They are a possibly the only grindcore band to have recorded a tribute to Columbo.

There are more acts to come but I’ve an appointment elsewhere. I take away happy memories which I know will slowly fade. I hope the tinnitus does likewise.