Sly & The Family Drone are rhythm fetishists seemingly on a mission to numb your cerebral cortex. Their sound is characterised by percussion clatter, gnarled electronic squelches, and bleary vocal incomprehension. And their live shows are usually pretty special (by that I mean, totally chaotic).
Investigate here
Showing posts with label Genre: Free Improvisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Genre: Free Improvisation. Show all posts
Friday, July 28, 2017
Friday, April 22, 2011
Skullflower | Werewolf Jerusalem | Helm | Hal Hutchinson - The Grosvenor, London, 15 April 2011
The noise freaks are out in force for this gig. The Grosvenor isn’t quite packed, but it’s an impressive turn out for an entire evening of noise.
First to the stage is Hal Hutchinson. He sounds like he’s trying to tune a radio broadcasting only the sound of rusty hinges. The highlight of the set is the sound when he squashes his gear with a piece of foam.
Helm follow. He always brings a scientific precision to his oscillating drones. As his set evolves he shifts from drone to found-sound and then to noise howl. At one point he becomes distracted by a errant vibration. He springs from his chair and immediately zeroes in on a mic’d up snare drum behind him. A quick adjustment and it’s eliminated from the mix.
Werewolf Jerusalem rolls out some tidal ebbs of raw noise. The people in front of me are without ear plugs. They must be mental. Wolfy starts with a deceptively restrained howl. It’s the calm before the storm though as soon Werewolf Jerusalem is creating the sound of a blackhole ripping asunder the fabric of space.
During the set I start to wonder why people barge to the front of noise gigs. It’s only ever a man hunched over a table of effects pedals not moving very much. Invariably these same people barge back out to the bar five minutes later when they realise there isn’t that much to see.
But I digress. Skullflower take the stage and swiftly provide time stretched howls of torture. Over a steady beat Matthew Bower’s guitar careens all over the steady bedrock. The second of the two pieces they play is faster. The drums are locked at black metal speed with that flat, relentless, momentum.
At first the track doesn’t sound like it’s working. The rhythm seems completely disjointed from the guitars. Maybe that’s the point, but the fact is it isn’t working. Bower’s guitar is constantly questing for new ways of expressing itself, and somehow later in the piece rhythm section and leads coalesce.
There are calls for an encore. The moment teatters on the brink. Skullflower hesitate. The soundman hesitates. The audience hesitate. But then the moment is lost. The soundman puts a CD on and the evening is at an end.
First to the stage is Hal Hutchinson. He sounds like he’s trying to tune a radio broadcasting only the sound of rusty hinges. The highlight of the set is the sound when he squashes his gear with a piece of foam.
Helm follow. He always brings a scientific precision to his oscillating drones. As his set evolves he shifts from drone to found-sound and then to noise howl. At one point he becomes distracted by a errant vibration. He springs from his chair and immediately zeroes in on a mic’d up snare drum behind him. A quick adjustment and it’s eliminated from the mix.
Werewolf Jerusalem rolls out some tidal ebbs of raw noise. The people in front of me are without ear plugs. They must be mental. Wolfy starts with a deceptively restrained howl. It’s the calm before the storm though as soon Werewolf Jerusalem is creating the sound of a blackhole ripping asunder the fabric of space.
During the set I start to wonder why people barge to the front of noise gigs. It’s only ever a man hunched over a table of effects pedals not moving very much. Invariably these same people barge back out to the bar five minutes later when they realise there isn’t that much to see.
But I digress. Skullflower take the stage and swiftly provide time stretched howls of torture. Over a steady beat Matthew Bower’s guitar careens all over the steady bedrock. The second of the two pieces they play is faster. The drums are locked at black metal speed with that flat, relentless, momentum.
At first the track doesn’t sound like it’s working. The rhythm seems completely disjointed from the guitars. Maybe that’s the point, but the fact is it isn’t working. Bower’s guitar is constantly questing for new ways of expressing itself, and somehow later in the piece rhythm section and leads coalesce.
There are calls for an encore. The moment teatters on the brink. Skullflower hesitate. The soundman hesitates. The audience hesitate. But then the moment is lost. The soundman puts a CD on and the evening is at an end.
Preferred drink: Young's Special
Monday, February 28, 2011
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.
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
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Concern | Pascal Nichols | Tuluum Shimmering - Cafe Oto, London, 14 December 2010
I arrive just in time for the start of Tuluum Shimmering’s set.
One man and a table with the usual tangle of wires and leads, and assorted electronic gadgetry. He’s also got a chunky wooden flute and a tom tom. The set begins with heady, heavy kosmiche hymnals. We’re deep into the dreamy spiritualism of Popol Vuh or Ash-Ra Temple.
The melange of hare Krishna bell rattle, organ tone float and looped flute summon the atmosphere of spirit worship and ritual. Imagine whirling round in a tropical forest, sun light flickering through the tree canopy, colour, motion, blur, undefined, yet fully engaging your senses.
Pascal Nichols is a drummer who plays in lots of different groupings, but most commonly in Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides. Tonight he’s playing a solo set using drums and samples.
It starts well with Nichols darting round the sound samples. However, I lose my way with the set. Nichols seems to have a microphone strapped round his neck. This allows him to add low, throat yodelling satellite signals as sonar ping over drumming which sounds like rain on a tin roof. It’s more a set of moments than something that works as a whole.
Concern are the headliners. They’re Gordon Ashworth, one half of noise-nikers Oscillating Innards. In this guise he’s operating in drone mode. A micro sample of a violinist laments faintly in the background while the tonal sound waves quiver gently. But again I’m not engaged by the sounds. Suddenly the music stops. Ashworth waves choppily at the audience and departs. It’s almost as if he was as tired of it as I was.
Preferred drink: Kernel's IPA
One man and a table with the usual tangle of wires and leads, and assorted electronic gadgetry. He’s also got a chunky wooden flute and a tom tom. The set begins with heady, heavy kosmiche hymnals. We’re deep into the dreamy spiritualism of Popol Vuh or Ash-Ra Temple.
The melange of hare Krishna bell rattle, organ tone float and looped flute summon the atmosphere of spirit worship and ritual. Imagine whirling round in a tropical forest, sun light flickering through the tree canopy, colour, motion, blur, undefined, yet fully engaging your senses.
Pascal Nichols is a drummer who plays in lots of different groupings, but most commonly in Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides. Tonight he’s playing a solo set using drums and samples.
It starts well with Nichols darting round the sound samples. However, I lose my way with the set. Nichols seems to have a microphone strapped round his neck. This allows him to add low, throat yodelling satellite signals as sonar ping over drumming which sounds like rain on a tin roof. It’s more a set of moments than something that works as a whole.
Concern are the headliners. They’re Gordon Ashworth, one half of noise-nikers Oscillating Innards. In this guise he’s operating in drone mode. A micro sample of a violinist laments faintly in the background while the tonal sound waves quiver gently. But again I’m not engaged by the sounds. Suddenly the music stops. Ashworth waves choppily at the audience and departs. It’s almost as if he was as tired of it as I was.
Preferred drink: Kernel's IPA
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The Dead C - The Garage, London, 1 December 2010
I can’t believe that I’m actually about to watch The Dead C.
If you’d asked me 15 years ago if they’d be playing The Garage I would have found the idea inconceivable. But here they are in a warm-up show for the coming ATP appearance.
The begin with Bruce Russell and Michael Morley manipulating squalls of noise from their guitars. After about 10 minutes Robbie Yeats joins them on stage, adding his breathtakingly simple drum beats.
Just as I’m expecting the performance to take off it falls flat. Whole sections meander, twisting aimlessly, into musical cul de sacs. They occasionally flicker, and I’m momentarily expectant, awaiting the dysfunctional magic they able to conjure. Only the spell is just as quickly broken. And, dare I say it, the tedium returns. The set sounds like a rehearsal where something isn’t working.
It’s too easy to suggest I’d built The Dead C up too much in my own mind. Set expectations they could never meet. If anything my critical judgement was temporarily suspended. I was ready to love them. They wouldn’t have had to offer me much.
I can feel a similar restlessness in the audience. The muted applause at the end of their set seems to convey the same message.
If you’d asked me 15 years ago if they’d be playing The Garage I would have found the idea inconceivable. But here they are in a warm-up show for the coming ATP appearance.
The begin with Bruce Russell and Michael Morley manipulating squalls of noise from their guitars. After about 10 minutes Robbie Yeats joins them on stage, adding his breathtakingly simple drum beats.
Just as I’m expecting the performance to take off it falls flat. Whole sections meander, twisting aimlessly, into musical cul de sacs. They occasionally flicker, and I’m momentarily expectant, awaiting the dysfunctional magic they able to conjure. Only the spell is just as quickly broken. And, dare I say it, the tedium returns. The set sounds like a rehearsal where something isn’t working.
It’s too easy to suggest I’d built The Dead C up too much in my own mind. Set expectations they could never meet. If anything my critical judgement was temporarily suspended. I was ready to love them. They wouldn’t have had to offer me much.
I can feel a similar restlessness in the audience. The muted applause at the end of their set seems to convey the same message.
Preferred drink: Bishop's Finger
Saturday, October 23, 2010
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.
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
Friday, October 1, 2010
Peter Brotzmann | Full Blast Trio + Ken Vandermark - Cafe Oto, London, 29/30 September 2010
Peter Brotzmann was, until recently, someone I only knew by reputation. I’d never heard any of his work. This two night residency at Café Oto seemed like a good opportunity for a crash course.
Playing as Full Blast with Marino Pliakas and Michael Wertmuller, they’re joined for these dates by special guest Ken Vandermark.
A few listens to magnus opus Machine Gun prepped me for the intense free jazz blitzkreig of the first night. From the outset Brotzmann and Vandermark are blasting away on their saxophones. They‘re underpinned by the rhythm section which like listening to rolling thunder.
The second night explores some quieter territory. However, they still find time for tidals waves of full blooded skronking squalls.
As a child I tried to play an instrument. However, my efforts were futile. It seems I have more talent for consuming music than creating it. Consequently, I have no understanding of music theory. So my appreciation of jazz, or any music, is always intuitive, visceral, emotional.
I appreciated the attack, aggression and questing. The conscious decision to experience discomfort and push past convention to some new undefined territory.
I just like it.
Preferred drink: Kernel's London Porter.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Ikue Mori | Chris Cutler | John Butcher - Cafe Oto, London, 14 August 2010
The last time I saw Ikue Mori playing Kim Gordon was wrapped in foil and writhing around at the front of the stage. I’d consider myself fortunate if I saw something half as memorable.
This is the last night of 3-day residency by Mori. Her collaborators have changed from night to night. This evening she is joined by percussionist Chris Cutler and saxophonist John Butcher.
The first set consists of three duos involving all the players.
Mori is uses a laptop. Triggering samples of science fiction inspired bleeps and whooshes. Butcher plays submerged sax squeals. Muting the power of the instrument and firing intermittent clusters of notes.
Cutler has customised his drum kit. Leads and wires run off to a table next to him. It’s covered in percussive ephemera and electrical gear, allowing Cutler to produce a simply extraordinary range of tones and textures.
For all these musicians skill, they sadly don’t play with enough volume for the venue to feel they can keep the bar open during sets. My failure to obtain a drink it the only low point.
The most effective performances are Mori’s duos. The interaction and responsiveness between the musicians seems particularly high.
In the second set they play as trio. Something about this grouping doesn’t quite work for me. It’s a set of moments. There will be a wonderful passage, but then whatever alchemy that had occurred will disappear.
At the end of the gig I too should disappear. Unfortunately, I have stock-piled beer a little too effectively, and as the venue empties I have to stay behind and finish my work.
Preferred drink: Kernel's London Porter.
This is the last night of 3-day residency by Mori. Her collaborators have changed from night to night. This evening she is joined by percussionist Chris Cutler and saxophonist John Butcher.
The first set consists of three duos involving all the players.
Mori is uses a laptop. Triggering samples of science fiction inspired bleeps and whooshes. Butcher plays submerged sax squeals. Muting the power of the instrument and firing intermittent clusters of notes.
Cutler has customised his drum kit. Leads and wires run off to a table next to him. It’s covered in percussive ephemera and electrical gear, allowing Cutler to produce a simply extraordinary range of tones and textures.
For all these musicians skill, they sadly don’t play with enough volume for the venue to feel they can keep the bar open during sets. My failure to obtain a drink it the only low point.
The most effective performances are Mori’s duos. The interaction and responsiveness between the musicians seems particularly high.
In the second set they play as trio. Something about this grouping doesn’t quite work for me. It’s a set of moments. There will be a wonderful passage, but then whatever alchemy that had occurred will disappear.
At the end of the gig I too should disappear. Unfortunately, I have stock-piled beer a little too effectively, and as the venue empties I have to stay behind and finish my work.
Preferred drink: Kernel's London Porter.
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