Music / Drone
Review: Supersession, The Exchange
Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of spontaneity about this day of improvised music, starting with a last minute change of start time (by five hours!) and ending with an unexpected display of splendidly homoerotic dancing. What happened in between, however, was a fine and varied selection of ‘free’ music and performance, starting in the Exchange’s main hall with Blakk Jazz: guitar and electronics improvised to Katy Bauer’s filmed monologue from an ageing self-styled hippy artist. The man’s bursts of speech, punctuated by thoughtful gaps provided a rhythmic structure that Sam Coxhill-Davis’ guitar echoed and reflected over a tidal flow of electronics from Fat Paul himself. It was impressively tight for a spontaneous piece, but was sadly curtailed when the visuals’ laptop abruptly ran out of battery.
The Unity Trio get it together
Things got more trad with the Unity Trio’s set in the bar. Mark Langford, Paul Anstey and Roger Skerman probably holding a century of improvisation experience between them and thus freely able to pass ideas around or respond adroitly to any surprises thrown at them. It was interesting to compare their style with the Calcine Quartet who followed hot on their heels. Swelled to a fivesome by Helen Papaioannou theirs was inevitably a more complex sound, often with contrasting narratives between rhythm section and frontline. The conversational rapport between Helen’s baritone sax and Rebecca Sneddon’s tenor or alto was particularly eloquent, often engineering rhythmic flow against Roger Telford’s more explosive outbursts on drums. There were many moments of unity, too, such as the episode of collective sputtering that evolved into washes of layered harmonics, Matthew Griggs guitar finally relaxing into haunting drones.
Brazenhead
By contrast Narrati Drone’s poetry, electronically processed and harmonised plus Fat Paul returning on gizmos offered a more theatrical moment back in the bar. The recurrent imagery and beat-referencing rhythmic pace drove an all-too-short interlude before the Brazenhead duo of Wayne Rex (drums) and Tim Hill (saxes) were joined by Calcine’s bass player Dominic Lash on the main stage. What resulted was exceptional, a weaving of free-flowing melody and complex rhythm references that was not afraid to recycle itself and even at times slip into a passing groove. When Tim laid his baritone sax to rest and shifted to alto it was an almost triumphant shift in gear, the bass swooping up with it, the drums tiskering in appreciation.
is needed now More than ever
worker? parasite?
It was always going to be a hard act to follow, but the semi-comic guitar flailings and overdubbed accordion drones of Worker vs Parasite pulled it off successfully as well as providing a bridge to the headline heavyweight bout of Stereocilia vs Saltings. These two respected solo dronesters appeared in the guise of a guitar/bass duo but a process of effected accretion led to a proper post-industrial thrashscape, with Andrew ‘Saltings’ Cooke soon on his knees before a laptop while John ‘Stereocilia’ Scott continued to wrangle guitar and pedals. It was about this time the ‘dancing’ started as two entwined men from the audience began weaving and wrestling in front of the stage, eventually rolling around the floor in what could either have been combat or foreplay. The ambiguity of their interaction reflect the onstage dynamics as it became harder to correlate Scott’s guitar fingering to changes in the mesh of sound. What had begun as the soundtrack of massive cosmic objects near-missing in space devolved to subterranean meltdown music, roaring and peaking relentlessly.
Considering the freezing post-Christmas evening and the last-minute change in timing it was good to see a respectably sized crowd enjoying this event, hopefully a sign of the continuing health of Bristol’s growing improvised music scene.
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