Sight Sonic
Link: http://www.sightsonic.org/
Rosy is a brusque opener (and quite clearly a man, which I wasn’t aware of. faceless laptronica eh?), delivering a terse set of drones. The initial emphasis on purity punctuated with the occasional tell-tale crackles of source material. This was an exploration of glitch as a fetishisation of error, the sinewy, supple tones courteously ceding territory to the surface noise. It was always a battle between two noises though, with little more than a cross-fade between the two. Too often the drones felt static, and were not elongated enough to start feeling the oblivion where you can’t imagine another sound, the sounds just sat on top of each other like oil on water. The shape of the set was disappointingly conventional – start quiet and tentative, get fuller, layer noises, crescendo end. I’m making it sound like Rosy is like a rancid jar of fat kept in a garage, whereas it was far more like a delicious tea with scones. Still, to be treated as a series of preparatory washes for…
An encounter with Philip away from the performance world would render an impression of a morose hoarder of anoraks, and yet he delivers the most impassioned performance of the three. The central conceit is the limited input, binding himself to two turntables, and the carelessly strewn vinyl scattered around his performance desk. (Last time I saw Philip Jeck I was struck at how he cultivates his surface noise, literally throwing his records around, no sleeves and shoved in a rucksack at the end of the set.) But this limitation of sources only serves to put pressure on other parts of the system, and so the tunnelling forays into the sounds from the records are expansive miniature dissertations; exfoliating the sound through distortion, piercing it with echo and using the loops to remind us of the one source-sound that runs through everything we hear. Sonic mittens on strings, tearing you away from the source, only to present it on a pallet to you later, like a kitten pleased with its first kill. No matter how far down Philip dives with the echo and squeal, he retains perspective; he will bungee from the depth of the most tweaked noise back to serenity and the reminder of the humble records, bearing their scars from previous sets. This is matched in the occasional sound outs (the aural equivalent of a black out) jarring the listener out of their reverie. This was the only set with images, mostly pastoral landscapes and sheep portraits, and the only common factor I could find was a lot of dappled sunlight shining through things. Non-narrative, inducing us to explore our own relationship to memory, as Jon Wozencroft urged? Or (just) pictures of sheep?
While Rosy Parlance and Philip Jeck both seemed to tame their music, Fennesz was the only performer who seemed to be wrestling with the sound, straining to pin so the audience could admire it a fragment longer. Maybe this is because he was the most direct of the three artists. Rosy Parlane used only a laptop, and the dull light it emitted offered no clue as to what part the performer was playing. Jeck obviously has the turntables, and frequently gets busy with them, grabbing the platter, but his contact is always somewhat obscured by the layers of effects, the pea under many, many mattresses. Fennesz has his guitar, firmly strapped on this time for the duration of the set, and the audience is far more aware of the possibility of error. Given that error in the form of skips, or loops formed by warping is a big part of the other acts, it’s interesting that it is the human error on the guitar comes across as the most fragile. Fennesz wasn’t tentative as a whole, but there were notes of hesitancy, interspersed with chugging riffs, as if to eradicate the previous delicate moments. Sounds bleed into each other, leaching across the guitar/laptop divide, which is where I think Fennesz excels, the overtones and feedback melting into the burbling electronic brook beneath it.
All three played together at the end, which was probably the best thing of the night. Jon Wozencroft introduced it by invoking the spirit of Warhol and Joy Division ("there are some things we'll never understand"), but there was no blissful amalgamation of noise, but rather a respectful interaction.
Kode 9 & The Spaceape - Sine (from Memories Of The Future)
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