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| Stuart Chalmers |
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| Posset |
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| BBBlood |
BBBlood
Stuart Chalmers
Posset
Bradford Fuse Arts Space
17th June 2017
At the gigs end I’m talking to Campbell when Stuart Chalmers comes up and hands each of us a small slip of paper. We looked at each other nonplussed. ‘Its tonights gig’ says Chalmers. We looked at each other nonplussed again. ‘You’ll be able to download it in the morning’ says Chalmers. We look at each other nonplussed for the final time as it dawns on us that we can download the gig we’ve just attended. I look at Campbell and he looks at me and our jaws drop slightly. Kin hell.
Maybe its an age thing. Once upon a time you’d come across shabbily recorded cassettes of gigs you’d been to and bought them dutifully and if you were lucky they’d contain some semblance of musical fidelity but in most instance they sounded like they’d been recorded using iron filings, nails and a biscuit tin. Some people even went to the trouble of putting them on to vinyl but the results were pretty much the same, a decent gig with a shitty sound.
Its a hot and sultry night in Bradford and theres more people outside the Sparrow Cafe than in so I find a quiet seat where a gentle breeze coming in through the door wafts my paper, a pint and the paper and the crossword that I cant fathom and there’s ladies wandering about covered in half a square meter of netting, huge wobbly lines of them up and down Hustlergate, gangs of them pre loaded and ready to roll.
The Fuse Artspace is but one room with two windows facing the outside world. The last time I was here was to see Stuart Chalmers, then winter and blowing with rain, coats kept on to keep the warmth in and the wet out. Now its the fag end of the first day of a heatwave and inside its a temperature conducive to drinking beer which, judging by some of the bright red faces on show seems to be the case. Its a mainly male affair [‘almost a sausage fest’ says the Bearded Wonder] and a group of about 25 and we’re here to celebrate Crow Versus Crow’s ‘Delirium Cutlet Impaste’ of which the three artists appearing tonight were all a part of and of which I waxed lyrical not so many moons ago.
Delirium Cutlet Impaste brought together three people who for want of a better acronym wander around under the brolly that is the RFM NAU, thats the Radio Free Midwich No Audience Underground to give it its full title. That crawlspace that exists beneath the house that is all the rest of the music in the world. It is a small audience but that doesn’t mean the sounds produced tonight aren’t deserving of a wider audience.
Posset, a.k.a. Joe Murray has a poem he wants to recite but has instead committed it to tape which is fine by me and no doubt everybody else in the room. His well enunciated poem is a stream of seemingly unconnected words soon the subject of half pressed fast forward and reverse buttons. Posset works plenty of tapes around his set up, small ones and big ones creating a distinct Posettian sound, that is half formed words, coughs, throat clearings, whispers of tape whizzed forward and back, the nighttime mutterings of the bedridden, EVP culled from the magnetic dust on crumbling cassette tape, the ghostly chains of wandering spirits. I’m quite certain I can hear Murray calling a cat called ‘Chum’ as a fatally wounded dinosaur breathes its last. Enigmatic, delicate, mysterious and and deserving of Dictaphone sponsorship.
Stuart Chalmers gives the night its longest set. Swapping his swarmandal for plenty of boxes and some pretty fairy lights he soon has the room locked in a bout of synchronized head nodding. I’m assuming. I’m sat on the front row right next to the Bearded Wonder who, as his is wont, is deep within his own, away with the lights as Chalmers fractures a loop that reverbs itself into its own kind of summers night fractal. Twenty five minutes of it and maybe a taster of that collaboration with Campbell thats just hit the ether [and my hand].The deeper it goes the more complex it becomes, building ever more unstable structures until it plateaus and settles in to a series of chiming out of synch church bells and sawing scaffold poles. Clangourous, head ringing, bells and cacophony and drone and harmony.
Paul Watson [a.k.a. BBBlood] has dragged himself up from London with a Fidget Spinner in his pocket which he tries to incorporate in to his twenty minute set of noise roars with, so I’m later told, limited success. Fidget Spinner Noise. Keep the ADHD noise jerk in your house occupied as they continue to fill the hard drive of an iMac with ear splatter.
I’ve never been disappointed with a live BBBlood set and tonight is no exception. Listening back to it now [yes, I know, exciting isn’t it] in the discomfort of my humid man cave I find sounds that on first hearing passed me by; amid the crumbling edifices and sea bed explosions lie frequencies taken from the upper reaches of Jodrell Bank, transmissions from Mars and maybe a Fidget Spinner hitting an old baccy tin containing a contact mic and a few Japanese coins.
Its still hot. I’m still thinking about Saturday night. It was a good night for the sausages.
https://stuartchalmers.bandcamp.com/
https://posset.bandcamp.com/
https://bbblood.bandcamp.com/
http://www.wearefuse.co/
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