It seems fitting that a night of molecule vibrating, alpha wave schmoozing, ambient sound and vision was held in the basement of Café Kino in Bristol. This subterranean room enhanced the fact that tonight’s artists all create sonic worlds that feel more like recordings of ancient landscapes rather than newly created pieces of musical art and even the air conditioning unit vibrated along with the low frequencies. The night was promoted by the Chewing Glass Soundsystem – CGC – and was the second in the Sound Sensitivity Program series. The layout had the artists and mixing desk at the back of the room with visuals projected on to the opposite wall and CGC’s impressive speaker stack off to one side. The aim was to create a visceral experience for the audience that would allow them to become completely immersed.
The first set came from Blind Peter (AKA Josh Cooke, who organised the event), named after the ‘phantom monk’ who is said to roam the ruins of Netley Abbey in Hampshire and, along with many shots of trees, the Abbey featured in the projected video. The room was filled with a mixture of elongated sounds and low frequency rumbling that often resonated with the space to create the feeling of a sonic cocoon. Only the occasional use of a voice over hinted at the corporeal instead of the haunting sense that the earth and stone of the location was creating the sounds not Blind Peter.
Tommy Creep turned three-notes on synthesiser into a recurring motif that was stretched, squashed, compressed, muted, and echoed so that it was transformed beyond all recognition and created a journey to inner worlds and outer space. Tommy Creep seemed to have taken some DNA from John Carpenter and become Doctor Moreau experimenting to create a whole menagerie of sounds on his remote island.
Below you can hear a set from Tommy Creep recorded at the Crown in Bristol back in 2022:
The final set was from the artist who had inspired me to come along: Ben Powell, AKA Llyn Y Cwn*. I had first heard Lost and Found at Sea, Volume 1 which, like all his releases, draw on Ben’s use of fields recordings and the North Wales landscape of his home as inspiration for what he calls his ‘dark ambient’ music. This was the first outing for tracks that are taken from his forthcoming album Megaliths which will be released on Cold Spring Records later in the year.
Ben told me: “The album is based on field recordings made at various megalithic sites, I started visiting these sites about 25 years ago and spend most of my holidays travelling the country in my campervan “bagging” stone circles. I’ve tried to recreate the atmosphere / environment / feeling of each site in the tracks, the sounds found on site dictated the feeling of the music; drops of water inside a burial chamber become percussive loops, crows, cows, wind and damselflies become drones, even overhead aircraft were utilised. I recorded impulse responses at burial chambers and used convolution reverb to replicate the ambience of the sites.”
Ben also says that the visuals are an essential part of his show and add to the “hypnotic effect” he’s trying to achieve. The effect of black and white photographs of standing stones and wide landscapes treated in a split screen kaleidoscope is mesmerising as the brain tries to make sense of the images. All the while elongated pulses and drones collide and cascade into the warp and weft of environmental sound which made me think afterwards of Stone Tape Theory**. This is sound as experience; not just a 3-minute dopamine hit but the chance to luxuriate in it and have it affect you on a fundamental level. Llyn Y Cwn gives an incredible gift to the listener who is prepared to be patient and still, and lean into experiencing the zen of intuition rather than conscious effort.
The whole evening was incredibly invigorating. Not only was sound stretched but time too, as the audience communed with ASMR-like susurration on one level and the tectonic-electronic rumbling of low frequencies on the other. Thanks to the CGC speaker system sound travelled through every part of you not just into your ear. This was sonic irrigation and it felt like my molecules were still vibrating the following day. If there was ever a chance of aligning my battered chakras then a night at the Sound Sensitivity Program is likely to do it.
* Llyn Y Cwn (Welsh – lake of the dogs) is a small lake at 715m in the Glyder mountain range of Snowdonia, North Wales.
**Stone Tape Theory posits that “ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that mental impressions during emotional or traumatic events can be projected in the form of energy, “recorded” onto rocks and other items and “replayed” under certain conditions” (source: Wikipedia)
Llyn Y Cwn socials: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Tommy Creep: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | X (Twitter)
Chewing Glass Collective: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Review by Paul F Cook
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