Opening the final night of Oxford Brookes University’s Audiograft festival of sound art, the Shit! I Can DJ collective promise an experimental blind DJ set, in which nobody involved knows what the next segue is going to be. Hey, it’s aleatory! Anything could happen! Although, inevitably, all that does happen is that five self-satisfied hipsters chuckle smugly to each other as the Sylvanian Families theme plays infuriatingly over Archie Shepp, whilst the audience grows visibly restless.
By contrast, James Kelly’s problem is that his sounds are too consonant. Pressing your own themes, motives and textures onto vinyl and mixing them live is a neat idea, but if the sounds are too prettily open-ended there’s no challenge. Biosphere drones, Garbarek sax and Liz Fraser glossolalia sound pleasant together, but they’d sound equally pleasant in any configuration, and the long set soon becomes an unstructured stream of sugary, soporific segments: nice enough for a brief visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty’s “…it pays my way and it corrodes my soul…”, on the other hand, is conceptually strong and sonically captivating. Cornford places a vintage reel to reel machine onto a table, attaches two contact mikes, picks up a screwdriver, and proceeds to methodically dismantle it, whilst Whitty turns the whirrs, scrapes and bumps into powerful noise with a selection of FX and treatments, galvanic screeches and angry buzzing sounding like Merzbow eating a plate of bees. The arresting piece could be read as a satire on the fetishisation of vintage hardware, and it’s amusing to see people staring intently at a pair of pliers and some 50s technology, whilst rows of shiny Boss pedals across the table create the actual sounds. The conclusion is witty too, as Cornford tries desperately to cram all components back into the casing, like someone with an overstuffed holiday suitcase.
After this theatrical spectacle, the Automated Noise Ensemble’s lightly modified turntables seem unadventurous. Two decks are adorned with pieces of string that hit a contact strip every rotation, whilst another pair play scored vinyl to create a skein of clicks and skitters. It’s rhythmically enticing, occasionally evoking trains or horses’ hooves, but there’s not much that can be done once the rhythms have been built up, so perhaps the brief set duration was advisable.
Veteran instrument builder Max Eastley brings along a hinged plank of wood with a single bowed metal string, which allows him to bend notes to an extreme degree, even as they decay. The range of sounds he can create is truly astonishing, alternately aping a ‘cello, a clarinet and a swanee whistle and in one harrowing sequence, a wailing voice with ultra-portamento, the lament of the Hawaiian damned. Rhodri Davies takes an accompanist’s role, seemingly pathologically averse to plucking his harp. Instead he rubs it, tickles it with e-bows, taps it with soft mallets, and spends a while shaking it at different angles, like a man trying to retrieve a plectrum from an acoustic guitar. It’s a brilliantly intense, oppressive set of eerie Lynchian hums and ghostly glissandi, and even Eastley seems a little shocked by the unsettling atmosphere at the conclusion. Perhaps they were trying to eradicate the memory of the ill-conceived wackiness at the start of the evening.