Concrete Gazebo; Kleptofirm

Concrete Gazebo and Kleptofirm celebrate a double album launch, as they see tape releases drop on Goldsmiths label NX Records this spring. Join us to “Acid Heath” and “Electroacoustic Work” with rare live performances at New River. Concrete Gazebo – “Acid Heath” “With their name recalling a fondness for concrète music mixed with the freestanding, open garden structure, Concrete Gazebo seem perfectly designed to connect experimentation with performance… Their music is very evocative of shifting space and place. It’s about the collective live experience. About community and connection in both public and private spaces, particularly in a post-lockdown world. There is an immediacy which makes you feel like you are sharing the same space as the players and are free to be swept along by their reverb-laden, dubby jams. Concrete Gazebo are curious, attentive, generous and mystical. Through their music they explore and observe ever-evolving sound worlds and invite us to step into these vistas.” Ryan Hooper, MEANS Concrete Gazebo are a mostly Cambridge (UK)-based collective of musicians who improvise together. They have also been organising the free, open-to-all improvisation nights, Under The Concrete Gazebo, at the Blue Moon pub in Cambridge since 2018. The line-up of Concrete Gazebo on recordings is constantly in flux, with players dropping in and out depending on the sessions and others preferring to focus entirely on live performance. All the music released to date, either directly to their Bandcamp or via labels Anticipating Nowhere, Free Arts Lab and Speak & Spell has been the fruit of online sessions, using JamTaba 2, that have been taking place since the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020. JamTaba, which itself relies on the “measured latency” of Ninjam open-source software, allows musicians to play in synchronisation with each other but also means that each player doesn’t hear the others are playing in real time but only several bars later. This can encourage a loop-y, additive approach based on repetition and variation but also a freer style of parallel play that calls for an acceptance of chaos and serendipity. Hours of recorded improvisation are then sifted through to find the most inspired passages and dreamlike moments. These in turn are whittled down until each piece’s form is found, a bit like Michelangelo’s sculpture which already exists within the untouched marble block. Except that Concrete Gazebo are anything but perfectionists and, even in the editing process, imperfections and quirks are embraced. Acid Heath largely keeps faith with the CG practice of producing tracks by editing down and splicing material generated during online improvisations. The sounds that predominate this time include a heavily effected Harmonic Art Handpan, a Yamaha PortaSound PSS-50 – a portable synthesizer keyboard originally released in the early 1980s – that has been fed through several pedals, as well as field recordings and samples that are triggered and manipulated live. However, the sonic material woven into the fabric of the album also includes mobile phone recordings of two live jams, including a more guitar-based session, that took place in Cambridge and London. The result is a murky, atmospheric stew, at different times suggesting a sort of Fenland psychedelia, lof-fi krautock or a deconstructed Broadcast.