Thursday 11 January 2024, 7.30pm
Great triple bill from the excellent Infant Tree label to kick start the year, featuring Norwich based band Germ Lattice, the home made instruments of duo Mosquito Farm, and no-input electronics from Conal Blake.
Mosquito Farm began in 2022, an artists band and collaboration between Maddie Banwell and Grace Black. Their performances include many handmade instruments - mechanical, electronic and acoustic, alongside props and devices to play them with. Some forms are unrecognizable as instruments, while some resemble more conventional strings, drums or machines. These create sequences of drone and percussion, switching between microtonal harmonies and more chaotic layered rhythms with harsher sounds. Their performance is as much object theatre as music - their physical presence is choreographed around parameters to construct or collapse their set up, veering between intensity and awkwardness.
So far, Mosquito Farm is mostly experienced live, however they have 2 tracks on SELN’s compilation ‘The Last Londoner’ from 2023, and a track on The Wire Magazine’s ‘Below the Radar’ compilation in November 2024. They are currently working towards a solo release with SELN later this year.
Conal Blake is a musician from Glasgow. He currently plays solo and improvises with Li Song and Regan Bowering, using electronics and percussion. He also runs the Feedback Moves label.
Joe Barton, Mickey Donnelly, and Louie Rice met in London during the 2000’s but it wasn’t until they had relocated to Norwich in recent years that they rented a studio in a condemned brutalist shopping centre and the Germ Lattice sound was formed. They began by agreeing what they didn’t want the project to be: no improvising or jamming, no overdubs, keep the tracks short etc..
Gipping Through the Ages presents the band’s structured, repetitive & linear tracks built around drums, bass, and synth with deliberately abstract vocals, which draw as much from folk traditions and the broader east Anglian landscape as they do from our fragmented modern world. Their novel use of microphones and live tape processing add a dynamism to the music where elements mask each other or the overdriven meters suggest the whole thing is on the brink of collapse.
Gipping Through the Ages can be seen as a palimpsest, rooted in place but spanning time, layering ephemeral traces of Mark E Smith, WG Sebald, and Laura Oldfield Ford.
