Fort Process 2018

Newhaven Fort, East Sussex
22 September 2018

Ahhh, that relentless rain! After a blazing summer it’s great to get back to some genuine English weather, isn’t it? And boy, it rained all day, meaning a lot of the improv parade ground goodness at Fort Process‘s 2018 edition got secreted away, upping the happen-upon expectation to rise that bit higher.

My scribbled-together rough itinerary was soon abandoned in favour of the accidental and most of the early offerings were celebrated through the interactive wares on offer. Jamming with honeyed harmony and the bitter discord of The Tesla Coil Organ, messing with the press-button sonics amongst the grenades and whatnots in the Spanish Civil War room, the live mixer of sampled war texturals that sounded like a Nurse With Wound record I’ve yet to purchase.

There was a lot to take in, continuously serenaded by aeolian harps and wind synthesisers encamped on the grassy battlements of Newhaven Fort as the rain heightened the vivid rust, the bubbling synaesthesia of the place. It was great to see previously empty emplacements now had massive guns in them too, (although not a war-type person, the twelve-year-old in me can’t help being bedazzled by such things).

First to be savoured were The Larsens, a feedback coven of vocalists circled in a deep orange hue, a switchblade of narrative on the subject of self-harm, lack of self-esteem and self-image. Wavering between dronal hum and chattering echo, a flickering hearth that sucked you in as the darkness surrounding it grew that little bit darker.

Caught a bit of David Thomas Broughton’s prepared guitar and the symphonic bounce of ORE’s tuba and trombone face-off, their atmospheric bell-tones bleeding pleasantly into the afternoon, while Tasos Stamou‘s modular mauls were an inspired set of stormy weathers and pithy séance. The prescribed Voces Castrum, dressed in high-vis and carrying glowing tubes (on occasion describing themselves as the Illuminati) wandered around, curling a taste of the Renaissance round the fort’s echoic nooks and crannies. Really liked watching the facial expressions this type of discipline promotes (when I wasn’t closed-eyes to the regal riches of it all).

Later in the claustrophobic underground tunnel to the caponier, I caught a Fluxus-type pop-upness by Jobina Tinnemans — featuring Alistair Strachan on cornet, Kev Nickells and Carrie Topley on violin; Lisa Guile on sax; and the voices of Rebecca Askew and George Patterson — which involved a long row of rustling newspaper readers vowelling away like a monastery of frustrated monks up and down the corridor to the hypnotic sway of gypsy strings and saxophonics.

Missed opportunities too — the wreckage of Rie Nakajima’s spent performance littering the corridors of the grand magazine, pinned full of should-have been there magnificence; totally neglectful of both of Marlo Eggplant’s performances too — how did that happen? Oh well, it wouldn’t be Fort Process without a bit of failure to witness. Luckily, I managed to see Map 71 (whose Void Axis album is currently burning into my cortex) fill the activity room up with oddly danceable directions and stripped-back poetics, before a tantalising Pythagorean pyramid of looped goodness from improv veteran Rhys Chatham in the Romney Hut. Here, a few hours earlier Ana Gutieszca was throbbing its tin casing with a distinctive dose of broken techno – lots of euphoric hookage and nodding heads, so impressed I rushed to the merch tent to grab some of her action, but sadly there wasn’t any (inserts sad emoji here).

The rather cramped nuclear defence room was take up with a constant parade of synthesizer sizzle from the Brighton Modular Meet, a slow roast of Cluster-like pennies spinning in your cranium, whilst between acts a press-screen tone generator nestled in the back gave you satisfying radiophonic sweetness. Caught a bit of Ursula Damm‘s Transits in the film room whilst escaping the rain, its slow-motion smears of traffic, trams and pedestrians were ace, smoothing coloured snakes of activity coiling round each other, transitions in rhythmically charged diagonals of vivid rainbows. Then, dipping into the end of Dirk Campbell‘s fascinating talk on “Music and Dance in Remote Antiquity” — as always, there was just too much going down.

Deep in the back rooms of the gun emplacement, spot-lit turntables spun, their cargo boulders hitting an intermittent array of contact mics. The resulting sound was eerily like “Die Wölfe Kommen Zurück” on Coil’s A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room, a chugging locomotive that when combined with some of Alice Eldridge and Chris Kiefer‘s amplified cello performance next door sounded like my old dishwasher. A sonic full of spidery spectrals oozing a slightly apocalyptic verve that suited their crumbling situation so well.

Was really eager to not miss Isn’tses, so kept close by, first taking in Slow Listener’s beautiful closed-eye panoramics and the abstract collisions of Ned Rush. With a round table literally overflowing with all manner of kindergarten fodder and Fisher Price hackery, Isn’tses started as they meant to go on in a giddy prism of glorious noise, a buoyant neon that cut into life’s grey cancers, ripe with ridicule, flashed in gristly electrolysis. Yay, a spectrumed glow of rhythmic keystrokes and melodic slaughter piling on the bass, Tim Drage dressed as an experimental baseballer plying a powerful stew for partner in crime Lisa McKendrick (dressed like a cyberwoman-wrestler) to chant over in a tribal pixellation of juggling cut-ups and circuit-bent abscesses that wowed her vocal passions.

As she menaced the room, wielding her light-up lance, the sound seethed, buckled and pop-candied in colourful curves, scraped at a metallic heart that sonically splattered like a caught fish gasping for air. Then, just as you think it’s going to be atonal annihilation, it’s creaming up a gnarly gustatory of dazzling joy-shapes. Really happy to have finally got to see their magic. A magic that bled straight into the final act of the night.

AJA was a day-glo sensation. A Nottingham-based siren of delicious wrongness, splattering the whitewashed walls in chiselled prisms of noise, a shriek-sharded fest that rodented your mind in wild blis(s)ters of euphoric strangeness. She got animalistic from inside a clear PVC sheet, then the crowd parted like the Red Sea, as she wandered through, destroying those performer / observer boundaries. From the venue’s doorway she howled, the reverbed saturation stippled the sonics; she handed her mic to the audience to scream into as she returned to the stage-end of the room. The results seemed to burrow into your head like weasels dancing to strobe stabs and pounding percussives.

Then disaster struck as her little box of tricks died — AJA cried out for four double-As, and luckily somebody came to the rescue and its unassuming plasticity was once again dispatching a demented breeze block of distorted techno. Energetically leaping around, she dervished spirals to descending vocals, her face Guernica(ed) to the ceiling as a raspy sine cut in, or cathartically curling in an over-ripe crescendo;, and smiles, with plenty of satisfied grins as she slammed a quake of bassy goodness on through.

AJA shifted through the memory of the synth, and she was unable to find the brew she’d created especially for tonight, but instead found a fabulous substitute that she comically stated “she must have done in her sleep”, a dark-hued triumph that was cut-up, collaged and sacrificed. Hers was a vibrant explosion of harsh noise, far removed from the misogynistic tropes of the genre for a change, that effectively signed off another Fort Process in a massive fuck yeah!

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-