Dead Space Chamber Music

Imagine you’ve just awoken and you’re wandering the corridors of a space station, but it’s not the clean, functional corporate sort of space station that the USS Enterprise would dock at; nor is it the beat up, lived in funky sort of space station where you’d find the Millennium Falcon. This is a space station designed by Giger & Lynch. You’re walking the corridors, feeling at ease and comforted but strangely there’s an underlying sense of other worldliness about the environment…something not quite right? Surely Cthulhu can’t have made it to the edge of the universe?

You enter a biosphere with a babbling brook and rolling English meadows and hear what almost sounds like a spidery madrigal, a plaintive voice “Flow my tears…flow my tears….” strong and clear and yet with an undeniable tinge of melancholy.

Leaving the biosphere you’re plunged into darker realms, the otherworldliness has transmuted to base menace, there’s something just of sight, lurking at the corner of your eye, not willing to show itself until…until the time is right.

Quickening your pace, you burst through the doors ahead to find yourself in a courtyard surrounded by Moorish buildings with the sun setting behind the minarets. The dervishes and djinn are dancing, but in slow motion, and you’re compelled to join them until the music ceases, leaving you off kilter – not disturbed but dishevelled and disorientated as the musicians leave the stage.

Dead Space Chamber Music played four pieces of music – Food for the Moon (an improvisation); Flow My Tears (a John Dowland adaptation); Screaming Veils (an improvisation) and Je Vivroie Liement (a reworking of a Machaut composition). The music was executed in near dark and Tom Bush, Liz Muir and Ellen Southern delivered the performance with classy, understated aplomb.

The audience awoke in the corridors with Southern amongst them playing a wine glass; the transition from the corridors to the biosphere saw the music fading to black with Southern easing the transition with the rustling of a space blanket. Her vocals (whether singing or vocalising) were strong but just so, and she was a captivating focal point in a less is more way.

Bush’s guitar was treated throughout and mostly the source of great swathes of ambience rather than solos or riffs (but there was some welcome heft in Je Vivroie Liement); Muir’s cello was both treated and au naturel, forming the bedrock for the pieces, dragging the sci-fi sounds back to the Gothic. All three musicians worked pedals and shakers both individually and in tandem to dress the soundscapes with misheard noises, unearthly transmissions and sonic emissions.

This was a confident, challenging and satisfying suite of work, the four pieces seguing seamlessly as a collective piece of music and Dead Space Chamber Music are a band that will reward your attention in ways you never thought possible. Jonathon Kardasz, Bristol 24/7 full review - https://www.bristol247.com/culture/music/review-bonnacons-of-doom-the-cube/