Given the size of the population in and around the city, it’s relative proximity to London, the fact of an arts-dominated university and a school of art that was attended by no less than Brian Eno, it is a thing of eternal wonder to me that Winchester has such a lack of gigs and venues. Where is everyone? With all that in mind, I guess it makes some perverse kind of sense that when there is a gig, it’s hidden away beneath the floorboards of an old, tilting boozer, away from the weight of the untenanted rockeries of history that litter the rest of the city. It was arranged by Joe Evans, head of Running on Air records, a micro label based out of a front room a few minutes walk from the Hyde Tavern, and featured some of his own audio-visual work (which I ashamedly missed) and two ambient/drone acts, Venona Pers and Ekca Liena.

Saying ‘under the floorboards’ wasn’t an affectation. After stocking up on mulled wine from a steaming silver vat, and almost stumbling into a cupboard, I walked down some gasping narrow wooden stairs and into a cramped low-ceilinged basement, resplendent with slung veils of spider webs, and a rack of power tools. Not to do the bands any injustice here at all, but it became quickly apparent that the venue was going to be as much a part of the experience as the music. The 30-strong crowd were sitting in coats on a mix of makeshift sofas and plastic garden chairs in front of a performance space no more than a metre squared. A projector screen acted as the back of the stage. As the lights were switched off, soft clouds of breath vapour were momentarily illumined by the damp light of the projector.

Venona Pers’s quiet pastoralism fitted into this atmosphere perfectly. The duo’s set up of two guitars and a laptop was a familar one and they built their warm ambience from bright tones and gentle layers of delayed guitar – largely based on last year’s The Past Is A Foreign Country album. This tone was matched by the autumnal nature of the projections – pastel shades and super-8 abstracted woodland scenes, like flickers of half-forgotten memories. Being as we were, huddled together in coats and lulled by the music and the mulled wine, it was difficult not to drift off into woozy reveries, and, eyes-closed, the occasional passage of someone up and down the creaking stairs adding a soff percussive undertow fitted so perfectly it was tempting to think of the room as a sound vessel, cut into the land and buried, using the dark chalk caverns as primitive resonating chambers… The closing track, ‘Still Libraries’ was fittingly the most immersive of all, with Jonathan Hill creating a ringing bed of tones with his 12-string acoustic, over which Grant Weston e-bowed long vibrating tendrils of sound.

The Ekca Liena set was somehow more problematic for me, or at least refused to fit as tidy a narrative. Daniel WJ Mackenzie, whether recording under his own name or as Ecka Liena, is one of the new breed of incredibly prolific artists, who seem to release a bewildering array of albums and EPs across a variety of labels. His signature sound could be said to be broadly pastoral as well, but there’s something more obscure and brooding – there are hints of darker neurotic themes, hauntings and an exploration of thresholds, be they those between sleep and wakefulness, day and night or even tropes surrounding morphology. The set tonight was a single piece, for which Mackenzie sat on the floor hunched around his guitar with his back to the audience. Beneath everything he laid a low, almost catacombic, rumble, which again was very much heightened by the subterranean surroundings; and into this he added billows of controlled feedback. It was unclear from mere observation, how the sounds were being created, which might be considered a strength; but being this close to the performance space induced a strange feeling of invasion of still seeing too much of the mechanics. Coupled with this were some oddly uninspiring images that somehow detracted from the music. It wasn’t until I disengaged completely that the performance really cast its spell: with closed eyes it was like being inside an elemental space, the drones swelling into the room and seeming to warp the threshold between inside and out. When the piece ended suddenly, the general feeling was that there had been a dilation of time – what seemed like a 15-minute piece, was closer to 40 minutes.

It was only left for us to stumble out of the dark like gurning, sightless tetrapods and gorge on mulled wine and ask the kindly landlady when the next episode was. Here’s to it.

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