Next Spirit of Gravity gig: Thursday 11th June 2009

Spirit of Gravity presents

ANIMAL MAGIC TRICKS / HOOFUS / MONSTER BOBBY

The Komedia Studio Bar, 44-47 Gardner Street, Brighton, BN1 1UN
Time 8:30 - 11:00 Cost £5 / £4

Animal Magic Tricks: minimalist toytown melodies and dark whispers.

Hoofus: 8bit melodies and sine wave bloopers

Monster Bobby: lofi loops, guitar, and a warped imagination.

Animal Magic Tricks

www.myspace.com/animalmagictricks
Frances Donnelly combines Fisher Price tinkle-pulses and beautiful, scarred words, minimalist toytown electronic melodies, tide-noises, the reedy breath of a Casio and adorns them with utterly endearing vocals, shattered, tiny and pure like freshly-made glass. This is the second attempt to get the marvellous Frances down.

'A woman with flaming red hair makes a keyboard sound like crunching rocks. Her voice flutters and flounces round like a ballet dancer. Beeps intrude on our intimacy.'
The Skinny

'....possesses a voice that could melt the evening's sudden downpour of snow...toy keyboards and strange sounding loops evoking comparisons to Tunng and even Animal Collective's school of song making.'
Music Mule

Hoofus

www.hoofus.com

Hoofus is the alter ego of Norfolk based musician Andre Bosman and his music is a collision of bleeping blooping 8 bit melodies; sine wave frequencies twisting and rubbing against each other, oscillators humming and purring in an electro drone rock soup.

Hoofus has a very hands on, performance based approach to electronic music. Not content to simply sit behind a laptop and press a few buttons, Hoofus on stage is a frenzy of activity - battering midi controllers, jumping up and down, sweating and engaging with the audience, he is the antithesis of po-faced live electronica.
Previous performances include appearances at the Faster than Sound Festival, Encompass Festival, Sonic Arts Network Soundcircus, the Dublin Conservatoire and Norwich Arts Centre.

Hoofus has featured on two split singles, both of were played on BBC Radio One, and has also performed a live session on Resonance FM. His debut album has just been released by Twitchy Eye Recordings, and has so far received airplay on Resonance FM and BBC Radio's On The Wire show.

Monster Bobby

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Bobby

Monster Bobby is a longstanding Spirit of Gravity favourite, he uses lofi loops and acoustic guitar to create wonderfully off centre pop songs from another reality. How can anyone resist a song that starts "I lost my light sensitive Theremin"?

We also love him for playing minimal impact on Huw Stephens Radio 1 show and being the evil Svengali figure behind polka dot sensations The Pipettes.

There will be an elektrocreche available for any unaccompanied toys who will be looked after during the intervals by our professionally trained team of volunteers. And anybody else that wants to bring along a sound toy to play with.

Hosted by our very own 'Laptop' Lee Hume
Visuals by _minimalVector

For details of future Spirit of Gravity events, go to www.spiritofgravity.com/.

We have video and audio on the Spirit of Gravity mp3 blog from all our recent shows at spiritofgravity-brighton.blogspot.com/

There are other videos on the Spirit of Gravity MySpace page at www.myspace.com/thespiritofgravity

We now have a Facebook group where you can be kept up to date with shows and information:

www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=75568366205

There are also downloads available of some complete Spirit of Gravity sets at

www.archive.org/details/the-spirit-of-gravity

There are now also some of _minimalVector’s films featuring Spirit of Gravity acts and guests at the Vimeo HDTV page

www.vimeo.com/thespiritofgravity

· Greetings:

The festival season is upon us and the much anticipated Spirit of Gravity Festival CD is at last available for Free Download from the nice chaps at Wronglab.

http://wrong.thirtytwobit.com/wrong-lab/51-wronglab/250-w-lab016--va-fest2008-spirit-of-gravity

Other Good Things for those living in other places:

We went to The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill for a Random Friday with Same Actor and T-Toe plus _minimalVector visuals. It’s a great set up in a lovely building. They’ll be doing more its free and well worth the effort to get there.

The night skies out there are better than ours though...

Then even further along the coast in Eastbourne, Deepkiss720 is hosting Asylum at Minnesota Jaxx on Seaside, alternate Fridays. Live music and DJ’s, a variety of strange and wonderful things.

· Reviewings:

Spirit of Gravity at the Komedia Studio Bar, Brighton, Tuesday 12^th May 2009

In the dark basement we played our Season showcase, kicking off with a partially deaf Strangers From Birth who basted us with a beat stolen from Kraftwerk and then baked to harsh perfection, some analogue synthesisers squelched and bassed for a stuffing and lost murked up vocals as a trim. A tasty treat, they suited the bigger PA we had down here.

Picking up from the elektrokreche random noise Henry Collins (rather than the sometime advertised Shitmat – apologies to anyone inconvenienced) and minimal impact set up on the extremities of the stage and played with the extremities of sound. It was a really good set of crafted noise and found recordings The environment wasn’t inclined to make you dream as so often you do with mi, but with the all abstract visuals it was very intense, climaxing with a slowed down voice falling through the stargate in “2001: a space odyssey” and a traditional breakdown in Steve minimal impact’s mixer, with a strange echo of Chris and Dan’s from last month Steve had to walk right round the stage to tell Henry he’d had to stop.

Carrying on the breakdown theme, Ital Tek had problems with his software during the day so couldn’t play his usual set instead he dropped some well chosen 12s and unreleased mp3s from his own catalogue.

Fortunately there were no such problems for Tim Exile. His soundcheck had been amazing human beatboxing breaks and bass so far into the bottom end it made my trousers wobble, and then dropped further to get the top of my boots going. Tim blasted straight in from Alan’s set picking the beat up and then taking off with a mixture of self generated and programmed sounds into an epic blast. For the second half of his set after a quick pause to reboot (what was I saying about technical problems again?) the joystick, Tim quickly took off a strangely fractured vocal (or was it an accordion) loop stuttered it and then wandered out onto the dancefloor (yes at a SoG show, I know) to build it up into a slower thundering piece. Crowned with a brief detuned vocal and some messing about with more vocals and then ending.

Calming down after that with some Gregorian chant before taking us off into the wonderful 80’s recesses of his record collection Ceephax played a mad melange of daft pop, dark rock and old electronics, with breaks and noise at unexpected corners.

Yours as ever

El Maestro Con Queso

Editor.

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