Deborah L. Knights & Joie Hinton: InVerse Gravity

This by turns deliciously mad-cap and delightfully bucolic album is a mixture of spoken word and song vocals layered across a psychedelic soundscape created by former Ozric Tentacles and Eat Static musician Joie Hinton and his partner Deborah Knights and features the voice of British scientist and inventor John R. R. Searl. Sometimes Searl’s voice is heard in lecture; sometimes in interview… he’s been a controversial figure who claims to have created perpetual motion devices during his time working for BR Rewinds in the 1940s and 50s; part of the objective for this project is to create new awareness of his methods and works.

What we have here is an engaging album that effortlessly moves between Deborah’s spellbinding vocals on tracks like ‘Eagle’ and ‘More Than Stardust’ and Searl’s professorial ruminations on the development of anti-gravity transport. We’ve heard poets like Robert Calvert adding recitations to space-rock, and there have of course been instances of experts from various walks of life having their speeches set to music (Tony Benn springs to mind). But this seems to me to be something of a first, an amalgamation of spacey synthesisers and scientific lectures. It’s an interesting idea, nicely executed and works predominately because it nicely flows between lecture and song, meaning that the listener is never overwhelmed by Searl’s scientific commentary. You’ll, of course, have to make your own mind up about the ideas being expounded but it’s a very creative package and highly enjoyable on several levels.

Hinton plays in Here & Now these days, and from there he’s recruited Keith Missile and Steffe Sharpstrings as guest musicians. A second Inverse Gravity Vehicle album, Amongst The Pigeons has, I believe, recently been released.

Joie Hinton Q&A

Tell us something of Inverse Gravity Vehicle…

It’s a kind of concept project, which I’m doing with Deborah, and with a professor, Professor John Searl who is kind of the Grandfather of inverse gravity. He’s developed technology that could, you know, save the world. You know these people who design water powered cars, and they all get coshed or bumped-off by the government? He’s one of these types; he’s developed stuff to do with magnetic devices that can be healing devices and forms of travel. He’s called these things SEG, which is the ‘Searl Effect Generator’ and he’s a close friend of Deborah’s. We’ve got tons and tons of interviews and talks with him – you could power the world on his stuff, free energy, instead of using coal and electricity it would be possible to power everything with no pollution. He’s been persecuted by government, had stuff taken off of him – one of these characters. He was down here for Christmas and we started off doing this mad music with him on it, and it’s a crazy mix. Deborah’s a songwriter, I do my own sort of wacky weirdness and we’ve got John Searl ranting and raving about magnetic-powered disc-shaped craft that he’s test flown. It sounds a little bit like Professor Stanley Unwin, gone mad, on top of our music.

So you put his interview tapes on top of your music?

Yeah, or vice-versa. We’ll have a track going, or we’ll phone him up to do stuff and it’s great fun. One of the things we’re doing with it is not just to raise awareness, but also to get help and funding for what he wants to do. He has got a few people interested, backers, and apparently they are very close now to building the first big solar flight generator. He did develop disc shaped craft that flew – that whole UFO mystery scene of the 60s and 70s… they were actually his test flights. So it’s a really positive thing to do, it’s like having a band with an ecological message with it. It’s also rather unusual to hear a mad professor rapping over psychedelic music; most people, whenever they use voices just use samples but in this case we’re sometimes playing half a lecture. We’ve done one album and a second is nearly complete.



Buy Inverse Gravity at Planet Gong
Buy Amongst the Pigeons
Joie Hinton Myspace Page
John Searl Website
John Searl - Wikipedia Entry