Here's a project I'm helping with a little bit of press on, any high-traffic bloggers or print / radio reviewers interested, please drop me a note from the e-mail address on my profile page.
Anyone who has followed Joie Hinton’s travels through electronic music, from his early wanderings around the free festivals with the O’Roonies to the moment at the Stonehenge People’s Free Festival of 1984 when he had the opportunity to “make some swishy noises” with the embryonic Ozric Tentacles and onwards to Eat Static, will anticipate that any album with his signature stamped on it will be a delightfully contradictory collision of bucolic soundscapes, mad-cap electronics and deliciously outrageous samples. There’s plenty of all of those sounds happening on this release, a by turns thought-provoking and wacky development of his most recent project, Inverse Gravity Vehicle, aided and abetted by co-conspirator, synth player, lyricist and vocalist Deborah L. Knights.
Inverse Gravity Vehicle developed out of Deborah’s long-time friendship with Professor J. R. Searl, her experiences of the healing benefits of his Searl Effect Generator, and Joie and Deborah’s interest in his experiments into the extraction of clean and sustainable energy that can be used to power a multitude of applications. “John Searl is the Grandfather of inverse gravity,” Joie explains. “He’s developed technology that could save the world. It’s a really positive thing to do, like having a band with an ecological message.”
“I was working on songs about his work and investigating his story,” adds Deborah, “and then got involved with a film about him, which originally a major film company was funding though the director eventually made as an independent DVD, researching and gathering evidence. The song ‘Through The Eyes Of A Child’, included here, was originally intended for the film. I was working on the album and involved in the film research over a couple of years, so I had plenty of ideas and endless audio recordings of John Searl earmarked for tracks. On the other hand, ‘Predator Control’ is an animal rights song, which I wrote with passion and anger, so there’s a range of themes that we want people to know and think about.”
Joie and Deborah had encountered each other some twenty-five years ago in a Primrose Hill Studio, met up again several years later, and found themselves perfect partners for Inverse Gravity Vehicle. The resulting combination of Professor Searl’s narration, Deborah’s elegant vocals and Joie’s spacey electronics has already graced two Inverse Gravity Vehicle CDs, but this two-disc set brings the music much more to the fore and is an excellent jumping-on point for those yet to catch-up with this project.
Gathered are an impressive range of collaborators. Ozric’s Ed Wynne makes his unique guitar presence felt on ‘Predator Control’. More recently Hinton has performed with the band that inspired his own musical ambitions, Here & Now, leading to contributions here from mainstays Keith ‘Missile Bass’ Bailey and Steffe Sharpstrings. Even Tom Billings, Lord Mayor of Glastonbury at the time of the recordings makes an appearance, playing piano on Deborah’s peace song, ‘Friendly Fire’.We’ll only brief allude to an ‘appearance’ from a rather grandiose figure of television presenting, and instead revel in the melting pot of the weird, the wonderful and the way-out tracks that are loaded with imagination and which will engage its audience with its multi-layered approach and sheer zest.
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