Awarded Best Music Event
Brighton Festival and Fringe 2011
Juice for the Baby is here!
After years exclusively playing live, we've released our first studio album.
Spacedog creates live music for theremin, vocals, saw, percussion and our famous uncanny musical robots. Our work reflects our obsessions with defunct machines, faded variety acts and the darkest English folk tales.
Sarah Angliss: Composer, roboticist and player of theremin, saw, recorder, carillon and piano.
Stephen Hiscock: Composer and percussionist (playing handbells, drums, vibes and other instruments).
PRSF Award 2011
Thanks to the PRS for Music Foundation for supporting us. Their funding will help enormously with our research and development - everything from building new instruments and booking a larger rehearsal space to a buying a more rugged flight case for Hugo.
For one night only, Spacedog and Project Moonbase are taking over the big, BIG screen at the Ghillie Dhu, Edinburgh, and showing vintage infrasonic terrors, smoking robots, mind control experiments, space age fashions, bizarre time and motion studies and other gems from the archives. A feast of scientific and technological curiosities on film, from 1900 to present day, Rocket Lolly makes its Edinburgh debut on 15 April, bringing the International Science Festival to a close. Many films are accompanied live by Spacedog on vocals, vibes and theremin and the night will include some live performances from our robot pals.
Rocket Lolly
8pm Sunday 15 April
The Ghillie Dhu, 2 Rutland Place, Edinburgh EH1 2AD
90 minute film-show with live music followed by a DJ set
Tickets £10 (£8) Buy your Rocket Lolly tickets online
We’ll be teaming up with Project Moonbase, Edinburgh’s finest retrofuturistic podcasters, who are making a rare visit to planet Earth. They’ll be on hand to answer your queries about the future and to turn the Ghillie Du, Edinburgh, into a space age cocktail lounge as DJ Bongoboy takes to the wheels of steel.
This weekend, we’re heading to Sheffield to perform at the Megadork, an electronic cabaret for the city-wide Lovebytes Festival. The Angliss sisters will be there with vocals, theremin, keyboard and a few of our robot pals (Stephen is on tour with the Globe Theatre this month but will be joining us again in April). Our set will include a new number featuring The Ventricle, an ox blood red 1960s handbag which Sarah has rigged up to pulsate like a human heart.
The Megadork is at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield, 7pm, on Friday 23 March – see the Lovebytes website for tickets. On Saturday lunchtime, we’ll be performing in the Winter Gardens for the Lovebytes headphone festival. Come along with your headphones to hear the music for free. Read more →
Our take on this traditional Hungarian folk song Apple, Apple is track 10 on the album Juice for the Baby. This video of the song features Spacedog front man Hugo, the 1930s ventriloquist’s dummy we wired up and roboticised after he was rescued from the attic of a dead magician.
With apologies to the late, great Donald Pleasance who appears in a CoI information film which haunted us as children.
This track from Juice for the Baby is our homage to space dog Laika, the first living creature in orbit. It mixes vocals, theremin, vibraphone and carillon with the sounds of the original Sputnik beeps.
The opening bars have been recorded from an old cigarette box picked up in Moscow. It was a souvenir of Laika’s one way trip.
Juice for the Baby is here! And over the next few days, we’d like to tell you more about our favourite tracks. First up is our torch song for one of Britain’s greatest variety stars, the incomparable Tommy Cooper:
A hero of Spacedog, Cooper was a much loved performer, hugely respected by fellow magicians and comedians alike. His bumbling magic act took enormous proficiency and skill. In April 1984, Cooper collapsed on stage midway through a televised performance on the variety show Live From Her Majesty’s. The audience initially thought this was part of the act but it soon became clear that something was very wrong.
From the album Juice for the Baby Buy the song (25% of proceeds to Entertainment Artistes’ Benevolent Fund)
See video for Hypnotist – another number from the album.
Derren Brown cameo
Joining us in remembering Tommy Cooper is another celebrated performer: Derren Brown. The illusionist, mentalist, painter, writer and sceptic speaks to Tommy across time and space; one celebrated magician to another. We’re thrilled to have Derren’s voice on this track – we do hope you enjoy it.
Here’s a short taster from our brand new album Juice for the Baby – this number’s called Hypnotist. If you’ve ever been to a Rocket Lolly, where Spacedog conjure a live soundtrack for vintage science films, you’ve probably heard us extemporising something like this.
Look out for the Juice for the Baby on Bandcamp from Friday 9 December. We’re going to be selling downloads from noon as well as our first batch of physical CDs. We’re also expecting the album to appear on iTunes in a day or so. We’ve been working hard on this album and can’t wait to play it to you – and to reveal details of our mystery guests.
Exciting news! After several years playing exclusively live, we’re releasing our first Spacedog album. It’s called Juice for the Baby and it’ll be available as a download and on CD from mid-December 2011.
We’ve been hard at work, recording and editing our favourite numbers – Ekranoplan, the Electric Lullaby and the Tommy Cooper song among them. And we’re thrilled to have some distinctive guest voices adding some wonderful spoken word into the mix. One is our dear friend, the brilliant Professor Elemental, who will be performing as you’ve never heard him before. The others we’re busting to tell you about but have decided to keep tip-top secret until the release.
On 3 September, Brighton is hosting its first Maker Faire – a festival of inventions and the hackers, makers and artists who create them. And Spacedog therematrix Sarah is hosting what we hope will be the perfect after-show party. Do come!
