Fantasia on a dream

Salutations my dear brothers and sisters and welcome to our latest blog post.

Once more we’re here to tell you about a spectacularly successful show at last Friday night’s Acid Gallery (Upstairs at the Garage, Highbury Corner)!

A stressful week’s hard work creating a new collection of slides delivered arguably our best visual extravaganza yet. This time we beamed odd-ball images into the lava pool to bubble under its membranous surface, with weird half-familiar faces, forms and slogans occasionally emerging from beneath the miasma to hover above the performers as if some spectre had been invoked from the primordial ooze by their sonic vibrations.

This element’s presence owed to a recently acquired powerful vintage Kodak carousel slide projector (which debuted at this show). To facilitate the projector’s inclusion we built an improvised (but solid) platform that could be mounted on our very sturdy Powerdrive stands to hoist its beam above the heads of the crowds, thus preventing interrupted imagery.

With one person short at the start of the evening there was an initial struggle to set up, but having surmounted these problems with the sterling help of a stout volunteer, the set-up was in full flow just in time to illuminate the ethereal sounds of the evening’s first band, The Hall of Mirrors. A mesmerising performance that seemed to flourish when swathed in the currents of technicolour lava that swam around them, it closed with rapt cries for an encore, not a frequent demand of an evening’s first support band!

This picture is reproduced courtesy of Phil of Sweet But Deadly Collective.

Next up were the Snap Elect, purveyors of electric piano-led sunshine pop who brought a big crowd of loyal fans along.

Following them were the mighty mediaeval folk-rock fantasists, Circulus. We’re big fans, but unfortunately this was not their best night. Some early technical problems and far too long spent tuning up seemed to lose the crowd’s attention. The scaled-down low-key set (they left their drums and electric guitars at home) for a headline act following an up-tempo pop group doubtlessly further hindered their reception. Nevertheless, for those of us paying attention, the music was an exquisite thing to behold and it was a great privilege to project fantastical imagery onto them as they regaled us with ‘My Body is Made of Sunlight’.

Following the live sets the DJs kept the remaining party-goers dancing into the evening. As guests Groovy Bob and Greg B (from Hamburg) pounded out psych-rock obscurities and classics the audience delighted in bathing in the psychedelic glow while they danced the rest of the night away.

As the evening drew to a close we were approached by many enthusiastic admirers, some soliciting offers of future events. There was talk of a possible charity event in the autumn and even going on tour with a band! All that AND, there are plans afoot for further expansion of our projection capability in future events. Tune in for further developments.

Next shows:

• OBIAT live at the Gaff, Holloway Road, Sunday 4th July

• Club Chameleon Volume 2 at the Moustache Bar, Dalston, Thursday 8th July!

And now, alas, we must once more bid you adieu dear beam-dreamer, so stay switched on until we next tune in…

OBIAT review!

Full posting on last Friday’s Acid Gallery to follow, but for now, here’s a great little review of the last OBIAT gig, replete with very nice photos – thanks to Laz and the guys for bringing this to our attention!

The out-of-body chemistry experiment

Greetings Fellow Light Worshippers,

Just a brief post to record a trip to No.w.here artist filmmakers’ lab on Saturday afternoon to try out some handmade film processing techniques I learned on a recently attended workshop. The intention had been to create interesting effects on still slide film and moving images using E-6 processing combined with filters and toner, the end result being projected stills and film loops. The technique I was trying out is called ‘flat-printing’, which I won’t go into the details of now, except to say that it’s a form of improvised contact printing and can produce some interesting results with slippage and distortion.

Having spent the night before on a regular DJing engagement in central London until 3am, the morning was a write-off and cycling through London Fields to Bethnal Green didn’t make it any easier going – passing by a buzzing festival on one of the hottest days of the year so far to plunge myself into a dark room was tough!

Sitting in total darkness developing film through various complex chemical stages while James, who runs the place from day to day, could be heard listening to the odd-ball hammy sci-fi B-movie effects of the Twilight Zone on the radio; that combined with the muffled sound of screams, music and Tannoy announcements from the funfair in the nearby park created a weird, hallucinatory out-of-body experience, like being in a sensory deprivation tank with piped in sound effects.

The results of the experiment, however, were disappointing. The outcomes of this technique are all but impossible to replicate a 2nd time and it is too ephemeral – being designed to create a positive image to be projected immediately without first creating a negative master and then producing positive (or interpositive) copies. My interest is in making multiple variations on the same image, all of which would be attacked, distorted, mutated and projected so many times as to almost destroy the image, therefore it is imperative that the original survives intact, particularly when working with found images, such as old slides and vintage home movies. It would be a great act of vandalism to despoil these pieces of history, whereas violating copies of them might produce some mind blowing results!

The next step is to learn how to use No.w.here’s contact printer for moving images and to get a slide copier – but also to shoot plenty more film! Plans are afoot so keep your ears to the ground and your eyes on the skies…

Time to go now, but the next Acid Gallery is on 11th June Upstairs at the Garage, Highbury Corner, North London, so come along and dig the visuals or read all about it out on the next blog entry after the event. For now I’ll leave you with a video, which was recently sent to us, of Birmingham shoegaze band Nightworker Revival playing at the last Acid Gallery, visuals courtesy of the Anti-Gravity Chamber!

Stay switched on until we next tune in.

Pictures of sounds

An observational post-script to the last post – I have noticed over the past few shows we have done what a massive demand there appears to be from grassroots level contemporary musicians to visualise their sound in a spectacular way. So many bands seem to want us to fill in the visual element to complete their sound. The music industry has always been about image (and that’s not necessarily a shallow statement). It just goes to show how interconnected sound and image are.

When you’re sitting listening at home, it’s easy to close your eyes and let your imagination take you on a trip, but a live performance is as much a visual experience as an auditory one. This is why music video remains so popular, even when most young fans access music online: Who wants to stare absently at a window listing all your files and documents while being taken ecstatically to another planet by your current favourite sound?

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore (in town for the Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary celebrations) was talking on BBC 6 Music’s Breakfast Show recently about his passion for album cover art. He spoke of how the visual element of the musical experience is just as important and I don’t think he’s wrong. Despite the prevailing trend for downloading faceless mp3s, music lovers everywhere can’t seem to do without the visual arts.

It’s time to wrap things up for this post (but we’ll be back very soon – it’s all go right now!), by announcing that the next Acid Gallery is coming up very soon on Friday 11th June, again Upstairs at the Garage (this time headlined by the legendary Circulus!) and we’ll have another Club Chameleon round about that time too. Plus, in future posts I will be making announcements about our plans to incorporate movie projections into the shows. I’m going to be trying out some experiments with hand processing of movie films and slide films (they all develop using the same chemical process, E6 Ektachrome) down at the lab this weekend, so hopefully the results of those experiments will soon be manifest via the world’s walls onto your optic nerves!

True Gazers

Salutations fellow seekers of the Light!

And here we are again, so soon after our last little chit-chat.

We’re very pleased to announce another successful transcendent happening of freaky sights and sounds Thursday night at the debut Club Chameleon.

Thanks to the event organisers, the fantastically accommodating Victor Talking Machine, who eagerly supplied us with every strange piece of furnishing we solicited, we were given free-reign to experiment with optical tricks never before invoked at any previous Anti-Gravity Chamber experience.

Running late from the day’s pursuits in central London, due to the somewhat gruesome inconvenience of a person under a train at Bethnal Green Underground station, some time after the appointed hour a taxi dropped us off outside the site of our evening’s creative indiscretions: The Moustache Bar in Dalston, North-East London. Luckily the bands were still sound checking and despite our tardiness we still had plenty of time to set-up.

Lugging our heavy gear down into this petite and angular cellar grotto we were pleasantly surprised to see that our obscure wish for a stepladder mounted on a platform had already been granted (the makeshift ‘platform’ was a wide pouffe-couch-thing from the bar). Evidently a rickety improvised mounting device, we immediately took to securing it to the wall by bombarding it with copious strips of gaffer tape. This would be our slide projector mount for the evening (a suitable portable stand that extends to the desired height being an item we have yet to procure, still on the hunt). Without needing to ask a second time a chair had already been provided to stand on, thus enabling some live tinkering from behind the projector – leaving us with the distinct impression that the fun was only just beginning – yes!

As the punters began emerging through the door, immediately confronted by fantastical neon hallucinations crawling all over the walls (without the need of chemical assistance), a buzz of excitement began to grow.

Being such a compact venue the images were surprisingly crisp and vivid, but unfortunately didn’t cover as much wall space as would otherwise occur in a larger venue where a greater focal distance would be afforded. A friend turned up and told us that one of the organisers of the event had been enthusing that the lighting effects made him feel like he was ‘back in the 60s’!

As the first band, She Said Resist, took the mantle to launch into their tight set, yours truly mounted his primitive crow’s nest and nervously embarked on the public debut of numerous experiments tested out at home with imposing objects in front of the lens of the slide projector.

Two more exciting bands, Victor Talking Machine (who get better every time I see them)

and Sunderbans

kept the throng transfixed. Mixing images in with the primary coloured oily blobs crawling across the wall, I used my hand to gently fade the image in and out of the psychedelic ooze and to create flicker effects. The most fun came from using a recently acquired prism, a vintage relic of school science classes. Interfering with the beam from the centrepiece slide projector, I created refracted mirror images that danced across the walls, floors, ceilings, windows and people and superimposed ghost mirror images over the top of the original.

The best effects achieved included transposing a refracted image of a tarantula in its web into the centre of a geometric vortex, making space-walking astronauts appear to float around the room and turn upside down (and dance on the faces and clothes of the performing bands), and making a transparency of the command ‘FREAK OUT!’ flicker spasmodically, as though it was some subliminal message – only to spin, in reversed letters, around the room. In future events these antics will be further expanded on and will incorporate multiple projectors; these have yet to be acquired but we have in mind a particular model of projector that, when used in multiples, will enable a constantly shifting interplay of images. More on this in future posts, for now, we’re keeping it under our hats…

As we packed down that evening, we were approached by several band members eager to work with us on future live performances, there seems to be an inclination to move toward bespoke images and effects through close collaboration with the performers – and this is something we are certainly aiming at, so we’re of course delighted to be having these conversations… Certainly, our impression of this event was that it will go on to greater things. We’ll soon find out how it goes at the next one in June, but such hard work and evident genuine enthusiasm was invested in this night that it was impossible not to like it and be infected by the ardent desire to create an amazing experience for all comers. All credit to that machine that got Vic talking.

An abundantly effulgent weekend, Part 2

Felicitations my dear disciples of the light beam!

As explained in the last post, our most recent excursions took us on a 2 day trip comprising 2 exciting events, so to keep it a little more bite-size, this latest entry is appearing in 2 separately posted parts. Part 2 follows below…

PART 2, Saturday 8th May

In the final few days leading up to Acid Gallery a late booking to light the cosmic stoner rock band OBIAT the following evening came through, again at The Gaff on North London’s Holloway Road. Always hungry for more action zapping live acts with our freaky image projections, we avidly accepted, despite being in need of rest that evening.

After a heavy night working the lamps at the Acid Gallery, the arrangement this time was fortunately much more easy-going. First of all, we were hired specifically to light their band and only their band for the duration of their set (a novel experience for us and one we enjoyed immensely) – which was fortunate since there were 3 other bands playing that night, all of whom had a skull-crushing sound not particularly in the spacey mould that befits the Anti-Gravity Chamber experience. This had the powerful effect of causing OBIAT to stand out from the other bands even further than they already did. While the support bands (all of whom by the way were extremely tight, punchy acts who got the crowd very excited) played before an entirely black back wall, lit only by the venue’s stage lights – which actually suited better their doomy grindcore sounds, OBIAT (whose epic cosmic rock sound can fairly be described as mind-blowing)  emerged on the stage in an ethereal, brightly coloured aura, as though they had been teleported there, via our projectors, from another world – or perhaps as though they were holograms of the real band and were actually being transmitted while performing in another dimension!

 

Laz, OBIAT vox

Raf, guitar

Alex, bass

Admittedly, the approach we took to lighting this band was fairly workmanlike – we used a previously tried and tested 4 projector set-up with 2 stands, each holding one projector either side, and no slides or film projectors – but the approach was highly effective and did not require any greater effort. The band loved the enhanced level of experience with which we embellished their music and so did the audience. They have promised a return invitation on a future engagement and we’ll be happy to oblige them – with a newer and improved amoury of effects, images and equipment!

 

Salute to OBIAT

Just lighting one band allowed us to turn up late enough to set up and not have to stay too late into the evening, so with the kind assistance of the band, we packed down efficiently, got our ride home with lead guitarist Raf and neatly set our kit aside for our next show – this Thursday at Victor Talking Machine’s debut club night, Club Chameleon. Hope to see you there…

An abundantly effulgent weekend, Part 1

Felicitations my dear disciples of the light beam!

We can proudly report to you further adventures of the Anti-Gravity Chamber of Curiosities. Our most recent excursions took us on a 2 day trip comprising 2 exciting events, so to keep it a little more bite-size, this latest entry will appear in 2 separately posted parts.

PART 1, Friday 7th May

Despite the gloomy mood the outcome of the General Election put us in on Friday morning and an overreaching feeling of morose lethargy, we stirred ourselves from our torpor and steeled ourselves against the eddying currents to get out and project our beams of light into the hearts, minds and skull windows of the world’s liberated freaks.

Friday night saw the welcome return of the Acid Gallery in a new venue (new to us, though a long-standing venue – although you wouldn’t know it judging by the lick of paint it received recently enough to give off a whiff of the distinct odor of emulsion), Upstairs at the Garage on North London’s Highbury Corner. We arrived a little apprehensive of what to expect and wondering whether it would be possible to get some visuals going at all in such a venue.

Having made several attempts by email and telephone to reach the venue to arrange a recce which never transpired the only solution was to check out the virtual tour on their website. With so many shelves upon which the punters were clearly expecting to rest their drinks and with so many LCD screens along every wall, not to mention the very dark brown light-eating paint, so recently applied to the walls, necessitating the mounting of dust sheets (not to mention no clear space to set up the projectors!), it seemed a very tricky challenge indeed. Fortunately there was a clear wall space next to the stage opposite the DJ booth which worked very well indeed. The sound man (after some cajoling) brought the screen I spotted behind the stage down to ensure the bands could be lit with my crawling phosphorescent blobs.

There was a minor battle of wills over light supremacy as the venue’s sound man insisted that he should not turn his own house lights down. Obviously this would (and did) dim the effect of our lights and since we were specifically hired to light the event we rightly felt that our image projections took precedence. Eventually with the promoter’s support the house lights were lowered and the Chamber’s luminescence was at last manifest in all its glory!

The one shortcoming of the evening’s set-up was the lack of an expedient position from which to mount our slide projector. Having recently specially created some new slides, this was indeed disappointing. Instead it was mounted at the back of the room where its mere 100W power was not enough to register under the other lights and so a spare space of wall next to the luminescent dust sheets was projected onto. There were plans to add effects to the slides but in such a position it would not have worked, so we wait for our next opportunity at the forthcoming launch of Club Chameleon (organised by Victor Talking Machine, it was initially known as Leave Them All Behind, but renamed due to a clash with a new club night Bloc Party are doing) this Thursday 13th May!

3 bands played that night, followed by partying and dancing with DJs after (including some partying in the backstage room, but what goes on backstage stays backstage, as they say). The excellent swamp-rockin’ Sunlight Service Group were up first after the opening solo artist canceled. The front man was a very friendly fellow who paid our lightshow many compliments, passing us a CD of their deliciously dirty sounds in return.

Group illuminated by Sunlight Service

Drinking in the lights

Birmingham shoegazers Nightworker Revival followed and their cavernous sheets of sound cascaded over our lurid lights like velvet sonic ink.

Nightworker Revival

Nightworkers convene

Finally the headliners, the Lysergics, complete with new keyboard player Lucie Rejchrtova, formerly of Arthur Brown’s backing band Instant Flight, took the stage and turned the place into a rocking party with groovy Hammond work-outs mixed with loose Blue Cheer-esque fuzz. Seemingly out of their heads on something good, there were times when they appeared to be outstaying their welcome but they certainly got the party going and front man Fabio’s Italian mates were freaking out right at the foot of the stage the whole performance.

Lysergic light surge

Fabio tries to catch the strange luminous blobs crawling all over his Telecaster

One backstage disclosure I will intimate is that all of the bands were very pleased to perform bathed in the warm ultra-glow of the Chamber’s projections and more than one band enthused that if they could afford it they would have us light their band at every single gig they play! After the performances there was much dancing and merry-making, the dancers certainly loved bathing in the lights.

The party went on into the small hours, so we slept through Saturday morning, untroubled, while the world awoke once more to its turbulent state.