A New Day Festival
A New Day 2018.
Mt Ephraim Gardens, Faversham, Kent. August 3-5
Over 70% of first-stage Earlybird tickets sold already!
Details and tickets at www.anewdayfestival.com
Guitar Legend Steve Hillage To Release 22-Disc Career Spanning Box Set “Searching For The Spark” October 21, 2016
London, UK – “Searching For The Spark” is a 22-disc box set celebrating the work of award-winning guitarist, Steve Hillage.
Since he began playing guitar in the early 1960s, through his time with Gong and beyond as a solo artist and one half of System 7, Steve Hillage has embodied what it means to be a truly progressive musician.
One of the most respected and beloved players arising from the Canterbury Scene, “Searching For The Spark” shines a spotlight on his solo work, chronicling his very first recording in 1969 through to 1991’s self-titled debut with System 7.
In addition to gathering his eight solo albums, “Searching For The Spark” also houses seven albums of live material and no less than four discs of demos and archive recordings, many previously unreleased, direct from Steve’s own personal collection.
Brimming with rare photos, press clippings, reviews and commentary from Hillage himself, the box set includes a lavish, hardback 188 page book documenting Steve’s life and times written, with Steve’s full co-operation, by acknowledged Gong expert, Jonny Greene.
Musical Highlights from “Searching For The Spark” include:
* Over 40 minutes of previously unavailable material from 1972’s Khan mkII line-up.
* Numerous rarities from Hillage’s archive of demo recordings ranging from pre-“Fish Rising” through to post- “For To Next”.
* Unfinished tracks from the ’80s and numerous demos leading up to System 7 also shed new light on Hillage’s pioneering work as a composer and ambient musician.
“Searching For The Spark” is an ambitious, immensely detailed retrospective.
For existing fans, it offers unprecedented access to the guitarist’s archives. For the new generations coming to Hillage through his ongoing work with System 7, it provides everything needed to explore Steve’s unique musical universe. For old and new admirers alike, everything from his formative years to his mature work as an unflinchingly forward-looking musician is gathered together in one truly encyclopaedic collection.
“Searching For The Spark” is nothing less than the definitive statement upon an impressively rich and diverse career.
The set includes:
• Arzachel.
• Khan’s Space Shanty, 1972.
• All eight of Hillage’s classic Virgin Records solo albums – Fish Rising, L, Motivation Radio, Green, Open (and Studio Herald), Rainbow Dome Music, Open, For To Next (and its companion And Not Or) – plus bonus tracks.
• System 7 (first album).
• Live in Deeply Vale, 1978.
• Two BBC performances from The Paris Theatre recorded in December 1976 and November 1979.
• Eight CDs featuring recordings taken from Steve’s personal archive, including four superb concert performances (Brighton Dome November 1977, Munich April 1979, Hammersmith Odeon November 1979, The Steve Hillage Band Live At The Gong Family Unconvention 2006) and four discs (Sparks Volumes 1-4) packed with previously unheard and unreleased tracks, demos and alternate takes.
Accompanying the recordings is a magnificent 188 page 32,000 word coffee table book. Written and assembled by Steve Hillage and Gong family expert Jonny Greene, the book contains hundreds of rare and previously unseen photographs and cuttings.
In addition there are three reproduction promo posters, two lyric booklets, a high quality enamel badge, a 60 page scrap book containing more photographs and cuttings, and a certificate of authenticity signed by Steve Hillage and his creative partner Miquette Giraudy.
Please note that this superb Steve Hillage package is strictly limited to 2500 copies globally!
Watch the promotional video here:
To pre-order “Searching For The Spark”: http://www.madfishmus
Steve Hillage media source page: http://www.madfishmusic.
Steve Hillage official website: www.stevehillage.com
For more information: www.madfishmusic.com
Prog Legends Gong To Release New Studio Album “Rejoice! I’m Dead!”
Their first album since the death of Daevid Allen – Released on Madfish September 16, 2016!
London, UK – Some say it couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be done. How could Gong exist without Daevid Allen? A few minutes into listening to the title track of their brand new album, “Rejoice!”, aspersions will be cast aside. It is undeniably Gong
Gong have had many, many line-ups. Formed when Australian beatnik/freak Daevid Allen quit The Soft Machine and moved to France at the tail end of the ’60s, before debuting in 1970 with Magick Brother, the band have remained fluid, even playing without their founder from the mid-to-late ’70s, fracturing and reassembling and constantly taking on new shapes and forms: an undeniably amorphous unit. David Bowie told Vanity Fayre in 2003 that Daevid Allen’s Banana Moon is one of his favorite albums, and today everyone from indie artists Temples and Ty Segall to hip hop artist Madlib and techno DJ Surgeon are inspired, and borrow, from Gong’s music and ideology. The funky grooves, avant-garde flourishes and counter-cultural stance is timeless. So timeless that Gong fully exists even without their creator and guiding light. For those who are unaware Daevid Allen died in March 2015.
“I have been co-presenting The Interesting Alternative Show with Steve Davis for the last six years or so,” begins the story of how Gong’s new singer/guitarist Kavus Torabi met Daevid. “In 2011, Steve rang up excitedly saying ‘You’ll never guess who we’ve got as a guest next week… Daevid Allen.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d met Daevid briefly a couple of times with Tim Smith (Cardiacs) but never properly. As a lifelong Gong lover, this filled me with delight. Straight away the two of us seemed to really click, within minutes the conversation had taken a turn for the absurd and I was more than a little flattered when he told me, after about an hour, ‘You’re a poet man, I can tell.’
“Over the forthcoming months we would text each other on a fairly regular basis, whenever Daevid was in town playing a gig he’d get in touch to see if I wanted to come along. ‘I’ve been thinking about this a lot,’ he told me, ‘Do you want to play guitar in Gong?’ This came somewhat out of the blue. ‘But you’ve never actually heard me play, Daevid’ I told him. ‘I don’t need to,’ he replied. ‘I felt the same way about Mike Howlett when I met him too and I’m never wrong about this stuff.’ Of course I said ‘Yes’ instantly. ‘You know, I can’t play like Steve Hillage,’ I told him. His response was priceless ‘I don’t care about what you can’t do, I care about what you can do.’
“Since being a teenager, I have often come up with riffs that, while I loved them, had to be shelved because I always felt they sounded a little TOO much like Gong. One of which I started playing. Daevid got up and started improvising lyrics and melodies over the top, his beautiful eyes twinkling. This would become ‘When God Shakes Hands With The Devil (from I See You).’ ‘Wow Kav!’ Daevid said afterwards, ‘Got any more like that?’ Realizing that 20 years or so of shelved riffs had not gone to waste, I blurted out ‘Yeah! Loads!’
Kavus joined Gong in 2014 in time for the last album the “new” band made with Daevid, “I See You,” unaware of the direction his new gig as a guitar player would take. “It was shortly after our Brazilian tour in March 2014 that, following a broken arm, Daevid told us that he had been diagnosed with cancer and would be unable to fulfill the 47 date world tour that had been booked to promote (the album). To my, and I guess all of our, minds there was no question that he would beat this thing. The most enlightened and switched on guy I ever knew, with light shooting out of every pore, he seemed indomitable. Nonetheless, he started making noises about how he wished the band to continue without him. I think everyone in the band felt ambivalent about this, particularly as we watched the majority of the gigs get canceled upon news that he was too unwell to fulfill them. I certainly had no desire to front it. I have my own band Knifeworld in which I play this role. We did, however, have a new album to promote, so we reluctantly agreed to play the remaining shows and bow out gracefully after that. Each night we sent Daevid recordings or links to YouTube footage and, from his sick bed in Australia, he wrote gushing praise about what had happened to the band and how this was exactly what he had hoped. By the end of the tour and with the full blessing of Daevid we decided to carry on.
“ ‘Rejoice! I’m Dead!’ came together over several weeks in an East London rehearsal studio. In terms of the writing, the songs became very elastic, what may have been brought to the band as a fixed idea, through experimenting, discarding, expanding and mutating evolved into the songs as you hear them now. Every member was key in the development of each song,” closes Kavus. Thus, Kavus (vocals/guitar), Fabio Golfetti (guitar/vocals), Dave Sturt (bass/vocals), Ian East (sax/flute) and Cheb Nettles (drums/vocals) took on the mantle of steering the Teapot further into outer space and the inner ear.
On the album you’ll also notice the voice of Daevid in an early song idea rehearsal, along with Gong alumni Steve Hillage, Didier Malherbe and Graham Clark. Fans of the “Virgin trilogy” won’t be let down!
In the words of bassist Dave Sturt: “You bet it’s a Gong record!”
It depends on your knowledge of Gong history and what constitutes as a Gong record, but if “Rejoice! I’m Dead!” is classified as their 28th album the Gong legacy is the strongest it has been since 1974. Consider the differences between “Angel’s Egg,” “Gazeuse!,” “Floating Anarchy” and “I See You,” the various splinter projects and collectives… what is it that make Gong who they are? Their spontaneity and numerous Phoenix-like rebirths – this is just the latest installment. Nothing more, nothing less. New members and old coalesce, the sound unmistakably Gong.
Even without Daevid Allen Gong will continue ….. And long may it do so.
“Rejoice! I’m Dead!” will be released on CD, a double LP and as a limited edition deluxe 3 disc hardback book edition featuring 44-page book, CD, DVD-AV & Bonus CD and digitally.
CD/LP & deluxe edition are available to pre-order here: http://www.planetgong.co.uk
Digital pre-orders: http://smarturl.it/REJOICE_IM_DEAD
For more information: http://www.madfishmusic.com
Gong Online:
Press inquiries (North America): Glass Onyon PR, PH: 828-350-8158, [email protected]
