Looking for Spacedog?

View our new band website.

Winner:
Best Music Event
Brighton Festival and Fringe
2011.

Sounds from Sarah Angliss:

Mailing list

newsletterSign up here and I'll send you occasional news of my live shows, radio and podcast appearances, exhibitions, robots and songs.

Latest events

View all forthcoming and recent events.

Cornwall: The Odditorium @Port Eliot

Edinburgh: Rocket Lolly

Sheffield: Lovebytes Festival

Brighton: Radio City Theatre

Brighton: Rocket Lolly (open rehearsal)

Manchester: QED - science and skepticism conference

London W1: The Event

Brighton: Brighton Science Festival

Brighton: Catalyst Club TV Pilot

London: Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People

Bloomsbury, London: Juice for the Baby: London Album Launch

Brighton: Juice for the Baby: Brighton Album Launch

Debut album: Juice for the Baby is here!

Exciting news:

After many years exclusively playing live, my award winning human, theremin and robot band Spacedog have launched our debut album. It’s called Juice for the Baby and you can listen to the whole album, download it or buy a physical CD here.

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.

Read more

QEDCon

I’m taking my theremin, phonograph and robot pal Hugo to Manchester in March for QED, a two day festival of skepticism and popular science. There are some fine speakers on the bill, Maryam Namazie, Steve Jones, Ophelia Benson, David Aaronovitch and Robin Ince among them.

I’ll be exploring some of the stranger obsessions of early adopters of sound recording as I immortalise a voice on wax, using an original Edison phonograph. And I’ll be delving into the archives to reveal a bizarre, long-forgotten recording method that was used to bring music into the home 150 years before the phonograph.

QED Con is a celebration of rational thinking that’s also a fundraiser for Sense about Science and a charity very close to my heart: The National Autistic Society.

The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (BBC Radio 4 doc) – notes

This Radio 4 documentary aired at 1:30pm on 5 July 2011. It’s repeated at 3:30pm on Saturday 9 July.
Now available on the BBC iPlayer.

For those of you who would like to know more about The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, here’s a bumper crop of references I’ve found over the last few months, including transcripts from the British Library, music excerpts, photographs of a serinette and details of contributors to the show. I hope you find them interesting.

Read more

Taster of my new talk on the Pod Delusion

The Pod Delusion is a fine, weekly podcast about science, skepticism and other interesting things. And this week, I’ve contributed a short piece on the phonograph – a taster of my talk at the Fortean Times Unconvention. You can hear it on the Pod Delusion site from Friday morning (11 November 2011).

The 7 minute piece starts with some curious words used by Florence Nightingale as she laid down her voice on a wax cylinder for the first time in 1890.

Read more

New album: Juice for the Baby

Exciting news! After several years playing exclusively live, Spacedog are releasing our first album. It’s called Juice for the Baby and it’ll be available as a download and on CD from mid-December 2011.

Do come to our gigs at the Marlborough Theatre, Brighton, on Friday 9 December, and the Horse  Hospital, London, on Wednesday 14 December, and help us celebrate the launch.

Read more

The UnCon is coming

On 12 November, I’m delighted to be joining experts on the sasquatch, hermeticism and Gef the Talking Mongoose at the The Fortean Times Unconvention. Jon Ronson will be talking about The Psychopath Test, Jan Bondeson will be discussing some canine intellectuals and Gail-Nina Anderson will be presenting her popular history of the Egyptian mummy.

I’ll explore some of the stranger obsessions of the early adopters of sound recording as I immortalise a voice from the audience by recording it on wax, using an original Edison Standard Phonograph. I’ll also discuss a little-known sound recording method, one which was used to bring popular music into the home, 150 years before the phonograph. And I’ll reveal some outlandish experiments with radio, from the early 1920s, as I play some live aether music on the theremin, accompanied by fellow Spacedog Stephen Hiscock and Hugo, my ventriloquial sidekick.

Read more

Happy Ada Lovelace Day 2011

This must be how it feels to see a unicorn.

Six months ago, I came face to face with a machine I’d read about often but never expected to see. A one-off invention, this oddity had been a dreamlike presence in my life, hovering into my consciousness at unexpected moments, something I imagined but couldn’t fully sketch in my mind. I’d dreamed of it since I was ten, a time when I was obsessing over a cassette tape my dad had given me. On it were some electronic sounds he’d recorded from the radio – sound pieces composed by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Read more

Spacedog live on BBC Click

This week, the BBC World Service programme Click (aka Digital Planet and Go Digital) is celebrating its tenth anniversary and producer Colin Grant invited Spacedog to play a few tunes on the live birthday show. You can hear what happened in this podcast and see some great photos by Paul Clarke. A possible case of ventriloquism on the radio: Hugo also appeared in one of our pieces, channelling the voice of our good friend Professor Elemental.

It was fascinating and just a little terrifying to take part in a live recording, knowing it was being beamed to 25 million listeners worldwide.