The Brunswick (venue website) Music 9, 16 May, 8:00pm-11:00pm
Family-friendly. Suitable for all ages.

As every schoolchild can tell you, TV was invented by John Logie Baird.  But in a sense, every schoolchild is wrong: Baird’s “televisor” was a technical dead-end, a flickering curiosity, ahead of yet out of its time.  And that’s what makes it a perfect foil for local duo Spacedog – whose retro-futuristic musical gizmos occupy that same fascinating space, somewhere between performance and engineering.

To us, the Brighton Fringe wouldn’t be Brighton Fringe without the Angliss sisters’ surreally haunting tunes, which meld anachronistic technology to a marvellously oddball muse.  Over the last couple of years, we’ve been serenaded by a computer-controlled bell-tower and spooked by an animated ventriloquist’s doll.  This year’s inspirations range from Tommy Cooper to a Soviet-era sea-plane.  And then, of course, there’s the televisor, transmitting live using a whirling disk and some parts recycled from a washing machine.

It’s not all mad science, though.  Spacedog’s vibe is sometimes touching and often creepy – mixing samples as though they’re fragments of memory, to touch the fears and delights of recalled age.  And for lighter relief, there’s a welcome guest slot from Professor Elemental (if you’ve never heard of him, this YouTube video tells you all you need to know).  All in all then, this show’s impossible to categorize – steampunk? science? – but whatever it is, we know we’ll be glued to the screen.