Arbelos

Photo Credit: NASA

There’s a really great piece of history-making music performance happening on Yuri’s Night (12th April). For the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned spaceflight, Space Station astronaut Cady Coleman will be playing a flute duet with Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. They will play an excerpt from Bouree while Cady is on the ISS and Ian is on the ground in Russia. You can follow the whole thing on NASA TV on the day. You may want to start monitoring this on the 11th as there is a marathon Yuri’s Night party running for two days in Perm, the venue for the concert. Frequent updates on Twitter from Jethro Tull and Cady Coleman.

UPDATE: You can see and hear the duet on Youtube.

If you nip over to our Youtube channel we’ve posted a few videos from our Brigend Theatre show in Dumfries.

Here’s a cracking version of Sunjammer, featuring Jenny’s great new piano section where the two ships go sailing off beyond the pull of the Solar System.

Arbelos performed to an appreciative audience at Dumfries Astronomy Society’s Yuri’s Night party on Saturday, 4th April. The set list included most of the “Songs Of Apollo’s Children” plus a couple of old favourites. You can see parts of the concert on YouTube where we have posted some of the highlights. Have a look at Sunjammer here:

This was the most technically challenging Arbelos performance so far. Previously we have put on a mostly acoustic set, but this time we went for the full-on prog sound of the CDs. Noel played acoustic guitar but also provided percussion and some sound samples courtesy of his Mac laptop; Ken seems to have 1001 sounds on his electric guitar; and Mark played his midified bass, providing much of the keyboards sounds of the albums as well as the expected bass guitar. We were very pleased with the result and happily the audience seemed to enjoy it too, and that’s the whole point of the exercise really.