PAULA RAE GIBSON

From Time Out, 3 March 2008
Previewing her gig at the Vortex, 11 March 2008

With a crystalline voice that switches between low confessional tones to fragile, gossamer-light highs, Gibson's acerbic wit constantly questions her (and the listener's) desires, feelings and self-image.

The red-top media has been clogged by a paparazzi-fuelled moral panic about certain female celebrities going into psychological meltdown under the weight of their own fame/drug habit/inability to stay home and call a doctor. The antidote to these self-induced traumas can be found in the searingly honest, glacially beautiful music of Paula Rae Gibson. Her approach to making both music and art was born out of some genuine traumas that are now distilled into her strikingly original work. It was recovering after a near fatal car crash, aged 21, that she discovered the therapeutic qualities of iconic arty German jazz label ECM and its prodigal son Keith Jarrett. Yet it was the death of her husband, the filmmaker Brian Gibson (director of the Oscar-winning ‘What's Love Got To Do With It'), ten years ago that set Gibson on her current unswervingly honest course. ‘If you can watch a man you love with every cell in your body die over 900 days, you get a feeling that you can do anything,' she says plainly.

A multimedia artist who's never formally studied anywhere, her cyclical creativity finds her combining all three disciplines of singer, photographer and filmmaker into an immersive live experience. At a recent gig in Vienna she even made the musicians play in the dark. With a crystalline voice that switches between low confessional tones to fragile, gossamer-light highs, Gibson's acerbic wit constantly questions her (and the listener's) desires, feelings and self-image. Her compelling debut, ‘No More Tiptoes', from last year, featured beautifully stark duologue between Gibson's Tori Amos-style soliloquies and pianist Tom Pilling's perfectly placed chords, resulting in deep space balladry and subterranean electric blues. Her new album, ‘Maybe Too Nude', adds a burbling electro-pop production edge (courtesy of Will ‘Goldfrapp' Gregory and Martin Barker) offering a more accessible path into Gibson's fearlessly frank world. Tonight she'll be performing with both Pilling and young Empirical pianist Kit Downes, as well as cellist-looper Richard Bolton, while her quirky films serve as back-projections.

(Mike Flynn)