gfire // Album Release Show with special guests Erin Ivey & Mystica Fiora

It’s possible that you’ve never heard of gfire, but that’s not a state of affairs that’s likely to last much longer. The Universe is overdue for an achingly gorgeous dose of musical honesty, and gfire is not about to lie to you.

Call her what you like – singer/songwriter, classically trained, decade-long veteran of Austin, Texas’ phenomenal DJ circuit, Goddess-about-town. Remember, though, a square peg with guts, smarts, and heart doesn’t give two hoots about the shape of the hole.

This Austin native established her street cred over the past decade by ceaseless touring and figuring things out for herself. Once a member of Austin’s tight-knit DJ community, she found herself and her art constrained by the lockstep gridlock of electronica. Her energy and fire burst forth, she struck out on her own, and her ideas converged and focused into her latest album, triangle.

The key to gfire’s heady allure may be her voice: ethereal without being wispy, passionate (but not enough to leave marks), and brazenly self-assured – some say it is the best three-and-one-half octave voice in Texas. Her inspirations include Sandy Denny, Bjork, Portishead, and Kate Bush (especially “The Dreaming”).

gfire’s outward confidence and artistry is nourished by inner enlightenment: she is a dedicated practitioner of Kundalini Yoga. And she gives voice lessons utilizing the teachings of esteemed British Scientist Ernest George White, author of the seminal musical manuscript Science and Singing and the founder of the Guild of the Voice Beautiful.

“I was having a lot of trouble with regular singing teachers; nothing made sense and it was difficult to understand the concepts behind the theory, you know?” gfire says. “Then I read one of White’s books and discovered his take on singing made total sense to me. He approached singing from an entirely scientific method, explaining the anatomy and the physics involved in the production of the human voice and then extrapolating the art of singing outward from the basic physiology.”

gfire says that White taught people who, because of illness or injury, had their vocal cords removed to speak and in some cases even to sing again. “I call it ‘Yoga for the Voice.'”

And how does this magick-filled Goddess weather the rigors and hi-fi fuss of the recording studio? “I’m a music geek,” she admits. “I talk to a lot of musicians about this, and there’s something geek, something intellectual and something magical about spending hours in front of a computer and perfecting our licks. A lot of musicians will agree with me: We’re all kind of geeks at heart.”

Her musical path has included the ambient-electronic Electric Sadhana, a collection of Kundalini Yoga mantras recorded alongside Austin’s eclectic Govinda [gulabi records, 2004] and her initial foray into singer-songwriting, the Arthur Brown-produced Looking For Alex, which led directly to the creation of triangle.

The concept for her new CD is powerful in its simplicity. “I do a lot of yoga and the title came to me in a meditation,” she says. “The track ‘less is more’ really sums up the concept behind the CD. Even the little triangle in a mammoth orchestra plays a major part and ought not be overlooked simply because of its diminutive nature. What that translates to for me is that it’s okay for people to follow their muse, even if it’s only for just one note in the great orchestra of life, so to speak. ‘For want of a nail…’ as they say, right?”