his attention to world folk and dance music. In Hopes and Fears he had "rediscovered the joys of song-form", and it was the song "The Dance" that Frith and Cutler wrote for that album that inspired the making of Gravity. Frith said in a BBC interview: Frith had been listening to music from other cultures, particularly Eastern Europe since the mid-1970s. He made no attempt to notate what he heard, but absorbed it and let it find its way later into his own music. On Gravity Frith mixed up all these different musical styles to make new songs out of them. Recording Gravity was the first of a series of projects Frith did for The Residents's record label Ralph Records. He had recorded with The Residents in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and appeared on several of their albums. Frith used two backing bands for Gravity, Swedish Rock in Opposition group Samla Mammas Manna and United States progressive rock group The Muffins. He recorded side one of the LP record with Samla Mammas Manna at Norrgården Nyvla in Uppsala, Sweden, with additional recording at Sunrise Studios, Kirchberg, Switzerland in August 1979. Side two of the LP was recorded with The Muffins at Catch-a-Buzz Studio in Rockville, Maryland, United States in November 1979, with additional recording at Sunrise Studios in Switzerland in January 1980. Frith recorded two additional tracks with The Muffins, "Vanity, Vanity" and "Dancing in Sunrise, Switzerland", but they were omitted from the album due to space constraints. They appeared later on The Muffins's 1985 album, Open City. Many of the tracks on Gravity consist of melodic lines woven into complex rhythmic structures taken from different folk music cultures. The time signatures are not the standard or , but more complex signatures like . Frith described in an interview how he arrived in Uppsala with his carefully written music sheets, only to find that Samla Mammas Manna could not read music. But when he played the music to them, he was "stunned by their ability to hear the details, especially the rhythmic details, that I had written." In 1980 Ralph Records also released a single from the album, "Dancing in the Street" b/w "What a Dilemma". Title The title of the album came from a 1937 quote by Curt Sachs (printed on the back of the album sleeve) in which he described dance as "the victory over gravity".