Monday, August 25, 2008

Free Noize: Blissful Virtuous



One of the things that we are excited about doing with this blog is to turn you on to some of the great non Six Degrees music that comes through our offices. As you can imagine we get sent a HUGE amount of music from around the planet. I always tell people that the most frustrating thing for me is not how much bad music we get- but how much GOOD music we receive that we can't release. Through our weekly radio show and now this blog, we hope to give a platform for the best of these projects.

If you have a project that you would like to expose through Global Noize please get in touch with us through our comments section. Leave your E Mail address and we will get back to you when we can.

I got the Blissful Virtuous CD in the mail over a year ago now and it remains one of my favorite demo submissions ever. I'm happy to see that the duo are still going strong and was thrilled to find out that they were cool with us featuring them on our blog. The band describes themselves like this:

Blissful Virtuous’ - Bliss’ed out world grooves & intuitive beats formed with care and chaos. Truly original sounds, blessed and influenced by the past. A massive journey of sounds, sessions and searching; With its roots in Zimbabwe, recordings and remixes have happened worldwide from Borneo to Sheffield, Tanzania to Providence. A collision of minds and music. Roo, running headlong - electribe under one arm & mac under the other, blissful with his delays, wires and weirdness - into Mark - arms full of instruments, head full of visions, and virtuous in his knowledge of this world’s music.
'A mutual lack of understanding of each others musical faith meant that we were captivated by each other’s talent. We were catalysts for each other'. If Mark played a riff on the mbira, Roo would catch it in some delays and work out beats and new patterns that worked for him. 'We'd each take turn in pulling apart then rebuilding what the other had done until we ended up with these amazing soundtracks'.
“Our first album ‘mbira post’ was the start of something great, and since then we’ve been lucky enough to grace stages around the world playing some prolific shows. We’re just back from supporting Pops Mohammed, Tarika Bé, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo at the Bushfire Festival in Swaziland, and incredible show in an magical venue, before that we were the first band in over 250 years to play a show at the British Museum in London (as part of Africa Live). Now we hear that we’re running high in the specialist charts on LA’s KCRW, it just get’s better and better.”
The second album from blissful virtuous will be available early 2009. Mbira Post is currently available from the bands website at http://www.blissfulvirtuous.com or from i-tunes.

For a free download of the track “Nhema Swing” from Blissful Virtuous click here

For Blissful Virtuous myspace page here
Email is: studio@blissfulvirtuous.com

2 comments:

Steve said...

That's a great track. I just ordered the whole cd. What kept six degrees from releasing it?

Bob D said...

Hey Steve- glad you liked the track and ordered the full CD.

The simple fact of the matter is, we only release around 12-14 records a year. (which is still a lot for a label our size). Of those about 10 slots are taken up by our current roster - that leaves us with very few slots for new signings making the competition pretty brutal.

This is one of the reasons why we started our "digital only"- Emerging Artist series.

I think the Blissful Virtuous CD is pretty special though and I turn people on to the band whenever I get a chance.

Bob D