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About Beats Antique
Electronic/World fusion dance trio Beats Antique brings you their new album and multi-media touring show A Thousand Faces, a journey beyond the sonic realm that’s part odyssey, part genre-warping rock opera. The album is an epic two-volume adventure that follows every stage of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey with sweeping and lushly textured new compositions. While the fully immersive show will carry audiences through the complete journey, A Thousand Faces – Act 1 represents just the first half of the monomyth, with the second volume due out next spring.
“A Thousand Faces is meant to be an adventure for the audience, a wild ride that takes them through these mystical lands all across the globe,” says David Satori, who formed the Bay Area-based group with fellow musician/producers Tommy Cappel and Zoe Jakes in 2007. A Thousand Faces – Act 1 features a carefully curated ensemble of guest artists, including PRIMUS vocalist/bassist Les Claypool, Sarod player Alam Khan (son of legendary classical Indian musician Ali Akbar Khan), and vocalists Morgan Sorne and long-time collaborator Lynx.
For Beats Antique—who have fused genres as disparate as flamenco, afrobeat, and French Gypsy jazz since their 2007 debut Tribal Derivations—taking on a musical interpretation of the monomyth was a prime opportunity to deepen their exploration of faraway cultures. “In Beats Antique we’re always trying to cross cultures and weave together a lot of different sounds,” says Satori. “So we were very much drawn to the fact that Joseph Campbell had studied traditions all over the world and found a link between so many different mythologies, from Native American to African to Southeast Asian.” Not only embodying the spirit of cross-cultural connection, A Thousand Faces merges a spectrum of musical styles—from Indian classical music to Balinese fusion to EDM—in a manner that’s both seamless and endlessly surprising.
That sense of sublime synergy was also a key factor in bringing to life the concept at the heart of A Thousand Faces. “As we were writing the album, everything from the music to the ideas for the stage show and video and choreography all came together in an amazing way,” says Jakes. Dubbing A Thousand Faces their most intensely collaborative effort yet, Beats Antiquedesignated a diagram of the hero’s journey as their guide for the initial stages of songwriting and composing—then let their experimental side take over and flourish as they delved further into the creative process. “Making the album was incredibly organic from thought to actual completion, right down to the guest musicians who joined us,” says Cappel. So charmed was the creation of A Thousand Faces, he adds, that within a day of deciding to ask Alam Khan to appear on “Kismat” (the album’s spellbinding second track), Khan contacted Cappel and told him he was interested in working together.
To build the lavish and intricate soundscapes heard throughout A Thousand Faces, Beats Antique blended the hypnotic rhythms and elegant melodies of traditional music with deftly crafted beats that reveal their affinity with EDM culture. An internationally regarded belly dancer who’s heading up the choreography for the dance element of the Thousand Faces tour, Jakes notes that she also found much inspiration in classical Indian dance and its practice of using movement as a means of storytelling. For help in lacing together so many eclectic sounds and influences, Beats Antique recruited guest musicians like baritone sax and clarinet player Sylvain Carton and violinist Lila Sklar, in addition to Les Claypool (who lends his bass wizardry and vocals to the brilliantly twisted “Beelzebub”) and singer/songwriter/beat-boxer LYNX (who appears on the breathtakingly ethereal “You the Starry Eyed”). From the serpentine splendor of “Pandora’s Box” to the heady intensity of “Veil of Tears,” the result is epic in scope yet intimate in its emotionalism.
Already renowned for their outrageous live performances, Beats Antique have dreamed up a grander show than ever before with the live component of A Thousand Faces. With technology and production helmed by Obscura Digital (a San Francisco-based company known for its work with Brian Eno, the Guggenheim Museum, and SF MOMA), the show will feature creative visual production by Ivan Landau (a filmmaker whose visual-effects credits include Æon Flux and Sin City). Also partnering with world renowned digital artist, Andrew Jones (who’s art has been projected on the Sydney Opera House and done the majority of Bearts Antique’s album covers). Also illustrator Leighton Kelly (who teamed up with Landau on the video for “Revival,” a track off of Beats Antique’s 2010 album Blind Threshold), the group has created a multimedia spectacle that’s rich in sensory stimulation.
“Instead of throwing out random visuals we’re using video in a way that’s very intentional and—combined with Zoe’s choreography and our costumes and the music itself—ends up immersing the audience in the story that we’re telling with the album,” says Cappel.
As veterans of a vibrant Bay Area underground arts scene committed to pushing boundaries through collaboration, Beats Antique first and foremost strove to offer a uniquely communal experience with A Thousand Faces. “This is a universal story that’s been told for thousands of years,” notes Jakes. “We are each a spoke in the wheel of the monomyth, and there’s a deep sense of unity in all of us sharing the same story.” To that end, Beats Antique chose to tell the narrative that runs throughout A Thousand Faces from the perspective of the listener. “Our main ambition for the album and the show was to create an unforgettable experience for the audience,” says Satori. “We’re the characters they’re encountering along the way, the scenery that’s constantly changing all around them, and it’s the audience members themselves who are the heroes on this journey.”
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