Enter Virexium: The City of Shadows

Hey Hivers!

Today we want to share something with you that is rather important! You'll recall from some of our posts earlier this year that we have been working a lot behind the scenes on a new project. That project is a Story Album that is centered around a fictional story that I (Bennet) wrote and takes place in a Fantasy World. Later this year, we will be in a position to share a lot more details about the project, the story and what our vision is for it - but right now we want to already give you a little preview of something we've been working on.

We are firm believers in the idea that our music should "cook" in front of a live audience and get feedback on it before we say anything is finished. This comes from our early experiences in the street, where we had many opportunities to test out ideas. You can see rather instantly if something is working or not based on how you maintain the attention of a crowd that has never seen you before. This is still something that we hold with us and often will test out new music at concerts with little background just to see how people respond. The past weeks in France we have been testing out one of the new pieces from our story album, and the feedback has been immense.

The song is called Virexium, which is the name of a fictitious city at the heart of our story. Without giving away too much detail, this track would be the opening of an album, setting the stage for the rest of the story to unfold as our characters enter the gates of Virexium. It's a story that I have been conceptualizing for years, and I took a significant amount of time this spring to write a Novella which will be the basis for this entire new show (there are still a few chapters left to finish before I send it off for editing).

In the early parts of the story, TIME plays a major roll. The first compositions have a handful of time signature changes, which are representative of the feeling of losing time while caught in the stressful rat race of urban life. We will dive much deeper into some of the structure of the music and the story-telling aspects behind our creative choices at a later time, but I thought it would be a nice little nugget of information when you listen to this one.

To be honest, after every single show we did the past two weeks, I had people come up to me and remark about how much they liked the new songs. In particular, a musician I greatly admire in the Neko Lights Orchestra sent me a message with a 30 second clip of this performance and said "Please send me the name of this masterpiece". He wanted to make a cover of it on his own channel. It is flattering to be receiving such feedback already.

This video was edited by Alexandre Le Gratiet. A dear friend that many of you would recognize from our earliest days in Strasbourg. His family has been very close to us over the years. We traveled to Morocco together and have spent many a month together over the past 7 years. He is a dear friend.

Enjoy the music! Welcome to Virexium 😈