Persephone's Bees is an
Oakland
Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is ...
-based
pop
Pop or POP may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Pop music, a musical genre
Artists
* POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade
* Pop! (British group), a UK pop group
* Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band
Album ...
/
rock
Rock most often refers to:
* Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids
* Rock music, a genre of popular music
Rock or Rocks may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wale ...
/
electropop
Electropop is a popular music fusion genre combining elements of the electronic and pop styles. It has been described as a variant of synth-pop with emphasis on a hard electronic sound. The genre was developed in the 1980s and saw a rev ...
music group, whose members are Angelina Moysov (vocals), Tom Ayres (who plays guitar), Paul Bertolino (drums), and Bart Davenport (bass). Bass players have included Mike Ferrel and Ethan Parsonage.
The band's name is taken from a poem by Russian poet
Osip Mandelstam
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (, ; – 27 December 1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school.
Osip Mandelstam was arrested during the repressions of the 1930s and sent into internal exile wi ...
.
History
Growing up in
Pyatigorsk
Pyatigorsk (; Circassian languages, Circassian: Псыхуабэ, ''Psıxwabæ'') is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city in Stavropol Krai, Russia, located on the Podkumok River, about from the town of Mineralnye Vody, which has an i ...
, Russia,
lead singer Angelina Moysov was musically inspired by her family: her mother played traditional folk/gypsy music, while her brother played modern music and Russian underground punk.
Her family brought her to America in 1993.
Morsov met Tom Ayres in 1993 in Monterey, California, while she was working as a waitress and Ayres as a local musician.
They formed a band, eventually moving to the Bay Area. While playing a show at the Paradise Lounge in San Francisco, they met producer
Eric Valentine
Eric Dodd, known professionally as Eric Valentine, is an American record producer who began his career as drummer and producer in the heavy metal band T-Ride.
He subsequently produced albums for artists such as Good Charlotte, Lostprophets ...
, who invited them to record an album for his label.
Their first LP, ''City of Love'', was nominated for best debut album at the California Music Awards, along with being voted "Best Bay Area Pop Band" by
SF Weekly
''SF Weekly'' is an online music publication and formerly alternative weekly newspaper founded in the 1970s in San Francisco, California. It was distributed every Thursday, and was published by the San Francisco Print Media Company. The paper ha ...
. After releasing the LP, they toured with
Cake
Cake is a flour confection usually made from flour, sugar, and other ingredients and is usually baked. In their oldest forms, cakes were modifications of bread, but cakes now cover a wide range of preparations that can be simple or elabor ...
and
Jonathan Richman
Jonathan Michael Richman (born May 16, 1951) is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. In 1970, he founded the Modern Lovers, an influential proto-punk band. Since the mid-1970s, Richman has worked either solo or with low-key acoustic an ...
.
In 2006 they signed to
and released their major label debut, ''
Notes from the Underworld''.
The debut single reached No. 3 in Billboard Magazine's Club & Dance charts. "City of Love" was also featured in the opening scene and soundtrack to the movie ''
Bewitched
''Bewitched'' is an American fantasy sitcom television series that originally aired for eight seasons on ABC from September 17, 1964, to March 25, 1972. It is about a witch who marries an ordinary mortal man and vows to lead the life of a typi ...
'' starring Will Ferrell and Nichole Kidman. "Muzika Dlya Fil'ma" was featured as soundtrack in
EA Sports
EA Sports is a division of Electronic Arts that develops and publishes sports video games. Formerly a marketing gimmick of Electronic Arts, in which they imitated real-life sports networks by calling themselves the "EA Sports Network" (EASN) ...
game, ''
FIFA 07
''FIFA 07'' (also known as ''FIFA Football 07'' and ''FIFA 07 Soccer'') is a football simulation video game developed by EA Canada and published by Electronic Arts under the EA Sports label for GameCube, PlayStation 2, Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360, P ...
''. Also, their single "Nice Day" appeared on the soundtrack of the 2007 film, ''
Nancy Drew
Nancy Drew is a fictional character appearing in several mystery book series, movies, video games, and TV shows as a teenage amateur sleuth. The books are ghostwriter, ghostwritten by a number of authors and published under the collective pseudo ...
''.
They toured with
The New Cars as their opening act during their Winter Road Rage Tour '06.
The band's songs have appeared on ''
The Sopranos
''The Sopranos'' is an American Crime film#Crime drama, crime drama television series created by David Chase. The series follows Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a New Jersey American Mafia, Mafia boss who suffers from panic attacks. He reluct ...
'' ("Home" in episode "
Cold Stones"), ''
Weeds
A weed is an unwanted plant of any species.
Weed or weeds may also refer to:
Places
* Weed, Arkansas, an unincorporated community in the United States
* Weed, California, a city in the United States
* Weed, Kentucky, an unincorporated communit ...
'' ("Little Boxes" in Season 3), and numerous film, TV, and commercial placements including Hilton Hotels, Cingular and more.
Persephone's Bees have been featured on popular music outlets such as MTV's "You Hear It First" (SXSW 2006 "Hot Bands to see"), Nic Harcourt's KCRW show ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'', and Yahoo Music.
Angelina Moysov's most recent side project is pop/rock band Candy Now!, which she formed with Blag Dahlia of The Dwarves.
In October 2010, the band relocated to New York and while on tour recorded and released a free download of Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan".
Shortly afterwards Persephone's Bees announced the self-release of their new album ''New In Berlin''. All the songs from the album were digitally released as singles every 6 weeks and in July, 2012 Persephone's Bees announced the release of the record as a vinyl with digital download of all the songs plus extra songs sung in Russian, German and French.
Albums
*''City of Love'' (2002)
*''
Notes from the Underworld'' (2006)
*''Selections from the forthcoming new album (EP)'' (2010)
*''New In Berlin'' (vinyl) (2012)
References
External links
Persephone's Beesat
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
"Nice Day" as an official sound of 118.008 service of the France's PagesJaunes!-- current for the March 2008 -->
{{Authority control
American pop rock music groups
Musical groups from Oakland, California