Bassline Live is excited to get this year started with the first of the Bassline Live at The Lyric Theatre series. This year the Bassline is taking the series live experience up a notch with multi-disciplinary artist collaborations. With the release of Msaki’s sophomore double album, Platinumb Heart, in November last year, she pushed boundaries giving both her singer-songwriter acoustic and electronic/producer sides time to shine. This double album earned her millions of streams worldwide, radio chart success, consecutive days of Twitter trending and immense support from both digital stores and media alike, for her ambitious, brave, heart opening and genre defying offering.
“I am excited to perform again at the Bassline Live at the Lyric Theatre, our performance last May was one of my favourite shows of the year. It’s always great to work with the Bassline family, for this show I will collaborate with dancer Kristi-Leigh Gresse during my set and my brother Vinnie Mak, from the ALTBLKcontinua community, who recently moved from the Eastern Cape to Jozi, will open the show with his Buffalo City Blues.” Says Msaki.
Kristi-Leigh Gresse has collaborated with a remarkable variety of South Africa’s dancers and choreographers, developing her own ‘voice’ as an artist as her work has cohered thematically around the politics of the body as well as expressions of collective and individual identity. She won a Standard Bank Ovation Gold Award for ‘Sullied’ at the National Arts Festival in 2018 and went on to win the South East Dance Award at the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2019, before being commissioned to produce a dance screen offering for the digital JOMBA! Festival in 2020.
Paige Holmes, Creative Director of Bassline says: “Audiences and fans of Msaki are in for such a treat, getting to see and hear her performing in all her glory within a live creative space that truly can’t be replicated and or felt through a digital space! We are also so amped, with restrictions having been lifted, allowing decent audience numbers, the artists and audiences can sense and feel that live performance electricity so sorely missed over the past two years”
Platinumb Heart Open & Platinumb Heart Beating were released on the 19th of November 2021. Msaki’s decision to release two albums comes from her known duality among her fans.