persona non grata

It’s a sunny Saturday morning and as the children liven up a quiet suburban neighbourhood with excitement and tantrums, as they get ready for club sports and prepare for the night ahead’s sassy sleepovers. 10 year old Ayalah Bentovim is upstairs in her room busily getting dressed up. Preparing to entertain her family and visiting relatives in the living room, using her hairbrush as a microphone to sing along to the Top of the Pops. What the future was to hold for this born entertainer, nobody could have possibly imagined!

Fast forward through a colourful blur of bad fashion, piano lessons and glitter-filled dreams under the stage light, to the present and Ayalah has ditched her christened name, for something a little more star-kissed and is now known only as Sister Bliss. Leading the charge on the electronic music scene with her partners in crime, Maxi Jazz and Rollo Armstrong, who’ve become a household name, under their collective Faithless moniker. Spending the better half of the last two decades working to smash down genre walls to escape being ‘pigeonholed’ by the industry genre forecast, always managing to stay one step ahead, keeping the one thing that’ll keep fans coming back, delightful suspense at every turn!
Now, after cementing their place in history forever with four stunningly produced studio records, one Greatest Hits compilation and several DJ mixes. The band are still happy to be going strong and excited about the future, after overcoming a near split.
I find the trip-hop diva still sleepy and slowly waking in preparation for another long studio day ahead, as Massive Attack continue to chip away at new material for their upcoming fifth studio effort. Although she’s been rudely awakened by a throng of interview calls this morning, she remains in high spirits, albeit, still battling a shockingly contagious case of the yawns. “There’ve been a lot of late nights spent in the studio lately” apologises Bliss first up, “We’re right in the middle of writing for the new album, which we’re hoping to have out by September.” The news is great for those of us that got the impression that the trio may have been intending to call it quits at some point after touring the last album. “We weren’t sure there for a while” she admits, “things got a little hard and we were sure it was going to come to an end. But after putting out the greatest hits, we gained a bit of momentum and realised that we’d grown, rather than shrunk over the years, so we know we’re incredibly lucky.”
So much so, that they’ve been asked to helm the latest exciting chapter in the internationally renowned Renaissance collection. ‘3D’ is a 3 disc compilation that takes you, the humble listener, on a journey through the band’s vast musical collection, in order to understand where they’re coming from as artists and just what it is that makes them tick. “It was great to get a chance to take some time out to do that. It’s not often enough that artists get a chance to take their fans down memory lane and show them where we came from and what music has shaped and influenced us as artists” explains a happy Bliss.
The compilation is a varied and eclectic listen that’s likely to appeal to all Faithless fans, from the more commercial following, through to the core dance fans. The journey gives you a chance to experience the artist ‘in the round’, as disc one takes you into the ‘studio’, featuring a blissful mix of their own hand selected remixes and productions. Before disc two takes you to the ‘club’ with a perfect mix of club thumpers and then disc three will take you ‘home’, where you’re treated to a more down-beat chilled mix selected by Bliss. “I had so much fun working on the Back To Mine [compilation] a while back, but I found it incredibly hard to show people who we were as artists, through such a small collection. So I thought the idea of 3d and experiencing all sides of Faithless as an artist and finding out where our musical heart belongs, was an amazing idea.” Getting to know a band as hard to pin down as Faithless, was always going to require a 3 disc space, in order to just skim the top of their flavoursome influential broth, with a mix including: Jungle Brothers, Joe Cocker, Christopher Just, Deep Dish, Coldcut and Scritti Politti.
As for how young Ayalah would have seen herself in the present day? “I was always creative and dressing up to entertain. But as far as forseeing my future as an electronic musician, I never could have guessed, cause house music just wasn’t around at the time.”

Faithless’ Renaissance 3D collection is out now.

Semone Maksimovic