Faithless’s Sister Bliss On Collaboration, Creativity, and Honouring Maxi Jazz
Faithless’s Sister Bliss On Collaboration, Creativity, and Honouring Maxi Jazz
Faithless co-founder Sister Bliss reflects on the band’s fearless spirit of collaboration, the enduring influence of Maxi Jazz, and why electronic music should still nourish the soul as much as it moves the dancefloor.
Words by Sonal D'Silva
Come for the dance bangers, stay for the depth. If you’re new to UK electronic music legends Faithless, that’s the experience you can expect, right from their very first album, Reverence, released in 1996, to their eighth studio album, Champion Sound, released this year in four parts.
Founding members Sister Bliss, Rollo, and the late great Maxi Jazz carved out a unique space for themselves in electronic music with their fearless blend of diverse sounds, spoken word poetry, and socio-political awareness, effortlessly weaving it all into a dancefloor experience like no other.
Ahead of the release of their new album, Sister Bliss talks to us from her London studio on a blazing hot day about the things that have mattered to Faithless right from the beginning: sonic experimentation, soulful collaboration, and staying true to the humanity within us all.
What is your current favourite track from the new album?
I really love the title track ‘Champion Sound’ that will be out at the beginning of September. It's a real statement of intent and pays homage to sound system culture. It’s also a little bit about the world as well, saying we're going to come together under this groove and forget our differences. For better or worse, I still think that’s a really valuable message. This album’s got a real warmth to it; it's like a big warm hug.
I was deejaying in Bali when I heard the first draft of [side three of the album] Book of Hours, so I got to listen to it in the sunshine with palm trees and monkeys running around and I realised it had a real chillout sunshine energy to it. Then I looked on Facebook the other day and someone said, really indignantly, “So you're Nils Frahm now, are you?” [Laughs] I was like, “Well, okay, that's quite a nice name to throw into the ring; he's a fucking don!” That made me laugh, because on all our albums, we have an ambient space that's quite exploratory and experimental. It’s mood-driven, there are textures, atmospheres, and there's totally a place for that in electronic music.
For me, the album is a mishmash of UK music with amazing influences from across the board; we wouldn't be Faithless without those. We were all from immigrant culture: Maxi's Jamaican, Rollo's Irish, and I’m Eastern European Jewish. We all came together to make something that was bigger than the sum of the parts, and these overlapping musical genres probably kept us out of a specific pigeonhole. Of course, we're most well-known for the big dance anthems, but I hope that when people get deeper into Faithless, they realise right from the first album that we’re so much more than that. I mean, we had an aria on the first album!
What do you look for in a collaborator?
Faithless has always been a collaborative machine, right from the very beginning, so it's exciting to collaborate with new people on this record, but it's not new for us. On every album we've worked with different singers, whether it was Dido, Cat Power, Boy George, or Robert Smith from The Cure.
On this album, we have great spoken word artists like Suli Breaks and Anthony Szmierek, and Bebe Rexha, who’s a proper pop star, but she also supports the kind of things we support; she's got a voice for the underdog. That's what I like about our band at the moment – there is still a spirit of adventure and a spirit of collaboration, and hopefully that will appeal to older fans as well as new fans. Our final tour with Maxi was called Passing The Baton, and I feel there's something in that…he would enjoy the artists we're working with and agree that they're thoughtful, have a consciousness, and they have something to say to the world in a poetic way.
People loved what Maxi’s gravitas brought to the band; they loved his lyrics, his absolute brilliance as a performer, his generosity and his wisdom. He was always trying to share something of the learning that he'd done as a human being, and even if in the moment the audience were lost in the riff and the rave, there was a little seed that he planted, and that's really important. You can feed people McDonald's, or you can feed people actual food that is nutritious and fills you up. For better or worse, Faithless is still that vehicle.
"Faithless has always been a collaborative machine, right from the very beginning."
How does it feel to release music in the current landscape of the music industry?
With the crazy amount of music that is released every day, it's a tough market. Especially because things are compressed into this 2-minute song format: it’s short, it's banging, it’s got a hook every two seconds, and there is an art to that, but music is more than just hooks – it’s storytelling, mood, textures…it's lots and lots of different things.
We just have to keep on doing what we're doing, and even though Faithless has a really loyal following, which I'm so grateful for, it doesn't mean we can just sit there and go, “Oh, it’s Faithless, they’ll listen.” They might not even know it's there! That's the big battle we have, to even let people know that there is new music coming out.
Even I had a moment recently – I was on the tube coming back from my studio and there were loads of people in cowboy hats. I was like, “Very cool! Perhaps there's some sort of cowboy convention happening.” It didn't hit me until later that they were going to see Beyoncé for the Cowboy Carter Tour! [Laughs] It just hadn’t registered that only the biggest star in the whole world was playing in London, which is obviously a big event. There's just so much competing for our attention.
What would you like your legacy to be?
Legacy is a funny one, isn't it? I really don't spend any time thinking about it. I only think actively about the music I’m making now. Obviously, I try to make music that honours the work we did with Maxi to create Faithless. If there’s a legacy, it's everything we created together and everything we've created in his honour since then.
Every show we do is not just about me and the band; there’s a bigger thing at play here. I like to think it's not been a meaningless existence. That's my hope for the future – that we can continue having a meaningful existence.
‘Champion of Sound’ is out on the 5th September.
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