beetBITE is Back!

Levity Beet & fleaBITE have a lot in common. We are both multi-award winners (NZ Children’s Music Awards for Best Song, Video, Artist/Album).  We share the same quirky humour and enjoy creating innovative and fun new kids’ songs.

In 2023, we released the first ‘beetBITE’ collection:10 original songs for adventurous young listeners that was nominated for Best NZ Children’s Artist.

This year we were lucky to receive NZ on AIR funding for another beetBITE project and are excited to present two more EPs in the beetBITE series.

Levity lives at the top of NZ’s South Island in the remote Takaka Valley while Robin resides in the sprawling metropolis of Auckland. We set up shared music sessions online, and traded ideas back and forth, often ending up at very lateral angles to the initial seed of a song. Something that began as a lullaby ended up as a rollicking Halloween track (Rattle My Bones).

We had a lot of fun covering a wide gamut of musical styles. There’s a twanging banjo in Centipede Counting Song; mariachi trumpet in Electricity; tabla drums and a one-stringed Punjabi instrument in Cat Fight in the Night; and thrash electric guitar in the epic Black Hole in the Galaxy.

Black Hole in the Galaxy single cover image.

We want the songs to stimulate and excite young minds and ears, expose them to new sounds, and novel ideas (how to generate electricity when the power goes out), take positive action (Plant A Tree) and generally encourage kids to experiment, enjoy the natural world and take musical risks.

The collection does have its softer, gentler moments.

Little Monkey Ukulele is a light-hearted song for beginner ukulele players; Dream Queen Dance is hypnotic and ethereal, and Pepe Tuna is a lullaby in te reo Māori about the life-cycle of the native Puriri moth.

Funding allowed us to include airfares for Robin to travel down to Takaka to get PR pics and invent fun visual teasers for the new songs. We hired a hall way out in the countryside and shot a music video for the upbeat Django Reinhardt-inspired Tune It Up. There was also time for jumping off boulders into the river and standing on a beach to watch the eclipse as the moon rose over the sea.

We are really happy with all the new tracks and hope you enjoy them and use them as springboards for activities with kids.

You can find songs and lyric vids here:

https://kindiemusic.wixsite.com/beetbite

Best wishes from fleaBITE & Levity