VENUS HUM on tour with BLUE MAN GROUP (except *)

5/18   WASHINGTON DC         Warner Theater  

5/19   NEW YORK CITY            Hammerstein Ballroom 

5/21   CHICAGO                      Congress Theater

5/22   MINNEAPOLIS               Northrop Auditorium

5/24   DENVER                        Universal Lending Pavillion

5/28   LOS ANGELES               Wiltern Theater

5/29   SAN FRANCISCO           Warfield Theater

6/01   SEATTLE                       Paramount Theater*

6/02   PORTLAND             Keller Auditorium*

“…this Nashville (yes, Tennessee) trio have created an insufferably pretty major-label debut that is eminently danceable, yet still manages to plant itself on the dream pop roster somewhere between Björk, the Cure, Enya and Dead Can Dance…”

-- Paper

"Lush electropop. Rosemary Clooney doing Bjork covers (or possibly vice versa), Bachrach in the studio with Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk making whoopee with Liza Minelli — the Hum sound is an often derivative amalgam that manages to seem new."                                        

— The Sunday Times

“Venus Hum delivers a solid debut that seamlessly bridges the gap between ‘80s-era synth-pop and today’s electronic-pop. While other acts have also accomplished this feat, Venus Hum does it with much heart, soul, and emotion…This is one band to keep a serious eye on.”

-- Billboard

Annette Strean grew up in an idyll setting in the small rustic town of Whitefish, Montana surrounded by her idealistic parents. “My dad was a logger, there were four kids and my mom stayed home with us,” Annette fondly remembers. “The house that we grew up in was way out in the woods. Whenever you played, you played outside. You very rarely just sat around and watched TV. You make your own fun living in a place like that so we always sang together.”

When the family sang together, Annette’s song selections would often surprisingly be show tunes. Along with her formative adolescent obsessions with the prerequisite drama-teen favorites like Kate Bush and The Cure, Annette developed a lifelong love of classic movie musicals.  Beyond making music Annette made her “own fun” by delving into kitschy 50’s film and fashion and began designing her own clothing by updating her growing collection of vivid vintage apparel. Her unpretentious and unique personal style was completely commiserated with her totally true technicolor life.

Meanwhile Tony Miracle whiled away his younger years on a keyboard and guitar in his boyhood bedroom that lay in the soul of the suburbs in Cincinnati, Ohio. “For me growing up outside of Cincinnati in the most suburban place you’ve ever imagined, music was always an escape from that sort of mundane world,” Miracle relates. “When you grow up in Ohio you either end up playing in a cover band doing Jimmy Buffet songs, or you have a small group of friends who like Depeche Mode and the Cure, and that’s the camp that I fell into.”

Along a side street in the industrial heart of New Jersey, sitting in a cramped basement, Kip Kubin was peering over the shoulder of his best friend, whose dad was piecing together homemade synthesizers.  Kubin recalls, “What I liked about that was, there was a freedom.  I could create a sound in my head and twist some knobs, join oscillators together with envelopes and filters and make a sound and then rework how I want that particular passage to sound.”

Independently the three individuals decided to uproot and move to Nashville. They are all unashamed in admitting their separate journeys to Nashville felt like pilgrimages. It was here that multi-instrumentalist/producer Tony Miracle set up a studio in his basement and set about making music. In 1999, and by now firm friends, Tony and Kip met Annette on the scene, were drawn together and the basis of Venus Hum was formed. “A lot of it started out of conversations we’d have,” says Miracle. “There’s an energy and passion that we all felt. We’d stay up late talking about things, and we’d write songs and there was always this vision about ‘Let’s make something happen.’”

The basement became a place to trade in musical ideas and individual influences ­ Joan Miro, meet Kraftwerk….Bjork, meet Burt Bacharach…Cocteau Twins, meet Julie Andrews… - and the Venus Hum sound was molded. And soon something wonderful was happening. The first time that singer Annette Strean let her sweet voice fly over the meticulously designed electronic soundscapes fashioned by Miracle and keyboardist Kip Kubin, the three traded excited glances that said, ‘Wow, this feels likes a band!’ Within a few months, the trio had a name (taken from a rare medical condition Miracle has), a handful of originals and they were playing their first gigs.

Venus Hum are a band who share in almost everything they do from songwriting duties to their unified vision for a new brand of pop music that combines the songwriting sensibilities of their early influences with the sonic vocabulary of modern electronica. Their debut album Big Beautiful Sky is collision of tastes and talents: from the switched-on positive pulse of “Montana” to the spacey funk of “Lumberjacks,” they offer up a sound of unstoppable grooves and hooks. “The Bells” has an tongue in cheek, hills-are-alive grandeur, while the folk simplicity of “Wordless May” makes it sound like an instant classic. Settled in their current home-base in the middle of Tennessee, Venus Hum have taken the best of their respective environments and are sculpting a new landscape of sound that, with the release of their debut Big Beautiful Sky, is now open for visitors.