Artist description AN EXTRAORDINARY MIX OF HIP-HOP, DANCE AND ALTERNATIVE MUSIC WITH LUSH ORCHESTRATIONS AND GREAT PIANO PLAYING! Sunny Marcus was born Marcus Tristan Heathcock near the city of Birmingham in the UK in 1967. A musician from the very beginning, he was already writing melodies and self-styled symphonies by five years old! At school he was active both in writing music for the school orchestra and in organizing a band of his own to play the sort of rock/funk compositions he was writing at the time. He then moved on to King Edward VI Sixth Form College, where he continued pursuing all musical activities to the full. His first public success came during this period – the college orchestra played one of his symphonic compositions at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and took a prize for having done so. It was also during this time that he teamed up with a local veteran musician called John Cooke to record his first commercial album for Graduate Records – Dreamers (1989). The album was sold under the genre of New Age but the music was ground-breaking in that it incorporated elements of the newly-emerging musics of dub and trip-hop. The album was released whilst Marcus was studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where his main areas of study were composition, keyboard playing and electronic music, both commercial and electro-acoustic. He was lucky enough to study for two years with one of the leading contemporary composers, Hans Werner Henze, who organized several performances of an opera, written by Marcus with three other students, at the Montepulciano International Opera Festival in Italy in 1989. He also had short spells of study with Olivier Messiaen, John Adams and Oliver Knussen. Encountering the minimalist music of composers like Steve Reich and Michael Nyman in the late 1980s was a turning point in Marcus musical career. Before this, he had kept the so-called classical and the pop areas of his musical activity separate from one another, but these musicians showed how it was possible to bring together all sorts of music under one umbrella. During the 1990s, Marcus continued to pursue both areas of musical activity, but they began to come closer and closer together. Two large-scale symphonies were premiered during the 1990s: Fire (commissioned by Greenpeace) in 1990 by the London Pareschi Players, and Symphonies With Sacred Litanies in 1995 by the Clent Festival Players. A large piece for choir called Vespers was also performed in the Symphony Hall in Birmingham in 1994, an event that helped to bring about a publishing deal with Banks Music Publications. The climax of the process of integration of all musical languages under one roof came with a piece commissioned and performed by The St Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra Klassica in 1999. The piece was a multimedia composition for symphony orchestra called Measure For Measure (Malian Mix), and it brought together elements of world music, classical music, minimalism and modern dance music against a background of African percussion! The orchestra itself was perplexed, but the crowd loved it! By the late 1990s Marcus was already spending most of his time in St Petersburg, Russia. He slowly started setting up his own home recording studio and started recording his own albums under his own small label Tripspace Records. Throughout the 1990s, alongside the other activities mentioned, he had started to move away from the ambient and dub music that he had been recording in the early 1990s, to the more urban and contemporary sounds of hip-hop and rap – inspired by artists such as Dr Dre, The Fugees, Foxy Brown and British acts like The Streets and even Radiohead. He recorded two albums that went on sale just in the St Petersburg area, Tripspace (2000) and SunSigns (2001) but in 2002 he recorded Street Level Symphony, which is the first of his solo albums to be released globally. It is sold under the genre of Hip-hop/Dance but the cover of the album includes the line: Genre – Hip-Hop/Trance/Trip-Hop/Ragtime/Dance/Punk/Folk/Electronica/Minimalist/Celtic . . ? ! Apart from the solo recording projects, he is also producing and recording with a couple of up-and-coming St Petersburg hip-hop/rap projects.

Music Style Alternative Hip-Hop/Rap

Musical Influences Madness, The Streets, Tricky, The Flaming Lips, The Specials, Pulp

Similar Artists Madness, The Streets, Pulp, The Flaming Lips

Artist History Two commercially released albums (Dreamers - Graduate Records, 1988 and Street Level Symphony - Tripspace Records, 2002). One film credit - Accessible Gardens, a British Government film to promote a new scheme for helping disabled people. New album STREET LEVEL SYMPHONY available through www.cafepress.com and www.sunnymarcus.com

Group Members Marcus Heathcock

Instruments Keyboard/Piano Player plus software

Albums Dreamers (Graduate Records), Tripspace, SunSigns, Street Level Symphony

Press Reviews About Street Level Symphony: A SUBTLE, INTEGRATED AND STYLISH ALBUM - Alexei Rybin, ex-guitarist with legendary Russian rock band KINO / THIS GUY SOUNDS LIKE DAVID SYLVIAN ON ACID TRYING TO WRITE A SYMPHONY! Birmingham Mail / PERFECT! I COULD LISTEN TO HIS STUFF ALL DAY / Daniel Cohen HIGH QUALITY, ALMOST ADDICTIVE AND WELL-PRODUCED MUSIC The Canadian Dead

Location St Petersburg, Leningrad - Russia

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