Squeaky toys, truck horns, and plates and teacups smashing in Levity Beet’s tracks were music to the ears of this year’s Ngā Manu Tīrairaka NZ Children’s Music Awards judges.
The Tākaka-based musician is a finalist in two categories for the awards which champion the music of homegrown songwriters for the country’s youngest listeners.
His Best Children’s Song – Preschool nomination is for ‘Funny Little Bunny – The Springtime Action Song’, which Levity performs with Auckland-based artist Judi Cranston, and his album, beetBITE, have earned him a Recorded Music NZ Best Children’s Music Artist nomination.
Levity, who has been recognised for his music at previous year’s awards, says his nominations were “exciting”.
“The recorded music nomination I’m pretty happy about because that’s a new project where I’ve collaborated with Robin Nathan [from Auckland] who has a brand of music called Fleabite, and together we call ourselves beetBITE.
“Robin’s been one of my favourite kids music producers for years before I produced kids’ music… so it feels like quite a special thing for me to be working with someone who I’ve admired for such a long time, and to have our collaboration acknowledged, it’s pretty exciting.
“Then the preschool song nomination… I felt like I learned a lot of attention to detail in the audio production side of things because that’s where my strengths as a writer lie.”
Levity says Funny Little Bunny was released in March last year, and it has since racked up 84,000 Spotify streams worldwide and its lyric video has 100,000 views on YouTube.
He says its inspiration was to stimulate brain connections for children by pairing movement with singing.
Levity’s August 2023-released album, beetBite, which has been made into two collections featuring five songs on each, includes a unique sound effect.
“The title track, called the beetBITE beat, the rhythm and background is a ping pong game, and we’ve sped it up a bit because we wanted a higher BPM,” he says.
“One of my favourite songs is called Echo Locating Machine and we started that from really discorded, strange machine sounds and feedback frequencies. Even though that sounds like a terrible thing to listen to, it somehow really works.
“For the song, Meet the Squeakies, we got heaps of squeaky toys and we recorded all the squeaks, Truck In The Muck is one that is made from the turning on and turning off of trucks and truck horns, and Bull in a China Shop has a rhythm section made from smashing plates, and teacups.”
The award winners will be announced on 5 May.
