Several friends have asked for an update on the Ourstage International music competition. We made it to the semi-finals but have dropped ranking considerably.  If you’d like to help get exposure for my music, please vote!  Finals are in a day so please keep voting till the end of June.

Here are some detailed steps to help you with the voting process on ourstage so that it’s smoother:

1. Go to ourstage and login or create a new profile
2. Create an OurStage profile — you don’t need to fill out a lot of information, just the necessary info to register.
5. You will receive an email to confirm your registration, so click that link and your registration will be verified.
4. Once you are back in the OurStage page, after you’ve registered and verified, Login.  The Login icon is in the top right hand side of the page.
5. Once you login, click this link or type in Elika Mahony in the search box at the top right hand of the screen next to login.
6. Now you’ll be on Elika’s profile page.
7. Click on this link to Judge
8. You will now be able to see pairs of songs that you can listen to and vote on. You have to listen to 15 seconds of each song before you can vote.
9. Songs may come up more than once, this is normal. If you’ve already heard a song before, you don’t need to listen again to vote.
10. When Edge of Forever comes up for a vote, please vote for the song above the cover.
11. That’s it! You can either continue to vote, if you want, or you can be done for the day.  Every vote is appreciated!
Elika should come up within your first 20 votes, as long as you made her your favorite artist.

Please feel free to share this with your friends.  If you have any questions, please let me know.  Thanks in advance for all your support.

I’ve been waiting for this moment for awhile now….
In my last blog I shared that we are about to release some new material and I’m excited to share my 3 new songs which are now available online!
I’ve added a full length version of one of the songs for you in this blog entitled, ‘Edge of Forever’.  This song is about the struggle between our spiritual nature and our attachments to this world. It is so easy in this life to become distracted with all sorts of things and forget our spiritual existence.  We become paralyzed and entrenched in our daily lives in a web of busyness and neglect our true selves.  We wanted to create a song that shows this struggle between these opposing forces and how our desires can taunt and misguide us. Hopefully you will get a sense of that in the lyrics:

“Like a vapour in a desert
This world is so fleeting
The realm of eternity is everlasting

Feel the eternal flame
Drawing you into the edge of forever
It calls your name
Raising you up from this mortal world”

These lyrics as well as the rhythm, and the flamenco guitar which is one of my favorite live instruments, make me excited about this song.  Eric Harper plays the guitar infusing the song with gorgeous rhythms on top of Jarome’s vibrant composition. It has been a thrilling journey exploring this new style of music, writing original lyrics and incorporating harmonies and rhythm. I’ve been so looking forward to adding more percussion to my music as I’ve been hesitant in the past despite being raised surrounded by African rhythms! Despite a progressive Latin feel, the melodies ended up with a bit of Middle Eastern flavor which I felt added to the diversity.

Listen to the title song, ‘Edge Of Forever’:

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This song as well as the 2 other new songs are now available on iTunes internationally, Amazon MP3, and most other stores online.
I’ll be posting more about the other songs, and adding them to my music page with links soon.

Can’t wait to hear what you think of my new music venture!

Recently I spent about a week in Vancouver recording new songs and working intensively on other projects in Jarome’s studio. Opportunities to work together in person are rare, so this was a wonderful chance to finally record and finish songs we have been waiting to complete.

In a previous post, I mentioned that we will soon finish a Chinese spiritual CD with several accomplished musicians including Cheng Lin, Phil Morrison, Keith Williams, Jin R, Lily and Siria Rutstein.  We just released Rose of Love about a month ago which will be included on the CD.

I’m excited to tell you about the newest songs as they are quite different in style from anything I’ve recorded vocals for before.  The songs are a New-Age, Latin-infused, Middle-Eastern style.  It has been fascinating recording for these songs as I have been exploring what my voice can do to suit the style.  There have been challenging moments when recording them because the style is so different from what I’m used to singing and the lyrics are original so I had to get the feel for them as I sang them.  We hope to release several of these new songs as digital downloads quite soon so that you won’t have to wait till we release the whole album.

One of the songs is about the struggle between our spiritual nature and our attachments to this world.  I love this song because of the rhythm, the lyrics and the flamenco guitar which is one of my favorite live instruments.  Eric Harper plays the guitar infusing the song with gorgeous rhythms on top of Jarome’s lovely composition.  It has been a thrilling journey exploring this new style of music and incorporating harmonies and rhythm.  I’ve been so looking forward to adding more percussion to my music – after all I was raised in Kenya which is full of wonderful African rhythms!