Passing Go
Biribá Union
FOR YOUR
GRAMMY® CONSIDERATION
Best Contemporary Folk Album
Best American Roots Performance Lamentations
Best American Roots Song Rough Picture
”Biribá Union is Bringing Back Real Instruments and Cultural Diversity to the Music Industry”
— Jejune Magazine
”a luminous gem, brimming with happy and romantic moods, effortlessly navigating between pop rock and indie rock … this single confirms Biribá Union as one of the most exciting and innovative projects of the year.”
— Radio Castor
”we are dealing with a band that cannot disappoint us.”
— Roadie Music
ABOUT
LISTEN
Biribá Union presents Passing Go, an album that invokes the energy of breaking through barriers by embodying cultural acceptance and unification through music, with a commitment to collaboratively exploring multiple cultural identities. Biribá Union’s debut album features all co-composed music by cellist/singer Mike Block (Overland Park, Kansas), beatboxer/rapper/guitarist Christylez Bacon (Washington, D.C.), and electric bassist Patricia Ligia (Montevideo, Uruguay). “Passing Go” offers a mix of instrumentals and songs, blending together the structures of classical composition, the energy of Brazilian rhythms, vulnerable song lyrics, the spontaneity of jazz improvisations, and the freestyle theatrics of hip-hop and Go-Go music.
ABOUT Biribá Union:
Biribá Union makes a unique rhythmic cocktail with Bacon’s inner-city DC hip-hop and go-go rhythms entwined with Ligia’s subtropic bass lines. “Everyone feels safe to switch roles and go to unknown places,” Ligia explains. Block agrees. “We all have a lot of room to breathe,” he says. “We can each shapeshift yet magically never get in each other’s way.” Bacon says that meeting Block was “like finding a twin spirit.” “He’s an emcee in the original sense of the word. A true master of ceremonies who can take the crowd on a mission with him.”
Biribá Union is certainly on a mission — to embody cultural acceptance and unification through music — but always with an infectious groove to hook audiences in. Take their rendition of “Lamentations,” a well-known classical cello composition, is a case study in experimentation and integration. The piece was written by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, an African-American composer who wrote arrangements for Marvin Gaye and Harry Belafonte. Biribá Union bends the piece into radically new shapes with beat-boxing, freestyle rapping and collective vocal lines harmonizing the cello. Or their take on “Santo Antonio,” a tune by Hermeto Pascoal based on rural forró rhythms that gets elevated with three-part harmonies and extended improvisations. Their debut album will be released on the Bright Shiny Things label in Fall 2025.
