Have you ever attended a live musical event? Did you know there’s always a slight bit of improv with them? I can tell you that is certainly the case for most live music shows. One, in particular, got somewhat improvised on account of a lead singer not watching where he was going during a performance and losing track of the new hit the band came up with. The person he ran into learned that she shouldn’t have brought her mother along to the concert because there was some commotion shortly afterwards. Of course, not many people do. I know mine wouldn’t have much interest in Romanian musicians, local alt-rock type bands, or computer-generated sensations from Japan.
But here’s something that a lot of people might be interested in: a very type of experience with online screening, and in-person, if you’re in Nova Scotia, that is. I’m talking about NOW.HERE.THIS. which is a concert featuring many of NS’s composers, with different styles of music all being improvised in real-time. How about that? It sounds like an exciting show to check out. Who’s responsible for such an elaborate project? Christopher Spencer-Lowe and Lukas Pearse.
Chris came up with a great concept involving contemporary music and improvisation. While Chris has an interest in experimental music, Lukas has an interest in film and media art. The two worked with a lot of conventional editors who did all the colouring and other subjects. The project was made not just as a showcase, but a time capsule with all the projects around Halifax, with some of the most active and creative musicians known in the area.
I wanted to talk to both of them, but Chris was far too busy with both this production and his job as a teacher/instructor. So I just spoke to Lukas. For a little more backstory about him, Lukas Pearse is the artistic director of Upstream Music Organization which is in Halifax and he’s done this job for about 9 years. They run a music festival every January for the last 15 years and they do concerts throughout the year. He has some major involvement with NOW.HERE.THIS. and I wanted to know more about here he did. So let’s get in the groove and move to the beat of this incredible content.
HNMAG: Tell me about your involvement with the concept. How much of it was your idea?
Lukas Pearse: A good part of it was my idea. Chris Spencer-Lowe and I have been friends and collaborators in various ways for many years and I had the experience as the artistic director of a music video organization through the pandemic. The experience of putting on quite a few livestream events, like live concerts, and the idea I had was kind of sick of those and a lot of people were getting sick of them and there must be something interesting we can do with this medium. Chris had previously made a short film that is very beautiful called Aletoria which was about randomness and he was interested in doing something like I wanted too. So I thought, “What if we actually made a randomized video experience so that it was never the same every time you watched it?” and Chris started thinking about how we could actually do this. I knew some programmers because I’ve done enough projection design for installation art and light art festivals which is a whole area I’m involved in, but the installation art side of things, as a video designer I am interested in things that are both static and not static. They can evolve overtime and have their own rhythms and patterns, and Chris really came on board as an experienced film director.
HNMAG: And how much of the work had you done for the production of NOW.HERE.THIS.?
Lukas Pearse: In terms of the way that it was structured and the way that it was funded, I was organized as the producer and creative director. so I left all the director decisions to Chris. I was involved in selecting the musicians and the composers that we were going to work with and perform with a few of them too because that’s what I do anyway as a musician. I also worked on a couple of the sequences doing projection design. Kind of involved in several different levels of it, but I trusted Chris to be the director so I could be involved with choosing the content and working with him on the overall plan of how things would work. There was a lot of back and forth of bouncing ideas off each other. He’s the director, I’m the creative producer as that would work but I’m very involved in the planning and overall conception.
HNMAG: It looks like a relatively simple layout. Was it hard to organize everything though?
Lukas Pearse: Yes, it’s very complex and I hired some very accomplished programmers who I know, also musicians, and people I had worked with in other contexts. John Jannigan Mills, who was the lead programmer, also an excellent bassist and I worked with him somewhat on video game sound design. It’s part of what he does, so he did sound mixing for it as well as the algorithmic player coding. We at first had this conversation on how to make foley interesting and not static in the video games he was working on and I’m also a foley artist and sound designer for film so I had a lot of actual experience with creation of the foley and the sound design. He was a very accomplished programmer so he was able to run with my high-level ideas and implement them. Then Sean Gillavry (multi-instrumentalist) who has been involved in social media before there was social media, designed all the back-coding and one of the most in-demand system designers but also a professional musician. He was able to oversee the media handling and come up with a plan that would come up with this algorithmic player work the ways I wanted it to. To make it actually technologically online because I could conceive how this might work on a static installation concept but no idea how it would actually work as a streaming experience. He was able to bring that to him and those two brought a lot of creative essential technological thinking to implementing Chris and my wild ideas.
HNMAG: Where did you find out about all these talented musicians?
Lukas Pearse: I built a lot of connections over the years. It wasn’t just like a musician coming off the street to talk about the filmies, I work in music and sound so it was really interesting to be put into that role as a producer which just changed the dynamics but it let me get people to do what they were good at. I’m pretty involved with commissioning composers and so that is the world I work in. It was curated. Each of them with very distinct creative approaches and I found all of them are musicians working as artists, not so much approaching it from any other angle. Some are jazz musicians, one is a renowned Indigenous artist who I play with regularly. Classical musicians, a Persian musician, a variety of approaches.
HNMAG: If there was going to be a follow-up of this work, would you have even more musicians involved?
Lukas Pearse: Yeah, it would increase the complexity of it too but it would be really interesting. We haven’t moved forward to next steps yet because we’ve been focusing on making this work and we just did a test screening and it works beautifully. The fact that we’ve done this and what the parameters are, who knows where that would go? I think there’s a lot of different ways to run with this. What I’m really interested in is non-static audio-visual experiences and the overall concept is that it’s something you can watch again and it would be different.
Lukas explained that any number of people can see the same concert but it would be a different experience for different ranges of people. Everybody will notice different things, because when you’re playing a certain song, it always goes some way.
HNMAG: Why is it being showcased in a format of improvised music?
Lukas Pearse: Improvised music, jazz, and from many different traditions it means that at the time you are seeing it, it goes like this. If the artists perform at another time, it’s going to go differently. That’s part of the art, they’re not making mistakes, that’s baked into the whole creative process so really thinking about a visual experience that follows the same logic and I think that’s what we tried to do. If I go to see a jazz musician today, then tomorrow, it might just be the same song both times, but they’re not going to play it the same way.
HNMAG: What do you do as a musical director for Upstream Music?
Lukas Pearse: Well, I program this festival, which is like a week-long festival of new and improvised music from traditions from classical, non-western, and jazz and electronic, and performance art. The concept that the creators had years ago was that upstream would be content different from the mainstream. We run this festival and we also do 4 other concerts through the year. The organization also has its own ensembles, like a quartet or quintet. We also have a larger upstream orchestra which is like an improvisers orchestra that usually combines classical, jazz, and other musicians in a large format. Even though some of it is free improvisation, a lot of it is about composing for improvisers. We present visiting artists sometimes, local artists, we collaborate with circus artists. We collaborated with a planetarium this year, and last year have worked with poets and dancers, and there’s a lot of different ways to approach this and consistently find different ways to do new and different things that are engaging.
HNMAG: And since you work with so much music, what are some of your favourite types of genres and songs?
Lukas Pearse: I started listening to my parent’s avant-garde classical records as a kid. Listened to John Cage, Luciana Bario and later Laurie Anderson. Then when I got older, I got interested in Punk Rock, hardcore, Post-Punk, and experimental music which also lead my interest in hip-hop, then the wailers changed my life and I developed an interest in Reggae, specifically dub reggae. But also interested in folk music of many traditions. I’m interested in South American music, and Brazilian music specifically. Afri-Cuban music, I’ve played with some great artists in that, but all the while been kind of interested in pushing the genres and possibilities of what can you do with these things.
HNMAG: What kind of music have you made?
Lukas Pearse: I’ve played Irish music, lots of Americana/Canadiana and country music, I’ve played fiddlers and then I went into an Indie Rock band for many years in the 1990’s. I toured Canada, and parts of the U.S. and made videos and albums, and lived in a van for many years. It was awesome and hard, then took a break from that and went to Korea to teach English and took traditional Korean drumming lessons. From there, I went back to school to study classical double bass. People claimed I couldn’t do that, so I decided to prove them wrong. I was then kind of approached by classical and jazz simultaneously and then really ran with that. All the way going to grad school in the UK, and getting very interested in electronic music, hearkening back to my earlier interests in Bario but also likening to electronic in terms of composition. I became involved in Upstream at that time because it’s been going on since that long ago, and realizing that the boundaries between improvisation and composition are kind of artificial.
HNMAG: Are there any projects you recently worked on that will be coming out soon?
Lukas Pearse: I’m working on sound design with The Breaking Circus Group who we have done collaboration with in the past, and a lot of videos which are available through Upstream’s Youtube Channel. The project we’re making also stars the musicians from New Hermitage who are from the Gales composition of NOW.HERE.THIS, so that’s being done in partnership with the NFB. I don’t know exactly when that’s coming out, but we’re doing mixing next month. It’s called Cache of Hornets. Also coming up soon which overlaps with NOW.HERE.THIS. is a project with Alan Syliboy and the Thundermakers, who have just finished a second album along with members of Symphony Nova Scotia. That’s going to be coming out this Spring and we’re in the process of shooting videos for it, going to ball them all out as one piece. I’m also very excited to be doing performances in a new album coming out soon with the great Jamila Smith, a wonderful reggae singer here in Halifax.
Lukas will also be playing in some of the Juno events that are coming in Halifax, which i s pretty cool and he also has some projects involving him coming onto CBC with the East Coast Music Live tapings of a group that he works with. He’s also setting up a tour of his modular video synthesis among other things. There’s just so much he’s up to it’s hard to keep track. For now, let’s just take it easy and watch a performance of NOW.HERE.THIS., and feel free to tell me what you saw in the performance you watched, because chances are we’ll have watched a different one. I do love comparisons.