There came a moment in late May when sitting still just wasn’t going to work. After a few months of lockdown, I started talking with my team at Mercury Soul about a way forward. After cancelling two of our biggest shows – one featuring legendary DJ Juan Atkins, one featuring the duo behind the music to Stranger Things – we devoted those resources to an immersive, beautifully-filmed miniseries featuring meditative classical music and electronica.
The result is Mercury Soul: Cathedral. Over the next month, each week will feature a new 15’ episode exploring mystical music with a fluid, floating viewer perspective. From Johann Sebastian Bach to Johann Johannsson, from Indian classical to Chinese folk music – all seamlessly mixed alongside downtempo DJing – this series is a soothing, lyrical journey at a time when we need it.
The series was created both as a soulful response to the current climate, and as a demonstration of a much more imaginative way to present classical music digitally. In the beginning of lockdown, it was great to see so many bedroom solos or Brady Bunch virtual performances, but soon those endeavors felt like such a shadow of the real thing. My curating projects, from the Kennedy Center to clubs, always use intricate production to animate the concert experience (more info on that here). To present classical music more vividly online, I imagined a kind of gliding camera that would never stop moving from one musician to the next.
So I reached out to Saint Joseph’s Society for the Arts in San Francisco, a magnificent cathedral-turned-art gallery designed by the renown Ken Fulk. As a cathedral with 22,000 square feet of opulent furniture and art, the space has plenty of room to safely space soloists and chamber ensembles. There are vast expanses of Persian rugs, decorative art, and light installations to provide stunning complements to performances of classical music.
I also reassembled the film crew from my animated film Philharmonia Fantastique (stay tuned for exciting news about that project). Having become more fluent in film production over the past few years, I knew we would have to move fast to get the crew and gear necessary to bring this vision to life. Everyone was sitting on their hands during the lockdown, but even in June things were starting to pick up.
Immediately evident in the opening minute is the sense of a journey – indeed, this series is all about the journey. For classical music to grab an online viewer, it has to be presented in a highly dynamic visual way. You almost have to make it work even if the sound is off. So the concept was a continually roving camera, gliding from one part of the cathedral to another. We wanted the viewer’s perspective to perfectly gel with the mystically lyrical music we programmed.
A key element of focus for all Mercury Soul shows is the transitions between sets, which are carefully choreographed with specially composed interludes and lighting shifts. That’s true too in this series: when each performance finishes, the shot begins gliding to the next musician. The journey’s the thing.
The primary challenge was actually light: when we drew up our storyboard, we realized the proximity to the Summer Solstice would require us to shoot between 9pm and end at 4am to achieve the lighting effects we desired. Luckily my key collaborator is Matthew Ebisuzaki, Mercury Soul’s managing director, who has a unique background in both performance and film. He took my shooting script and carefully designed the shoot schedule so that we could glide from one performer to the next – no small feat when we were restricting how many people could be on set at a given time.