Quiet Connection: Elisa Thorn and Hermitess Discuss Experimentation and Community
Elisa Thorn. Photo credit: Taija Grey.
Elisa Thorn barely knew Jennifer Crighton of Calgary’s very own Hermitess. They’re Instagram friends, the kind of harpists-lurking-on-harpists relationship that has existed ever since social media made it possible to quietly track the small handful of people pushing the instrument outside its classical boundaries. But when the Vancouver-based harpist reached out to ask for advice on places to play in Calgary, Crighton not just showed up, she organized and put on a show.
This generosity and sense of community is the invisible architecture of independent touring and it’s exactly the kind of thing that makes this Sunday, May 3rd show at Idle Eyes Collective worth paying attention. “Independent touring is hard these days, in Canada especially, it doesn’t happen without a huge supportive network of likeminded folks who connect to bookers and venues and share shows and advice. It’s also very much dependent on local music fans who will take the chance of going out to see a new artist they may never have heard about or seen play before,” Crighton says.
“Every time I go to a city and I reach out to someone to help me put on a show, people are just amazing, and so generous and kind, and community minded,” Thorn says. “It’s really special.”
Thorn arrives in Calgary fresh off a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for an evening billed as an immersive harp-focused show by Hermitess and Jairus Sharif.
“I was aware of Elisa being one of those likeminded experimenters [...]. Elisa suggested we reach out to Jairus which was obviously a great idea, all the ingredients for a very special musical journey for sure,” Crighton excitedly shares.
Thorn is a difficult artist to place in a genre, with her music so expansive that it resists categorization, which she seems perfectly comfortable with. Ask her to describe her music and she will tell you it’s “bathtub music” in a way that it is introspective without being ambient, narrative in structure, pulling from pop, jazz and indie in equal measure.
Her forthcoming album leans into that sense of intention. xiik refers to the approximate dollar amount she spent recording it ($12,000). This is a figure she chose to centre deliberately, including in the album artwork where she’s pictured in a bathtub full of money. “We’re at a quick, crucial breaking point with how we consume music. I wanted to highlight that cost currently is almost always falling on the artists themselves without much opportunity to recoup.”
There’s a self-awareness to Thorn that surfaces throughout our conversation and on stage too that I am excited to witness. She describes herself as an “accidental stand-up comedian,” someone whose music is punctuated by genuinely funny stage banter. “Having this music that maybe takes people inside or on a journey, but then inviting them to come back in the room together in between that can actually make those introspective moments land harder.”
Her relationship with the Banff Centre stretches back nearly a decade, when she completed the jazz program there at a pivotal moment after classical music school at UBC. “That totally transformed everything about how I think about music and collaboration.” Thorn shares that the work she is doing at the residency has been different: this interdisciplinary work involves movement and staging and while none of it will feed directly into Sunday’s show, it’s shaped the artist who’s arriving.
Idle Eyes Collective has its own character as a space. “[It] is a unique space, it’s an artist-run photography studio and has works-in-progress energy which I thought would be great for this lineup, it’s a great place to play and attend shows. It feels like both a workplace and a stage set. I’ll be making some hand-painted back drops for the show because it’s fun to do that stuff if you can, but of course, I’m biased because it’s also in my neighbourhood,” Crighton says. All performers are improvisers, and the plan leaves room for spontaneous transitional pieces between sets if the night calls for it, the kind of unrepeatable moment that only happens when the right people are in the right room.
As for what would make this night a success, Crighton’s vision is warm, “People of all ages come to a Sunday evening show, get treated to a unique musical journey in a cool artist-run space. Friends meet up, enjoy excellent local music, then become fans of a new out-of-town artist they have not seen play in Calgary before. Everyone goes home before it’s unreasonably late with stacks of artist merch.”
That’s the dream… and it sounds pretty achievable.