Today, Luka Kuplowsky is sharing the new video of his performance with the Stardust Players, live at The Golden Lion, a Ukrainian dining club in south Etobicoke. Directed by Colin Medley, the filmmaker found inspiration in the Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki who “always seems to have at least one scene in all his films set in a bar or restaurant with a live band performing” says Medley. “Unlike other directors, who may just show a quick shot of the band playing to establish their presence, Kaurismäki lets these musical moments play out in full. Knowing that Luka, like myself, is a massive fan of Kaurismäki’s films, it made sense to try to place him and his band in one of these scenes.”
“The Golden Lion is not too far from where I grew up,” says Kuplowsky. “I remember going there around eleven or twelve and being struck by how vast and ornate the space was. We were celebrating my Baba's birthday and my brothers and I were wearing stiff white dress shirts and black ties.
When Colin and I thought to film a live performance homage to Kaurismäki, The Golden Lion sprung to mind. It shares the dislocated time and place of his films and serves the European ideal of the dinner and disco; white tablecloth and beer.
We filmed the performance in early January of this year. The owners kindly allowed us to take over the space for an evening and within the span of three hours we had constructed our own Kaurismäki universe. To briefly revisit a childhood space and play a set of music through the lens of a Finnish director is a real trip.”
Out now via Next Door Records, Stardust continues where we left off with Kuplowsky’s Judee Justin Arthur Mary, the reimagined covers EP from earlier this year. With many of the same players as the EP – Evan Cartwright (Andy Shauf, U.S. Girls) on drums, Thom Gill (Martha Wainwright, Sam Amidon) on electric guitar and organ, standout jazz player Josh Cole (Josh Cole Quartet, Sandro Perri) on fretless bass, Bahamas’ Felicity Williams (Bahamas) and Robin Dann (Bernice) for backing vocals, and Brodie West (Broken Social Scene, The Ex) on alto sax – Stardust sees Luka incorporating strings and horns to accompany the jazz-inflected folk sound that he explored on his EP. The album is truly a cinematic exploration of song by Kuplowksy, who works as an adjunct professor of film in Toronto. His narratives often twist and weave through realism and melodrama, romanticism and surrealism. Kuplowsky has an ability to create non-linear narratives that both feel complete and can leave your head spinning with a simple lyric; such as the standout line on the eponymous “Stardust”, where Luka sings, “Did I make an angel blush, with my suffering, my loss?”. Kuplowsky explains his heady vision for the new album, saying:
“In Stardust, the voice is a planet and the band, satellites in orbit.
The songs find their flow in this dance, finding balance not in cohesion but rotation.
Similarly, the lyrics are not necessarily narrative or linear, rather they are spheres of thought and contemplation.
Verses and choruses circle an idea rather than move towards a foregone conclusion.
Let's extend this metaphor further in another direction.
Stardust is indebted to the creativity of Joni Mitchell, Arthur Russell, John Trudell, and Ryan Driver (among others).
Think of influence not as a mask or screen, but also an ORBIT.
You gotta create your own gravity, or else you're just drifting…
Forever an apprentice in song,
Luka Kuplowsky”
With his wonderful new album Stardust, Luka Kuplowsky makes a refreshing argument for the relevance of acoustic music as a place to hold thought; an open space to place impeccably chosen words, ideas and images. A young songwriter with a calm, conversational delivery and an effortless, un-showy grasp of poetry; Kuplowsky humbly picks up the same threads of inquiry that did Cohen, asking the big questions about love, meaning and consciousness. Musically, Stardust triangulates between Hejira and Late for the Sky, finding connections between the purity of simple melody and the tangled modulations of jazz. Luka Kuplowsky makes a music of contemplation, a music alive to the everyday possibilities of epiphany and revelation, an unhurried music that moves with the gentle and curving rhythms of thought.
From the first note, Stardust feels fresh and immediate, and this immediacy is no accident. The album was recorded in just two days, in a studio with almost no isolation, with an all-star band of musicians drawn from the rich jazz and improvisational scenes of Toronto. Vocals and nearly everything else was recorded live, in an act of pure trust, and the album truly captures a performance, an assembly of players discovering the songs in real time.
~ written by Tamara Lindeman (The Weather Station)
