LUKA returns to the East Coast for a handful of intimate performances.
It’s always interesting to hear what people remember most about their time visiting the East Coast.
“An early morning walk through Sackville’s waterfowl park, hearing Nigel [Chapman] stumble through songs from the first Nap Eyes EP on classical guitar, the bass tones of Construction/Destruction against the high ceilings and wood-floors of Connexion ARC, playing real good to three people in Moncton and brown pizza sauce.”
That’s what Toronto musician Luka remembers about his last trip out here this past fall.
Next week he’ll be back with a lot of new material to share. He currently has two full album’s worth of material, one of which is expected to be released in late spring.
“In the past year I’ve been taking my music across Ontario, Montreal and the East Coast for the first time in various incarnations of the group,” he said. “My sophomore record is going to be released in late spring through a new American label out of Maryland. And this past weekend I just recorded a new album that will be held in the LUKA vault for the time being.”
For the uninitiated, Luka is a romantic. A self-proclaimed “doe-eyed dreamer, a jilted lover, a naive preacher, an excitable boy and a warrior of the romance ballad’ and has dedicated much of his craft to exploring the various ways our broken hearts speak to us.
“Most art is the beautiful failure of expressing the traumatic,” he said. “Even songs of happiness are always relational and in conversation with the possibility of loss. If not pain directly, art is most definitely in pursuit of the inexpressible.
“Heartbreak is at once so strongly relatable, but also so impossibly articulated,” he said. “It’s an interesting struggle to capture. To me, songs of heartbreak attempt to channel that trauma of teenage romance. That impossible longing that paralyzes ones’ emotions, stunts language and charges music with such intimate intensity.”
His 2013 full-length debut Calling All Cats Black is beautiful in its minimal, folk-inspired approach and offered a fresh interpretation on an age-old theme.
“My relationship to heartbreak has changed over time,” he said. Calling All Cats Black is so intensely caught up in a moment of loss and the ways to articulate one’s pain in a literal, direct way. The upcoming album approaches heartbreak both literally and abstractly, taking on less conventional and more philosophical meditations on loss and love. My newest work seems to be less concerned with personal heartbreak and more with understanding or attempting to relate to another’s loss. My language is turning more cryptic in songwriting and I’m not sure why. It’s always intuitive, so I’ll just go with the flow.”
LUKA on tour:
January 19, 2016 – Halifax, NS -Modulating Mansion
January 20, 2016 – Fredericton, NB- Connexion ARC w/ Jane Blanchard and Pierre Von Biscuit
January 21, 2016 – Sackville, NB- Stereophonic-Struts (7 p.m.)
