'Perhaps I was possessed by the film'–An Interview with Sir Lyra Hill

Six and a half years ago and I found myself on the set of Uzi’s Party, cooking lunch for the cast and crew. Although there was technically only one star in the film, the Roger’s Park home was crowded, everyone working diligently under the direction of friend and fellow School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum, Lyra Hill. To be honest, I volunteered for this to get in on Lyra’s magic. 

Sir Lyra Hill is a force—their transition from filmmaker, to Master of Ceremonies, to comic artist, to performer, is entrancing and seemingly effortless. Their method is thoughtful and meticulous. Lyra is the kind of artist and organizer that we all admire, and I’m very excited to have had the chance to connect with them again over this serendipitous showing of Uzi’s Party.

Join us this Sunday (02/09) to catch Lyra’s film, Uzi’s Party, which has never before been shown on 16mm film – as Lyra says, “its true and best form” – in Chicago.

Alyssa Martinez: Your sister, Johanna co-wrote and starred in the film—what sparked the idea for the film and your collaboration with one another? 

Lyra Hill: The technical challenge of the movie was actually my first inspiration. Then, the setting of a group of adolescent girls having a Ouija party. I experienced a pivotal, terrifying sleepover around age 12, where my friends and I lost our shit over (what seemed to be) Ouija possession. My sister was 19 when I wrote the film. I consulted heavily with her in developing the signature of each character. I saw her in my mind's eye when I imagined the film, and I knew I could trust her with such a grueling project. I never considered anyone else for the role.

AM: How did she prepare to embody each of these five different characters during filming? 

LH: Months of discussion and play familiarized us both with the characters. And Jojo did amazing work in the short time before we started shooting. A lot came together in the week preceding production. I flew her out to Chicago and we collected all the costumes, wigs, accessories and color palettes of each character, with a lot of help from Marjorie Bailey and Jenna Caravello.

 In order to film shots with dialog between visible characters, we had to pre-record the dialog at the pace we desired, so that we could be sure each character, filmed separately using multiple exposure, spoke at the right time. This technical necessity meant that Jojo and I stayed up late nights running through every scene. On set, I would listen to the recordings during takes and whisper the lines back to her to keep her in sync.

A while after filming was done, she told me that making Uzi's Party required her to pull her personality apart. Many people watch the film and don't realize that she plays every role. When she put herself back together, she said, it was in a new way with new knowledge. I am still in awe at how quickly she transformed, again and again, every day on set.

 AM: All effects for Uzi's Party are done in camera – which is amazing. What were the reasons, both technically and thematically, for your decision to work this way? 

LH: I love to do things that are almost impossible! Haha, it's true and it's very painful. I was heavily invested in optical printing and in-camera matting at the time, and I wanted to use my skills for a narrative picture about possession. Perhaps I was possessed by the film. I'd never filmed sync sound or written a script before. Once the task became clear, the world opened up to me. I dove into concepts of multiple selves and split personalities. The dark and spooky backdrop provided cover for the matte lines, where different takes overlap on screen. I knew, based on my limited resources, that it would be a scrappy, imperfect image, not slick like a studio production. I wanted to create the feeling that not only the story but the material itself might fall apart at any moment. I actually expected it to come out much stranger than it did. It casts a glamour!

AM: As a fellow alum of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I know from experience that the community really encourages students to work in different artistic disciplines—your work is especially interdisciplinary. Will you talk briefly about your experience at SAIC and how it shaped you? 

LH: The fact that SAIC encouraged me to bounce around departments was life changing. I didn't have an easy time in school, but I did make a plethora of connections that blossomed into years of successful collaborations after school, and I had the freedom to wander down several paths I never expected. Some of those paths became big parts of my artistic identity. In my last year, I co-organized workshops and screenings for the Experimental Film Society, which turned out to be the first year of my still-growing career as an event organizer and emcee.

Good relations with staff and faculty at SAIC allowed me the resources I needed to shoot and finish Uzi's Party. They have incredible 16mm facilities. I spent hours and years after graduation borrowing equipment and sitting in editing rooms, cutting my negative. I could not have made this film without such strong support.

AM: When you moved to LA a few years back, you began the “ritual variety show,” MULTI CULT. Will you tell me about how performers participate in this show as well as what your role is as facilitator?

LH: Yes! MULTI CULT is the work of my life! I am putting everything I learned in Chicago and more into this project. There is a submission form for every show, it's always open and free to apply. Sometimes I reach out to artists as well. The event happens quarterly, and each show features 3-4 different performances after grounding, casting, intention and a sermon by yours truly. I am the host, curator, and producer. I have a great team. Because it's a group ritual where the audience participates in creating the magic, I also priestess the show, meaning I hold and conduct the proceedings as sacred. The title that says it all is Master of Ceremonies.

AM: Do you see this role at MULTI CULT as an evolution of your role at the performative comix series BRAIN FRAME (which I and so many Chicagoans loved), a totally different thing, or somewhere in between?

LH: I think about BRAIN FRAME a lot while I'm working on MULTI CULT. My role is very similar, but the content and the context for the show is different. Los Angeles is a different context than Chicago. A ritual variety show invites a lot more artistic diversity than a performative comix reading series. In a way, it's much more difficult because I'm constantly focusing on paradox and multiplicity, both of which are impossible to focus, by their very nature. I thought that BRAIN FRAME was difficult to describe while I was doing it, but I've really done it now.

AM: Ha! Anyone who’s had the pleasure of attending one of your events knows what an incredible host you are—you have a spellbinding way of engaging the audience. When you host, how do you become that person? Do you feel different within yourself when you’re hosting vs when you're not? 

LH: Aww thank you!! Hosting comes naturally to me, not to understate how much I've practiced and studied to become better. I started out as the people-pleasing mediator in a volatile family, growing into an exhibitionist control freak in my spiritual community, and by the time I found myself hosting live events I was actually deeply shocked at how much I liked it, since I avoided performance in art school. Now I understand that when I am MC, I go to a raw place more true to myself than the version I'm playing in my day-to-day life. I channel the powers I generally repress in polite company.

AM: What are you working on now or what’s next?

LH: It's all MULTI CULT all the way! I have a show coming up in LA on the same night as this event, unfortunately, but I will be in Chicago at the end of February to perform at the fourth anniversary of Zine Not Dead! Which means I need to write a new comic this month. I've been releasing videos on YouTube: documentation of MULTI CULT as well as anarchist diatribes. I'm working towards sustaining myself with Patreon (patreon.com/multicult) so I can make all the things that are clamoring to be made inside my head and heart. MULTI CULT is a recurring show, but it's also an ethic, a framework, and a production foundation for an infinite variety of magical ideas. It's the only container that can hold me.

I Had To Do It My Way: An Interview with Shulamit Ran

One of the most gratifying things about playing a piece by Shulamit Ran is getting to interact with this exemplary composer. On December 12th, we are fortunate to be joined by Shulamit on stage at Constellation for Once More, With Feeling! This series exists to deepen your appreciation and enjoyment of an unfamiliar work through on-stage interviews with the composer and by playing the piece in question at both the beginning and end of the show.

Shulamit leads an extraordinary life, and is a wonderful storyteller. We sat down for a conversation at her home recently to talk about her epic second string quartet, the elusive process of creativity, and what parts of herself find their way into her writing.

We hope you enjoy this longer-form interview, and look forward to seeing you on Thursday!

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"Let's Make Space": An Interview with LJ White

On August 14th, we kick off our 2019/20 season with our popular Once More, With Feeling! series, featuring two of our favorite artists: composer LJ White and the 1960’s cult favorites, The Shaggs. Our 2019/20 season is all about uncovering how much of a composer’s personal identity they chose – or not – to include in their writing, so Doyle got in touch with LJ (composer of Spektral fan favorite Zin zin zin zin) about how he aproached one of the most infamous tracks in all of rock history.

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Doyle Armbrust: Hey LJ, I love Zin zin zin zin just as much today as I did when you first wrote it.

LJ White: Thanks!

DA: From what you state on your website, it seems like this open-arms approach to sound is still at the heart of what you are up to as a composer. Does it look any different these days than when you wrote Zin?

LJ: I wrote Zin over six years ago now, and I can explain it all better now, but I think the motivations are still the same. I like to examine and question genre barriers, and I do it through considering all of the elements of music under my control – pitches, rhythms, timbres, textures, phrasing, articulation, and on and on – independently of each other and with as open of a mind as possible. In Zin, for example, there are timbres that would fit in at Darmstadt, there are motivic and rhythmic elements from hip hop, there’s a way of thinking about vertical spacing that’s informed by spectral music, and there’s comedic timing in the structure and a rhetorical, onomatopoeic communicativeness of gesture that are reminiscent of opera buffa or cartoons.

There’s no reason all of those things can’t make sense together, if they work toward a singular purpose or feeling for the music, a singular idea that interests me. The reason I’m interested in breaking down these lines of genre, I think, is that as a queer trans person, I’ve had to continually make lots of small decisions in order to build a fitting identity outside of the big binary-gender categories that would have otherwise made those kinds of decisions (what to wear, how to speak, etc) automatically for me. And I like to try and build a world, modeled in music, where the full spectrum of decision making is open in all cases, where we all can, as much as possible, freely make decisions for ourselves.

DA: This season, we are aiming to have composers tell us what aspects of their identity they want front and center, rather than whatever the current narrative about them may be. If we were to write up a one-sentence bio for you in one of our programs, what would be the lede, as of this moment?

LJ: This is a really interesting question. Thanks for the thoughtfulness in striving to represent the composers you’re working with the way we want to be represented.

It seems like there’s two parts to it: 1) Tell us what aspects of your identity you want people to understand about you, or associate with you, and 2) What should your one-sentence bio be? In my case, a one-sentence bio wouldn’t encompass issues of identity directly. The first sentence of my bio (which, for composers, can end up being used as a “one-sentence bio,” and is something we agonize over) says that my music is “direct, focused, and socially relevant” and “assimilates a variety of influences.” This is what I think my work does, in a nutshell. However, identity issues are important to why my music has these priorities, as I’ve described. I want people to know that I’m transgender. My gender identity is something that has strongly informed my work, in tandem with other aspects of myself, and it probably it is a large part of the “current narrative” of me that is out there, cultivated by myself and others. I also care about LGBTQ+ visibility, so it’s important to me to be open. That said, my gender identity is definitely not the full picture, and probing my music would uncover a lot of other features based on an inseparable tangle of identity-based, interest-based, and personality-based traits, one which I don’t think can be summed up fairly in a sentence that would function as a composer bio.

All of this is to say, I guess, that you can feel free to tell audiences that I’m trans and that this informs my music, but let’s make space for this information to be an organic response to questions about why the music sounds the way it does and how I understand my work, along with any other relevant information that could pop up (like the amount of time I spent watching cartoons and MTV as a kid, my interest in language and communication and interpersonal dynamics, etc.)

DA: As a trans composer, that aspect of your identity is probably going to surface pretty often. Is that something you embrace, or is it challenging to automatically be compelled to be an advocate?

LJ: It’s complicated, but I do embrace it, and I hope I’m always an advocate. As I was alluding to, I think my gender identity is something that’s foundational to the way that I think of and write music, whether or not the music deals directly with LGBTQ+ issues – for all of us, our art comes from who we are – so I’ve gotten comfortable talking about it, on my own terms. And I often do want to engage those issues explicitly in music. I feel that there’s been a good balance: I’m getting to write those pieces close to as frequently as I want to, and I’m also getting a lot of opportunities to write pieces about other things.

When I write LGBTQ+-focused music, I tend to write it for friends and close colleagues in the contemporary classical world, who I know support me, and who I know think carefully about gender and other issues of identity for themselves. That way, we’re all connecting to the music with passion, and I don’t feel isolated or other-ized. There are so many important issues to grapple with right now, in 2019 – gender is just one of all of the things we’re collectively taking on. At times, I’ve turned down opportunities where that collaborative, world-improving, inclusive spirit seemed to be missing: interviews that felt tokenizing, or commissions that were too prescriptive and inauthentic to my experience, or situations where I wasn’t sure I trusted the presenting organization to get it right. But I’m thankful that an abundance of fruitful collaborations has made those experiences irrelevant, in my case.

DA: We chose you to re-imagine one of our favorite tunes, My Pal Foot Foot, because 1) We love your work, and 2) because we figured a tune this fringe would be right up your alley. Do you remember your reaction when you first heard the original track?

LJ: I was like, “This is bananas. And I need to listen to this whole album a lot.”

DA: One thing I find so compelling about this tune, and The Shaggs in general, is that they are unabashedly doing their own thing. I think the “other-ness” is what draws me in. Do you find yourself with any similar feelings of camaraderie with the music-making in this way?

LJ: I didn’t really experience it in this way, honestly. I think what was compelling about it for me was the improbable musical material and the seeming belief among the band members that they were “doing it right,” doing what musicians do – the dutiful rudiments in the drum part, the simultaneous earnestness and wackiness of the lyrics, etc. I geeked out on things like the really complex rhythmic and pitch material and amazingly weird harmonic and lyrical structure of the song, which coexist really interestingly with that dutiful vibe that I felt I was picking up on. To me, it felt more like a misguided attempt at conformity than a rebellion.

The connection for me might be in the ways that I’ve tried but spectacularly, cluelessly failed to conform to things like gender roles in the past. I’m not sure how to say this without being condescending towards the band, though.

DA: What was your lightbulb moment, when you were writing your cover?

LJ: I think it was figuring out how to do something original with this music without having it feel like I was just making fun of the Shaggs because they’re out of tune and out of time, etc. I had several false starts before I started to bring in a bigger variety of material and to, in a way, poke fun at all of it by juxtaposing it all with references to opposing styles and associations. This includes the references to my own previous music that are in the piece. I had to discover that the music needed more territory to cover in order to not take itself too seriously.

DA: You’re now a teacher of composition. Do you find yourself offering your students specific advice in terms of how much of themselves, personally, they should invite into their music?

LJ: I want my students to write really personal music, by learning how to control all of the musical elements at their disposal toward their chosen goals in a musical work, and also by being thoughtful about themselves and what’s important to them, so that they can infuse their music with their own aesthetic and extra-musical values. This doesn’t mean that they should all write explicitly confessional or identity-focused music if that isn’t what feels right – it’s really about the way of constructing music more than the music’s stated topic or purpose. I want them to make decisions in a way that’s individualized and thoughtful and connected to what they’ve been able to observe that they like or believe in or care about. I want them to think more deeply than conforming to any one style blindly, and to write music that no one else could write but them.

It’s something I put a lot of thought into.