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Chersea brings wall of sound to Friday Night Live

Electronica musician opens new fall season in Lynn Valley series
Chersea
Live, Chersea uses loop-stations to create sonic walls of frequencies. Her debut EP, Grey Matter, came out in 2014. A full album is imminent.

Chersea, performs Friday Night Live on Sept. 22 at Lynn Valley United Church,  3201 Mountain Hwy., North Vancouver. Doors: 7:30 p.m. Show: 8 p.m. Tickets: $10 at the door. Under 12 with adult – free. For more information visit fnlnorthvan.com.

The robot speaks!

Just a moment earlier chit chat choked the room’s atmosphere. Pinpoints of light leaked from smartphones and confined concentration to individual 4.7 inch screens.

But once the mechanical entity talks the little lights dim, texts go untexted, conversation stops, and disparate waves of concentration coalesce into a singularity focused on the stage, the robot, Chersea.

And then she sings.

“I have a vocal effects pedal and I turn on the robot voice and it shuts everyone up,” the Port Coquitlam singer says with a laugh, describing her technique of commanding the room.

She’ll sometimes add a choir or an orchestra to the robot’s voice to draw laughs from the crowd.

“I think comedy is a really good way to break the ice,” she explains.

Chersea’s music is defined by, well, being difficult to define.

Sometimes her voice is husky, like the cigarette-smoking femme fatale in a black and white movie whose smile puts sweat on the detective’s forehead. Occasionally that voice swells to showtune-size but mainly Chersea croons amid labyrinthine musical arrangements that loop instruments, backup vocals and sounds atop each other.

It’s a wall of sound but not of the Phil Spector variety. It’s more like a sonic chain-link fence with Chersea’s voice flitting in and out and under and over it.

The variety of influences in her songs is likely a product of growing up with her parents who held: “conflicting views on what music is,” she says.

“We grew up listening to QMFM whenever we were in the van with my mom,” Chersea notes.

That meant Celine Dion and Norah Jones and the type of soothing sounds preferred by four out of five dentists.

But at home there was her dad’s vinyl library to dive into.

“Growing up we listened to a lot of records,” she says, emphasizing the words: a lot.

There was Pearl Jam and Van Morrison and The Eagles and Pink Floyd and Cake (“our family loves Cake,” she enthuses).

She also learned piano and drums and got a bass amp for her 12th Christmas.

“Santa was still around during that time even though at that age I was kind of, ‘OK Dad, I get it,’” she says.

There’s a rite of passage common among many musicians: that point in their teens or early 20s when they flee from their youth and find music that’s just for themselves.

For Chersea, that meant going “way outside the box.”

She found electronica, experimental pop, Imogen Heap, Sufjan Stevens and Bjork. But she also speaks glowingly of Anne Murray and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (“I really love their musical fusion.”).

While she doesn’t have a strict formula, her process generally involves crafting melodic, classical music and incorporating it into new technologies.

“Growing up I kind of took everything and tried to mould it together.”

She’s still working on that, she explains, often writing late into the night.

It’s about 1 a.m. when “the best stuff comes out.”

It’s when she can translate, “the vulnerability and the darkness and just the silence,” she says.

The melody comes first.

“Then I’ll start singing a whole bunch of nonsensical stuff,” she says.

But amid the gibberish words emerge like the contours of a sculpture.

“I really like playing with some really dark lyrics in happy songs, and vice versa.”

She talks enthusiastically about a new song called “I Can’t Be You,” which she describes as: “kind of Alicia Keys-y, but with this weird industrial backbeat.”

The lyrics describe a compulsion to be near someone and the inability to be yourself around that person.

“You get into the deep dark cavernous reaches of your mind and you realize that the only person you can impress and be proud of and happy with is yourself,” Chersea says.

For Chersea, writing a song is like putting a message in a bottle and casting it on the water without knowing the national language.

“A lot of artists are fairly disturbed so we write about things that matter to us and make a lot of sense to us. . . . You write with the hope that translates into how other people think and feel, and you hope that they listen to it and they can feel the same way,” she says. “You kind of write because it’s what your insides need.”