Flat Earth Society Orchestra creates rich counterpoint of high art and low comedy
Surrealism is a major influence on the Belgian big band coming to Vancouver courtesy Music on Main
Flat Earth Society Orchestra.
Music on Main presents the Flat Earth Society Orchestra at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre on November 3
HERE AT STIR we don’t usually tell our readers what to do, other than suggest that seeing more live arts events might be good for the psyche. But today I’m going to break from tradition and offer a step-by-step guide to how this article should really be consumed.
1) Print it out.
2) Tear it up.
3) Tape it together in random order.
4) Read.
Of course, it might be just as fruitful to imagine doing this. Either way, you’ll get a sense of the creative chaos that awaits you when Music on Main presents the Flat Earth Society Orchestra at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre on November 3. Starting with its name, this Belgian big band embodies a vast array of seeming contradictions, polar opposites, and sonic incongruities, and while we never did get an answer as to why some of the smartest musicians in Europe would name themselves after a theory espoused by idiots, keyboardist and co-founder Peter Vandenberghe is more than happy to explain why his ensemble sounds like no other.
“There’s certainly a big influence on everything from Surrealism,” he says, reached at home in Ghent while packing for the flight that will soon take Flat Earth Society Orchestra to North America. “And in Belgium it’s a thing, Surrealism. In France, they have Dadaism, but in Belgium it’s more Surrealism, like [René] Magritte paintings and stuff like that. And, yes, we like to switch between things, put things together that obviously are not always matching. We like to switch between genres and keep also the humourous side of things in it. Not getting too serious about anything or everything.”
Perhaps this exploration of difference is only natural for musicians who have grown up in an officially trilingual country, Belgium being split between Francophones and Flemish-speakers, with a pocket of German-speaking townships on its western edge. The Flat Earth ethos goes beyond that, however. Since its inception in the late 1990s, the band has created a rich counterpoint of high art and low comedy, free improvisation and intricately thorny charts, and multi-media influences. Early incarnations found it covering Frank Zappa and the Residents; the Americanisms have mostly (but not entirely) fallen away, and in the Hearsee program it will present at the Roundhouse film has come in as a primary focus, both as a way of structuring clarinetist and bandleader Peter Vermeersch’s compositions and as a path, for viewers, into some undeniably complex sonic landscapes.
In true Surrealist fashion, those works don’t function as traditional scores, amplifying the action shown on the screen. Instead, they run in closely synched parallel, and it’s up to the audience to make sense of what’s going on.
Flat Earth’s initial venture into live film scoring came when Vermeersch revived Ernst Lubitsch’s 1919 silent classic, The Oyster Princess, with his own music. “When he did that, he really found a special kind of format for creating live music, which is very closely related to the editing of the movie,” Vandenberghe says. “The rhythm section plays with headphones and a click track, and a lot of the music is really on the image. When there is a change in the movie there’s a change in the music. So after that he created this Hearsee program, where it’s more like short movies. Certain of them are newly made; others are like new editing with found footage, or just old movies from the really early days of cinema. And it’s always the same procedure, let’s say, with the click track being inaudible to the public. But we hear it!”
It is, the keyboardist admits, a daunting process. “The first time we get the score and have the click track to practise to at home, it’s like ‘What the hell is going on?’” he notes, laughing. “It takes a special concentration to play it, but it’s very nice. We strongly believe that if you make film music, it’s nice to have an extra layer, an extra thing in the music, like, underlying. if you put everything in the film into the music, it’s not interesting. That’s the power of the music: to create an extra dimension alongside the image.”
Although Vermeersch has composed all the music for Sunday’s program, his approach is one that Vandenberghe is entirely comfortable with—and has, at times, gone beyond. “I’ve always been a big fan of film and film music, and I did write a lot of soundtracks as well,” he says. “My wife [Trisha De Cuyper], she’s a movie-maker, and I often do music for her. We have this one project, a literary/music thing where we have two different films being shown simultaneously, and then I did the music for it with my trio, and there was a famous Belgian writer who did spoken word over it. We had these different dimensions and layers, and the text was not explaining what was happening in the movie.
“A lot of people were really lost in it, and they’d come afterwards and ask ‘Am I right, thinking this or that?’” he adds. “But it’s the involvement of the public that’s important in this, and it’s weird how often the public is afraid to get involved. They want to know about whether they’re right—and everybody’s right, of course.”
Except, perhaps, in politics. During the Flat Earth Society orchestra’s North American excursion, the group will be presenting two different programs: Hearsee, and a full-length concert version of its latest recording, The One. It’s a concept album, and in typical Flat Earth fashion the concept isn’t easy to explain, even for its originator.
“It’s a double idea, because one thing that has always stuck with me is the Bootsy Collins concept of ‘the one’,” says Vandenberghe, who came up with the initial idea and shares compositional credits with Vermeersch. “They asked Bootsy ‘Man, why are you so funky?‘ and Bootsy answered ‘Well, I play on the one.’ And ‘the one’ is like a musical concept where everything starts there and generates all the rest. But when he tries to explain it, it’s a mysterious thing. It’s a bit like swing in jazz. You can’t explain it; you can only feel it. And that was an interesting idea to me.
“The other thing was the idea that nowadays everyone believes in this one person or this one truth,” he continues. “Everything needs to be one, and everybody wants to be the one, and everybody wants to believe in the one. But this is just an illusion, that there’s one thing or one truth or one person who can solve everything. And with the music we make, it’s very multi-layered. So it’s like we’re trying to create an antidote for this mono-thinking that is, in fact, ruining society.”
It is, to say the least, an intriguing proposal to bring to the United States on the eve of a particularly fraught election.
“It’s a perfect time to be there!” Vandenberghe enthuses, and for everyone’s sake we hope he’s right. 
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