Here’s what I’ve been up to lately. Mostly writing for Stir, but there are other exciting things in the works.
Chor Leoni sings of healing and hope in The Songs Will Remain
(Stir, November 4, 2025)
IT’S NOT OFTEN that a choral performance goes viral, but that’s precisely what happened when Chor Leoni released a video for its version of the Kate Bush song “Army Dreamers”. Recorded live at St. Andrew’s–Wesley United Church, the video captures the Vancouver men’s choir singing Ken Cormier’s arrangement of the song, which poignantly portrays a mother’s anguish over a son lost to an unspecified war: “Should have been a father/But he never even made it to his twenties.”
As of this writing, that video has racked up 1,058,845 views on YouTube.
Chor Leoni’s timing could not have been better. The choir uploaded its video in April 2022; a month later, the fourth season of Stranger Things sparked a resurgence of interest in Bush’s music with the inclusion of “Running Up That Hill”. Then, in 2024, the TikTok generation discovered “Army Dreamers”.
“What is interesting is that this viewership for our video was clearly driven by young people, most completely new to what choral music is,” Chor Leoni artistic director Erick Lichte tells Stir. “So, just hearing a choir sing a song which is trending opened a new listening world for some of these folks…”
Eastside Culture Crawl artists are drawn to wildly divergent approaches to image-making
(Stir, November 14, 2025)
ROGER MAHLER’S DRAWINGS likewise benefit from the perceptions of individual viewers. By design, his work is entirely free of narrative or figurative elements.
While this might seem like a radical departure from the pictures Mahler produces in his day job as a corporate photographer—think C-suite head shots, product photos, and advertising images—he contends that his approach isn’t really all that different.
“In photography, you’ll always take things out to simplify a picture,” Mahler says while giving Stir a tour of the Parker Street Studios space he shares with his wife, business partner, and fellow Culture Crawl exhibiting artist Holly Truchan. “And this is almost a version of that—taking everything out and just dealing with one line and one colour…”
54-40 artist biography
(5440.com, November 20, 2025; commissioned by Divine Industries)
Sometimes a creative endeavour seems to take on a life of its own, with the artist merely acting as the conduit through which the art finds its way into the world. That was the case when 54-40 began to create its 16th studio album, Porto, with producer Warne Livesey. According to singer-guitarist Neil Osborne, everything just sort of clicked into place. “It seemed like it was writing itself, in terms of the whole making of the album,” Osborne recalls.“Everything was very quick and instant and immediate. And maybe that’s based on our experience of learning how to not overthink things, I don’t know, but it just seemed like there was a wind in our sails right from the get-go, from the lyrics to the music to getting Warne on-board to pre-production.”
When it came time to record, the long-running B.C.-based band decamped to the Portuguese city of Porto, from which the new album takes its title. Setting up shop at Arda Recorders for a couple of weeks, Osborne and his bandmates—guitarist Dave Genn, bassist Brad Merritt, drummer Matt Johnson—maintained their forward momentum, in spite of a massive power blackout that took the entire Iberian Peninsula off the grid for a day. “Recording in Porto was an amazing experience,” Merritt says. “The studio and staff were superb. It was nice to be able to make another recording with the great Warne Livesey, and it was a bonding experience that won’t soon be forgotten…”
(Please note that my work begins at the second paragraph on the page linked above; the first paragraph was written by someone else, presumably the band’s publicist. I would also like to take this opportunity to note that writing artist bios is one of the services I offer, and one that I particularly enjoy.)
Chapel Sound’s Notebook Season showcases experimental electronic music from around the world
(November 21, 2025)
ON PAPER, UNDERGROUND club music from the Netherlands might not seem to have that much in common with traditional Arabic instrumentation and Southeast Asian martial arts. To Veron Xio, however, it all hangs together, and in some ways it’s the differences that make it work.
Xio, a Vancouver-based music producer, is the founder of Notebook Platform, an electronic-music and artist-development initiative. In collaboration with other likeminded creatives (including Nancy Lee of Chapel Sound Art Foundation and Mada Phiri of Made By We), Xio curates Notebook Season, which they describe as “a miniature festival of artist talks, workshops, and experimental music performances”.
While the prospect of “experimental music” might seem daunting to some potential audience members, Notebook Season’s mission is not to alienate anyone.
“I think we see experimental as a very loose term in the sense of just, how do we stretch things that we know in ways that we’ve haven’t seen before?” Xio tells Stir in a video call…
The Improv Centre mines classic TV-comedy tropes for yuletide yuks in ’Tis the Sitcom
(Stir, November 18, 2025)
The holiday episode is a TV sitcom staple, and everyone has their personal favourite. For The Improv Centre’s artistic director, Alan Pavlakovic, it’s “Secret Santa”, a 2009 episode of 30 Rock—especially the scene in which Danny (guest star Cheyenne Jackson) intentionally sings off-key to make Jenna feel more confident in her own vocal abilities.
On a joint call with Pavlakovic, Jacki Gunn tells Stir that her perennial pick is “The One With the Holiday Armadillo”, a 2000 episode of Friends. “The moment where Ross is forced to wear an armadillo costume is pretty iconic,” Gunn says.
The Improv Centre is mounting its very own holiday special this year, in the form of’Tis the Sitcom, which lovingly satirizes the sort of TV comedies that focus on groups of friends, roommates, and/or co-workers in urban settings. Think all of the aforementioned shows, plus The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, et al...
John Lucas 
Leave a comment