The Spirit Of Strangers

“I think everyone at music college gets a little bit despondent about music, the world they're about to embark on, because you get trained up but the number of jobs available and the kind of work you're going to end up doing is often very different to what's been projected for you at music college.”

It's a bleak appraisal of the study of music that Chris Wheeler gives, but it was out of this despondency, close on a decade ago in 2004, when he and fellow graduate Jules Buckley took a punt on a project that would soon see them collaborating with everyone from Tim Minchin to Aphex Twin – the Heritage Orchestra.

“We were pretty much straight out of music college and I'd been promoting in clubs in Shoreditch and Jules was becoming more well known as a composer and a conductor. We joined forces and put on the orchestra in one of the clubs which I was running which was called Heritage, so the name just came from that club night really,” Wheeler explains.

“It was a laugh to begin with, it wasn't a serious undertaking, we actually started doing blacksploitation covers in the first gig, but it was so successful that we thought well next time we'll do a collaboration. We did a collaboration with saxophonist called Chris Bowden and it was really great to collaborate and that was an eye opener for us because it took us into a new world music. We then decided to take on that idea of collaboration as the main emphasis for our work.”

True to his word, collaboration – be it with an artist or any existing body of work – is immediately apparent in the two shows Heritage Orchestra have as part of the Vivid Festival: performing Music From Blade Runner, a hybrid electrosymphonic reinterpretation of Vangelis' groundbreaking soundtrack; and with Live_Transmission, a tribute to the music of Joy Division that saw the orchestra collaborate with electronic artist Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) and members of UK experimental electronic band Three Trapped Tigers, alongside visual artist Matt Watkins for accompanying animations and projections.

“It was Scanner's original electronic interpretations of Joy Division that we took and recorded a rehearsal with a rhythm section and synths from the orchestra, so it was like Chinese whispers,” says Wheeler, extrapolating the process of collaboration for the latter. “They changed from those original demos, we then sent those rehearsal studio recordings, which I'd cut up into manageable pieces and put back together, to the orchestrator Tom Trapp, so there were three processes that the concept went through.

“The idea was to grab the essence of Joy Division, to key in to certain bass riffs and musical motifs that are really reminiscent of Joy Division and very recognisable, but also to then rip them apart, deconstruct them. It's a massive exploration of the Joy Division world; it's a deconstruction, it's a reinterpretation, but you get their essence, and the signature spirit of that band.”