Photo Credit: Jason Hillman
The first secret of a live music video series is finding a distinct setting. NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts has its famously cluttered office and Audiotree offers a tranquil, modernist studio, while other series opt for a more naturalistic, outdoors vibe. Milwaukee’s Hear Here Presents has its own memorable space: a roomy, Walker’s Point loft decorated like a museum of killer thrift store finds. Bands perform against a backdrop of beautiful vintage chairs, lamps and, most strikingly, dozens of framed pictures that have been doctored and painted over, with varying degrees of surrealism, by artist Jenny Vanderheiden.
“I am a good Goodwill hunter,” brags Hear Here director Ryan Holman, who co-founded the series in 2015 and films each installment with the help of a large cast of artists, videographers and lighting and sound techs. The performances may have a quaint, cozy vibe, but the actual filmings are major productions.
“We’ve always wanted this to be the best sound, the best video and the most artsy out of all these video shoots around the country,” Holman says. “We know there are hundreds of them out there, so we really wanted to have something that set us apart. Tiny Desk concerts sometimes are just one camera straight on, and that simplicity is cool, but we wanted to beef it up, so at any shoot we usually have a minimum of three cameras, sometimes up to six. We did one shoot with Lotus that had 13 angles on it, so we were just sticking cameras everywhere, giving our editor as much to work with as we could.”
This month the series marks its third anniversary and the release of its 50th session, a performance from the Japanese psych-rock band Kikagaku Moyo. The series’ backbone is still Milwaukee music—it’s recorded acts as varied as Pleasure Thief, Zed Kenzo, GGOOLLDD, Dead Horses, Q The Sun and King Courteen—but increasingly it has become a magnet for touring acts as well, including Colorado songwriter Esmé Patterson and Dallas art-rockers Midnight Opera and the Boston guitar-pop quartet Quilt.
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Hear Here has also been gradually expanding its brand. This summer it began co-sponsoring a new monthly music series with Brew City Bass called Disco Brunch, a Sunday afternoon concert and brunch at rotating venues around the city. Its first installment with the Nashville electronic duo Cherub drew a full house at Boone and Crockett; its next installment features the jammy Chicago electronic trio Orchard Lounge at The Ivy House (906 S. Barclay St.) on Sunday, Sept. 30. Then on Saturday, Oct. 13, Hear Here will host an anniversary concert at Company Brewing featuring BUHU and Strangelander that will feature an announcement about more Hear Here news.
Holman says he’s playing the long game with the series, which he hopes to find sponsorship for as it continues to grow. “I feel like it’s a selfless thing to have dumped this much time into it, but I love it,” he says. “It’s so fun for me, and so rewarding because of all the connections that I’ve made with all these amazing artists and musicians. It’s been so satisfying having this art project that is growing into something else.”
The complete Hear Hear Presents archive is available at hearherepresents.com.
