Musician Aquakultre's new album, 1783, is filled with record and anecdote as he and others assume the voices of historical characters from the history of Black Nova Scotia.Mo Phùng/Supplied
On his coming album 1783, Dartmouth-based musician Aquakultre (a.k.a. Lance Sampson) uses a dizzying array of culturally and geographically relevant musical styles to write a multifaceted history of Black Nova Scotia. That sort of far-ranging consideration of the past and present conditions of a group of people is uncommon in pop music; throughout the 17-track epic, Sampson’s songwriting is almost wholly concerned with understanding the perspectives of his ancestors and the community members who’ve made his life possible.
Sampson says he hopes the record can help Nova Scotians “get back to the importance of community, get back to the importance of understanding how we’re all connected. Not just within the Black community, but as a whole – Scotians as a whole.”
The album cover for 1783.Mo Phùng/Supplied
The biggest names in pop music typically celebrate selfhood or muck around in its trappings. They carve out a perspective from one angle – that of the “I” – and express the world and their experience situated solidly in that centre.
In the Christian magazine Sojourners, Ezra Craker notes in a review of Rosalía’s Lux that, although she seeks it in spirituality, the Spanish star is “still preoccupied with personal freedom” throughout her visionary and “God-haunted” 2025 album. Whether he’s flexing or reflecting, Drake’s gaze is usually inward. Taylor Swift’s eras may be myriad, but they are all about Taylor Swift.
There is nothing new under the sun in art writ large. And hints of real novelty in pop music, despite what the poptimists might say, are rare – a condition of the system (Big Music’s crazed capitalism) that makes it happen.
That novelty, when it does appear, often does so in idiosyncratic combinations of influences. But the pop perspective almost always issues forth from the self who’s singing: “I would want myself, baby, please believe me,” Calgary-born Juno Award winner Tate McRae sings on her 2023 single Greedy. “I’ll put you through hell just to know me.”
And that’s okay. Nobody tunes into pop radio to better understand The Other, or learn to organize for social change. But it makes 1783‘s kaleidoscope of perspective remarkable – it’s the rare record that uses pop music to assert that identity isn’t something you alone create; it arises through collaboration and from constellations of contingency.
“I wanted to create something that honours a lot of the work that African Nova Scotian, Black loyalists, Black refugees, Maroons did for me to be here today, for us to be here today,” Sampson says. More than 500 so-called Maroons were sent to Halifax in June, 1796, by the British administration in Jamaica. Looking at the history made Sampson reflective.
“It made me question how, if I’d had this understanding when I was 15 or 16, how it would have shaped my life today.”
This approach grew naturally out of Sampson’s work on GeneratioNS, a TV series that investigates the history and culture of Black Nova Scotians. He had been doing extensive research and asking questions in intergenerational conversations about what things have been like in those communities since Black Loyalists arrived in the late 18th century.
The Dartmouth-based musician hopes his latest work might offer guidance to his own children.Mo Phùng/Supplied
“What was community like?” Sampson says. “How were people dealing with community, dealing with issues as a community? I was really trying to reinforce that curiosity of community, and reinforce some of those morals and practices, because the shape that we’re in right now, it’s just not looking good. We’re not as close and community connected as we once were. We’re not dealing with things and processing things that are happening with our community.”
Accordingly, 1783 is filled with record and anecdote, as Sampson and others assume the voices of historical characters (related to Sampson and not) from the history of Black Nova Scotia. With the stirring gospel-soul of Holy, he steps into the uniform of Reverend (and Captain) William White, father of famous opera singer Portia White, imagining the letters the reverend may have written and received during his time serving in France during the First World War. (Letter-writing was important to Sampson himself when he was incarcerated for 19 months as a young man.) The fiery horror-blues of Gallows unpacks the story of war veteran and Sampson’s great-great-grandfather Daniel Perry Sampson, convicted of murder by an all-white jury and hanged in 1935 in the last execution in Halifax. There is plenty of evidence pointing to the fact that Daniel Sampson may have been framed, and the younger Sampson is currently working to exonerate him.
Legal groups seek exoneration of Black man from Halifax hanged in 1935
Simmering, funky vibes in The Avenue celebrate the historically Black neighbourhood of Crichton Avenue in Dartmouth, and the horn-blasted Bags Packed is inspired by the story of Carm Robinson, whose shared interest in genealogy with Dr. Ruth Whitehead led to the discovery that Whitehead’s ancestors had enslaved Robinson’s in South Carolina (the NFB produced a documentary about it titled Loyalties).
Near the end of the album, there’s a recording from the mid-1970s of a kitchen party singalong where Sampson’s grandma leads the family in a raucous Show Me the Way to Go Home.
“When I brought the recording to her, she was able to point out who was who, who was singing and who might have been there on that day,” Sampson says. “And it was beautiful. It reminded me of the importance of that documentation.”
While the past provides the majority of the subject matter on 1783, Sampson thinks mainly about the future when he considers the finished record, hoping such a document might offer guidance to his young children Georgina and Jamel, and provide them with an understanding of identity that does not centre on the self, but considers individuals as interconnected fragments of community.
“I know that my experiences are my experiences,” Sampson says. “They make me who I am today. But if I’d had this knowledge and care and respect for what our ancestors had to live through for us to be here today, I question how that would have shaped my life.”