East Coast artists talk music and travel in home-built flight simulator
HALIFAX — Nova Scotia singer-songwriter Joel Plaskett croons about Arizona over what appears to be an aerial view of the desert landscape near the Grand Canyon — but in reality, he is sitting in a cramped corner of Asif Illyas’s Halifax home.
Plaskett was the inaugural guest on Illyas’s new online talk show “Live On The Flight Deck,” where he chats with fellow East Coast musicians as they soar through computer-generated skies in his home-built flight simulator.
Illyas, the 45-year-old former frontman of Halifax alt-rock group MIR, said the concept for the web series came to him while he was watching Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” in which the legendary comic drives around with his famously funny friends to talk shop over caffeinated beverages.
“It was just like this light bulb moment,” said Illyas. “I think I could finally find a way to bring these worlds together, because these are the two things that I love — music and flying.”