Pierce Fulton Talks About His New Live EDM Tour, Stopping At The Warehouse

Though Pierce Fulton’s music is deeply embedded with electronica and house, all sorts of influences creep in: contemporary pop, hip-hop, classic rock, metal.

On “Better Places,” the Bridgeport native’s debut album, he collaborates with NYC singer-songwriter Noosa (on “Autumn Blossom” and “The Sound”) and LA-based collective NDVES (on the title track); the result is a nine-track, pulse-quickening, nostalgic collection, tailor-made for pumping up crowds.

Fulton performs at the Warehouse in Fairfield on Nov. 27 at 8 p.m., with NDVES opening — the first official EDM show at the venue. Fulton spoke by phone from Dallas about crafting a 90-minute set for his first major tour.

Q: This is your first major tour, correct?

A: It’s sort of a combination of things. It’s the first time I’ve done a tour like this of any kind. In addition to that, I was DJing for a long time as my main form of performance, and I developed a whole new live show for this tour, which reflects a lot of my new music. But I also I got creative in how I could incorporate my old music into the new live show. It’s a lot of firsts, which is really cool. It’s been a lot of work preparing for it, but so far it’s been really fun.

Q: How did you go about incorporating your old music into this show?

A: When I first started planning the show, I kind of thought it was going to be a band show, because my new music sort of reflects that sound. But then, as I started to incorporate a lot of my older electronic music, I thought it could kind of be built like a DJ set but still be a live show. I took the best qualities of my DJ sets and the new qualities of this live show I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and created the perfect way to display all of my music within a 90-minute set.

It took a lot of planning and thinking and trial and error to make certain songs work with other songs. All of it is mixing mostly by key. Harmonically, it flows like my DJ sets, so that there’s no dissonant songs playing one after another, and they all kind of work, whether it’s major to relative minor, and all that. Through the first two shows, there are a lot of really, really long-time fans, and they were happy to hear the whole blend of everything that I’ve done over the past five or six years I’ve been making music. That’s the ultimate goal, for them to be super excited and surprised by all of these songs.

I kept calling it a “college paper.” I made an outline and asked myself certain questions: What do I want to be doing during the show? What do I not want to be doing? Who’s my intended audience? I drew an outline of how I wanted the show to progress, whether it’s high-energy stuff or more instrumental stuff or more vocal stuff. I just kept refining and testing things and going back. Since I did it all myself, I can keep tweaking it as the tour goes on.

Q: Is the plan working out?

A: Yes. As I was rehearsing for this tour, my parents have this new house [in Fairfield] that was unoccupied, so I moved a bunch of my stuff in there for the past few months to develop the show. If I didn’t have that opportunity to take time off, it probably would have been really hard, especially for the first few shows. But because of that work, if something goes wrong, I usually know what it is.

At the Dallas show, I hit a button by accident that shortened the sequence of the drum loop. Usually it’s 16 steps, but it was only going through four. I didn’t know how to fix it live, but I bypassed that sequence and improvised on the spot. In the moment, I was stressed, but I came up with a solution. If I hadn’t practiced that much, I would have had a nightmare dealing with that.

PIERCE FULTON performs at the Warehouse in Fairfield on Nov. 27 at 8 p.m, with NDVES opening. Tickets are $25-$28. fairfieldtheatre.org.