Robots Invade Cowtown!
Electronic Music Calgary Brings the Sounds of Circuitry to Calgarians’ Analog Ears
By Mike Pathos
“Once upon a time, Calgary was a smallish city known in music circles mainly for its local country music and garage rock scenes. Things stayed like that for a long, long time. Until, one day, Calgarians woke up to find a rich new musical life in their much-grown city…”
Helping this story come true, performance by performance, is Electronic Music Calgary (EMC), an organization for local artists of all musical genres using electronic instruments, which holds multimedia events in several venues monthly throughout the city.
Michael Weicker, an electronic musician working as Weep, O' Mine Eyes, says he started EMC because “as a studio musician, I wanted to play live in Calgary but did not find anywhere really receptive to live electronic performance. I knew there were other musicians also who were doing amazing music but were not getting any exposure.”
Richard Reynold from EMC, who performs and records as brokenpaws, explains: “If it’s created with an electronic device, that’s all we ask, and that for live shows we want the performance to be live in some sense. Any genre is welcome; we’d like to have it open to all types of electronic music.”
Once the Cantos Music Foundation – a downtown keyboard museum with an extensive electronic instrument collection and a performance space – accepted their proposal to regularly showcase local electronic music artists on Cantos’ stage, Michael explains, “we have been doing shows as part of their First Thursday arts program ever since. We have branched out from there to regular shows at the Soda Night Gallery and Lounge on the third Thursday of each month.” Starting with “about four electronic acts” by Weicker’s count, EMC now works with more than twenty performance groups.
It seems EMC has gained much momentum since the advent of MySpace, but the artist known as Nebulous on the popular networking site sheds some light on the early days of the collective: “About three years ago, I was contacted by Michael. He had spotted my solo works on the web, as well as one of the two music projects that I work on, called Voltage Control. He seemed intrigued by the fact that I program analog synthesizers for ‘fun’ and that I had completed a number of trippy synth recordings in the style of the late 1970s electronic movement. Voltage Control was a studio project, and never meant to be a live act. However, Michael’s prompting resulted in two firsts for us: he got us to play a non-live project live, and a year later, managed to get us to play two more times, and actually haul out the Jupiter 8 (a classic synth that I swore I'd never take on stage). As it turned out, we were well received, and had a total blast!”
Nebulous’ comments reflect many I heard from other EMCers online. Balon, for example, writes: “I started in the eighties with beats that caught my ear,” and just recently found an outlet in the electronic instrument jams. These jams have been especially successful in bringing the community together: one recent such jam, held around Christmas, attracted participation of thirteen artists, who played together for more than three hours.
As interest in electronic music in Calgary continues to increase, the future looks bright for EMC, who are debating putting out a compilation CD, and putting on a full-fledged music festival in the near future. Chris Graham, who records as Robot Dreams, concludes, “it is gratifying to know that there are people out there, even peers, hearing and responding to my music. I may never have gotten this far if not for EMC. Just seeing what other Calgarians are doing, and how well the music can be produced, is an impetus to continue and to grow.”
