Music Festivals

”I want the audience to experience a piece of theatre that feels like an intimate conversation,” says actor Mary Fay Coady, who will perform a monologue from her play Tender Beast at Agricola’s Lost and Found as part of this year’s OBEY. “I like talking about matters of the heart, and we all have one […]

“Every song is about this internal good versus evil. I’m really into religious allegories as a metaphor for dealing with depression and anxiety. I’m working on one where the lyrics are ‘I hate myself’ and just saying that out loud–I was crying when I was writing it, it’s incredibly cathartic. I’m finally making the music […]

In the grand tradition of outsider music and art festivals in Canada, OBEY stands at the top. Like its contemporaries (your Wyrd Fests, your Somewhere There Festivals, your Toronto Thaws, your Festival International de Musique Actuelles), for seven years running, OBEY pushes boundaries, defies genres and stokes creative fires. Art In Fest, OBEY’s standalone contemporary […]

“I’m wearing all white right now” Camella Lobo says with a laugh. “I don’t know what that means!” While a pale wardrobe might not seem particularly puzzling to some, for Lobo, the brains beind Tropic Of Cancer, it does seem to pose a bit of a quandary. Tropic Of Cancer’s haunting, synth-laden output over the […]

Lisa Lipton works with many moving parts. There’s her drumming practice, developing since 2011 and showcased as the marquee exhibit BLAST BEATS at Nocturne 2012. There’s the film she’s making, The Impossible Blue Rose, which she’s been writing, filming and assembling on the road from California to Windsor, Ontario. Unlike most features, which are unveiled […]

Tri Le is hitting two firsts this season–graduating from college and playing OBEY. The two go hand-in-hand: as a recording arts student at NSCC, the former bedroom recorder had new techniques to put to work on pop-punk trio. Surveillance’s month-old EP Stressed and Depressed. “I learned there’s a proper way to do things, there’s no […]

Like fellow OBEY act Julianna Barwick, Crystal Dorval (AKA White Poppy) trades in ethereal layers, guitars and vocals piled atop one another, emotional and cathartic, best heard in headphones or churches. The difference is Dorval records everything by herself–she’s her own writer-editor. “I remember someone telling me something about painting once–a painting can technically continue […]

“People forget that we are alive,” says Tanya Tagaq. The Inuk throat-singer from Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, has been performing her unique style of traditional throat-singing for over a decade. For In the Dead of Winter, Tagaq will perform her original score to the 1922 film Nanook of the North at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on […]

Timber Timbre’s music is the kind of moody indie-rock often called “gloomy,” “atmospheric,” “evil,” even, kind of stuff that blows across the streets of New Orleans, scores haunted houses and churches the world over. But the band’s fifth album, Hot Dreams (out April 1), was created in a pair of unlikely places–written in sunny California, […]

Kathleen Edwards is on a break. After more than a decade of worldwide touring, four full-lengths, 11 Juno nominations, one Polaris Prize gala hosting gig and a pair of Letterman appearances, she’s back in her hometown of Ottawa with a new house and a new dog and no new songs. “I’ve been in that constant […]