Kazoo! Fest 2013 Wrap up!

Wow! What a great week!! We’re finally recovered after Kazoo! Fest 2013, our biggest and best year to date. Thanks to everyone who made it happen.. all the incredible performers, volunteers, and everyone came out.

A very heartfelt thank you to all of our volunteers who did everything from postering, doing merch, working door, making pancakes and ensuring everything ran smoothly this year. Our volunteers are the only reason we’re able to pull off this crazy festival every year.

If you missed out, all weekend Exclaim! covered the festival writing daily reviews which included photos and videos. The Ontarion also wrote a series of reviews of the festival including the photo to the left which was taken on Saturday night at the Green Party office.

A special thanks to Gillian Wilson and Gregory Pepper who worked on poster art for the festival this year. Be sure to check out all of the other amazing work they do. Also, we’ve got some t-shirts and limited edition silkscreen prints still available, so if you forgot to pick some up, get in touch.

Thanks so much to our local business and community partners: Wellington Brewery, The Cornerstone, City of Guelph, The Bookshelf, Baker Street Station, OX, CFRU 93.3 FM, Atmosphere Cafe, Ouderkirk & Taylor, Red Tree Productions, The Red Brick Cafe, The Dragon, and the Downtown Guelph Business Association.

We’re mostly going to be laying low this summer but we’re making plans for two nights of shows as part of our 7th anniversary happening in early June. More details to come soon. Thanks again!!

#KazooFest Day Three Preview – April 5th

It’s hard to believe it’s already the third day of Kazoo! Fest 2013. On Friday we’ve got a lot of great stuff happening all over town. If you haven’t had a chance to check things out, Exclaim! have been covering the festival posting pics, videos and reviews of each day.

Starting off the weekend portion of Kazoo! Fest, we have a unique live drawing project from The Original Group Of $even entitled ‘Perpetual Motion Mousetrap‘. The project will feature a 30 ft live drawing by local artists Michael Byers, Marc Bell, Gregory Pepper, Gillian Wilson, Jay Stephens, Nick Craine and Ryan Cassidy. The drawing will be accompanied by live soundscapes from Ben Grossman and Reborn Endless. Stop by Silence and catch this unique cross collaborative project in a fun and relaxed environment.

Over at The Cornerstone we’ll be featuring an intimate performance from two incredible songwriters. Opening the night we have Neil Haverty, the lead singer of the mighty Bruce Peninsula. Joining him will be the beautiful and haunting songs of the legendary Jennifer Castle. This is a very rare performance of two stunning songwriters playing a rare intimate show. Space is very limited and this show will definitely sell out, so plan on showing up early.

Friday night also marks the launch of our pop-up venue at the Green Party Office at 34 Gordon Street (beside the ANAF). The venue is a beautiful open space that is a re-purposed auto garage which will be transformed into an audio visual spectacle during the weekend of the Kazoo! Fest. The venue will also showcase an immersive light installation by Live Action Fezz entitled ‘Toy Factory‘.

Opening up the show at the Green Party Office will be The While, who are “an ethereal, harmonic, percussive audio-video experiment” who will be performing off stage in the venue. Next up we have Scattered Clouds coming from Hull, QC, one of the most interesting and obscure bands at Kazoo! Fest that we’re really looking forward to. Following them we have Rituals from Toronto, who are celebrating the release of a new EP. After that we’ve got Guelph’s own Esther Grey who will be performing their unique brand of distorted lo-fi garage folk. Utterly unqiue, they are truly one of Guelph’s most interesting bands. At this show they are releasing an extremely limited cassette tape (only 6 copies!!) featuring demos from an upcoming album. Closing out Friday night we have Dusted, a 2 piece band featuring Brian Borcherdt (of Holy Fuck) and Leon Taheny (Final Fantasy, Rituals, Bruce Peninsula). We can’t say enough about Dusted, they are so incredible, so be sure to catch their set.

Also, be sure to check out our ongoing visual art exhibitions including L.Roe’s mixed media installation ‘pdsd‘ at Dis-A-Ray (3 Wyndham Street North). Whew! That’s all for now, check the schedule or grab a Kazoo! Fest pocket guide for all the details.

#KazooFest Day Two Preview – April 4th

The second day of Kazoo! Fest 2013 is all about experimentation, the kind that brings people together to share in the awe of strange and incredible spectacles.

All weekend we’ll be co-presenting a number of shows with Silence, a brand-new experimental music series and venue. We’re honored to be working with them and we’re looking forward to a series of events that focus on audio and visual experimentation. To start off Thursday we’ll be hosting a Handmade Music Night. Part party, part science fair, Handmade Music is an open event for people who make stuff that makes noise, from instruments to electronics to software. Come bring your experiments and creations to show and play, your curiosity and ideas. Builders, hackers, programmers and the curious are all welcome. Electronics, acoustic instruments, hacked game consoles, custom software, DIY synths, circuit bent toys, visual and light projects, sound art… anything goes. While you’re there be sure to check out Peter Bradley’s Scrutineer Tapemobiles, an interactive audio installation made from old walkmans, toy cars and cassette tape!

Immediately following that we have a performance by Matt Miller who is a well-known improviser from Toronto incorporating found sounds into dance music. After that, Ed Video Media Arts Centre and Silence present a performance of Gordon Monahan‘s Sauerkraut Synthesizer project, which is an experimental synth, built around fruits, vegetables, and a jar of sauerkraut as voltage controllers for a computer synthesizer. Gordon Monahan was recently awarded a Governor General’s Award for visual and Media Arts and is also the co-founder of Electric Eclectics who are co-presenting our show at eBar immediately following his performance.

Opening up the show at eBar we have Dutch Toko, a Guelph based band who blend no-wave influences with washy guitar noise, one of Guelph’s best new bands with a visceral stage presence. Up next we have Odonis Odonis from Toronto, ON who will be bringing their brand of industrial beats and surf rock to Guelph for the first time. Don’t miss these guys, they are doing a US tour with METZ this month! Closing out the night we have Absolutely Free, the re-incarnation of Toronto math punks DD/MM/YYYY. With this new project the band explore krautrock and psycadelic influences alongside the polyrhythmic experiments that DD/MM/YYYY became known for. It’s gonna be a wild show night we hope you can join us!

#KazooFest 2013 Day One Preview – April 3rd

Don’t worry about this winter weather, we’ve got a full day of hot events to kick off Kazoo! Fest 2013.

Starting off the day, we’re featuring a surprise noon-hour concert on the University campus by Gregory Pepper. This is a FREE show happening at high noon in the University Centre presented by the CSA.

Later at Ed Video Media Arts Centre we officially get Kazoo! Fest underway with the opening of Visualization, an exhibition featuring animations, illustrations, and sketches. This amazing exhibition features Marc Bell, a cartoon illustrator from Guelph, Alex McLeod, a media artist from Toronto and A.M. 180, a collective from Prague, Czech Republic.

Immediately following the opening reception at Ed Video we have an incredible line-up of pop bands at eBar. Opening up the night we have the garage pop duo, Army Girls, which features Carmen Elle (also of DIANA) on guitar and Andy Smith on drums. This is a band we’ve been waiting for a chance to bring to Guelph, so don’t miss them! Following them we have Gregory Pepper‘s second set of the day, joined by his band from the Common Grackle era which includes members of Del Bel, Legato Vipers and more. Closing out Wednesday night we have Toronto’s The Bicycles, re-united after a 3 year hiatus, they bring their sunshine pop back to Guelph. They’re also celebrating the release of their brand-new album ‘Stop Thinking So Much’.

Join us and let’s get this party started! You can find more details about the show and everything else coming up in our schedule.

Pocket Guides, Crony Pass, Kazoo! Podcast and more

It’s hard to believe that Kazoo! Fest 2013 is only a week and a half away. We’ve been working hard to pull together the final details for our biggest and best festival to date. A crew of Kazoo! volunteers have spent the last few days folding and stapling literally thousands of Kazoo! Fest pocket guides. Look for them at locations throughout downtown Guelph.

Each year we offer a limited number of Crony Passes, the all-access Kazoo! Fest pass. They are on sale now at The Cornerstone in Guelph for $30 including tax. If you’re not in Guelph and would like to reserve a pass you can email us at kazookazoo [at] gmail.com.

We’ve already got 3 episodes of our Kazoo! Fest Podcast up. Each episode features an interview plus a selection of songs from artists playing the festival this year. Thanks to CFRU 93.3 FM and our hosts Captain Eihab and Boston Carlyle for making this happen. We also put together a Video Mixtape featuring youtube videos from sixteen different artists at Kazoo! Fest this year.

The Kazoo! Print Expo is officially full, we’ve got approximately 40 tables of amazing stuff. Ange Drystek, the organizer of the Print Expo did an interview with The Cannon about the roots of the event and what to expect this year.

Take the time to explore the full Kazoo! Fest schedule, check out the music performers and read up on all the incredible visual art & multimedia projects featured this year. Catch up with us on facebook and twitter for the latest developments.