Posted on 13 June 2013

Normally my CFUR Radio show Almost Mainstream consists of a grab bag of music I’ve been listening to lately- no real themes or anything like that. But this week I’m between travels and pretty wiped and was considering not doing a show until I realized it’s the same weekend as Casse-Tête. Billed as “A Festival of Experimental Music”, the idea is to take non-conventional music- everything from shoegaze to free jazz to a guy who’s going to play music on a parka and mittens- and put them in a festival.
I’m not a big follower of this type of thing, but the idea intrigues me not least because of the man behind it. Jeremy Stewart is a singer-songwriter and poet, and while I don’t always get everything he does, I get the ideas behind it. It comes from a place of art, and he’s also very much invested in making Prince George a place where this sort of art can happen. And he’s not some annoying, inaccessible artist, either- he can lay down a sweet Hendrix solo on a guitar and play a straight-up folk song with the best of them, which (in my mind) gives validity to his more out-there stuff because it sounds like an outgrowth of something more conventionally understandable, even when it’s heading out into the outer edges.
Anyways, this was enough to lead me to explore the artists performing at this festival and I liked what I heard enough to put a bunch of them into a special edition of my podcast in the hopes it will encourage other people to get into them and give the festival a shot. It happens this weekend and if it’s pulled off it will be a whole new element in Prince George’s cultural capacity. The website, where you can buy tickets or become a supporter of the festival is cassetetefestival.tumblr.com. The podcast and playlist that I made is at almostmainstream.com or below. Enjoy.

Almost Mainstream Episode 54 ½ – the Casse-Tête Sampler Packon Mixcloud

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Filed under: music, Prince George