Well written article about the Canadian edm scene that I just came across on RA. Some of you might find this interesting.

It consists of five different parts which I've quoted here. Enjoy

*Link*

quote:

Part 1: Late in 2011, I noted in Exclaim! Magazine that Canadian electronic music was undergoing a groundswell of talent and infrastructure the likes of which hadn’t been seen in at least a decade. The truth of the matter is that electronic and dance music hasn’t had it this good since the early ’90s, when it first garnered attention in the nation’s media as the preferred soundtrack of the so-called chemical generation. What exists today, and what didn’t exist back then, is a nationwide fabric of techno, house, and bass music growing out of almost all of Canada’s major cities. Many contemporary artists still look to the international scene for work and attention, but more and more of them are looking to home and to each other — no small feat in a country this large. Canadian electronic dance music had a troubled birth. Informed by the rave scene out of U.K., and the Detroit/Chicago techno and house scenes on this side of the Atlantic, the other-worldliness of the music's long, lateral compositions and ardent minimalism quickly got tied up in the stigma of warehouse parties and ecstasy, resulting in crackdowns in most cities across the country. After the major-label electronica boom of the late ’90s tried to capitalize on rave’s popularity, with the music finding its way into everything from sporting events to car commercials, the pendulum swung towards guitar-based bands and the bruised and slandered genre went deep underground, at least here in North America. Until now, that is. In 2012, it seems we’re at a pivotal point. With little hype, the popularity of this almost exclusively underground genre is quietly percolating up again everywhere you look, with elements of electronic music seeping into everything from indie rock, hip-hop and R&B, to mainstream movies and hockey games. Canada even has something akin to major mainstream dance acts. Niagara Falls native Joel Zimmerman (a.k.a. Deadmau5) can headline Toronto’s Rogers Centre, drawing five-figure crowds on his own. Meanwhile, retro-house act Azari & III has allegedly been hand selected by Madonna to open her next tour. So how healthy are Canada’s techno, house and bass scenes? Life After Rave explores what’s driving innovation among Canadian producers and DJs; what labels are thriving and how they are handling distribution in the age of the internet; how venues, promoters and festivals have bolstered the community; and finally, how the media has both perpetuated and limited the development of these artists. - Part 2: The next generation: Corporate partnerships and entrepreneurial savvy Not long ago, the sense was that most electronic music producers and listeners in this country were aging leftovers of the genre’s ’90s popularity, and that they came bearing all the scars and hang-ups of that era’s plights of being misunderstood and misinterpreted. But many of today’s most exciting talents are too young to have lived through Canada’s rave experiment. By most accounts, Jacques Greene is one of Canada’s hottest new exports right now. At 22 years old, the Montreal producer who specializes in distorting ’90s R&B samples has only six singles to his credit on U.K. bass labels such as Night Slugs and LuckyMe. He’s also remixed Radiohead, whose coveted stamp of approval has already boosted the careers of many young electronic acts – among them Modeselektor and Flying Lotus – to greater international acclaim. Greene is very much part of a new generation of music producers. He’s well under 30, he produces tracks within the ever-morphing bass genre that has captured the imaginations of kids who came of age with dubstep, electronic music’s first bona fide internet success story. Unlike most of his ’90s counterparts, who worked live events as DJs because pre-digital era gear was cumbersome and expensive, Greene belongs to a growing number of producers who've taken advantage of affordable, accessible technology to perform live. Like dubstep and all its offshoots, Greene’s career is largely internet-based, reaching an audience through MP3 downloads, online music videos, podcasts, blogs and social media. He’s also a graduate of the Red Bull Music Academy program, which has helped launch the careers of fellow Montrealers Lunice and Ango, who are also now affiliated with LuckyMe. Corporate sponsorship that actually works An unlikely offshoot of the energy drink company, the Red Bull Music Academy has, in recent years, become the inconspicuous thread binding many young producers with an elaborate network that spans the globe and includes several Canadian cities. In each city it visits, Red Bull builds a state-of-the-art academy, a permanent studio space that it leaves behind for the city’s producers. It has embraced Canadian bass culture in a major way, redrawing the image of electronic music for the latest generation of producers, while heralding more established homegrown producers as sources they can learn from. The academy’s dynamic of spotting new protégés and pairing them with mentors has elevated the seriousness of the art form all across the country, in a way no Canadian arts institution has ever done before. Among Canadian mentors is former teenage turntabling prodigy A-Trak, now 29, who lectured for the academy in 2003 and 2007. Fellow Montrealer Tiga, an incredibly important figure in Montreal’s club history and a world-renowned electro producer in his own right, lectured at the academy in 2004. And Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan took to the podium when the academy came to Toronto in 2007. As a journalist, I attended a two-week session of the 2009 academy in London, England, and the atmosphere among the producers there (the vast majority of whom were well under 25) was electric. There I met Montreal producer Poirier, whose Bounce le Gros and subsequent Karnival nights have been responsible for bringing many U.K. producers to Montreal. Poirier was attending the academy as a participant, even though he already had the thriving career many of his classmates were chasing. The free studio space and accommodations, the networking potentials and the international locales are simply too much of a draw to pass up for many artists. Going global The Red Bull Music Academy may be the most visible corporate infrastructure for giving new Canadian producers a leg up, but the digital age has also made finding audiences easier for any entrepreneurial artist looking to break out of a local scene, and Montreal’s connection to Europe and New York has served several other emerging talents well. Among them is Bowly, who manages to interact with the U.K. funky scene in real time, via frequent sets on global radio streaming networks such as Nasty.fm, though he’s an ocean apart. Female house duo Blond:ish is releasing its Lovers In Limbo EP on the long-running German techno label Kompakt, while melodic Euro-trance act Flowers & Sea Creatures have several releases on Ben Watt’s Buzzin Fly label. These opportunities are by no means limited to Montreal. Following the major international successes of house acts Art Department and Azari & III, Toronto’s XI has made strong inroads in Europe on the back of several EPs out on the upstart U.K. label Orca. On the West Coast, Vancouver’s Babe Rainbow is currently the only Canadian artist on major British independent label, Warp, home to Aphex Twin, Autechre, and other pioneers of the genre. Tomorrow I’ll take a look at this country's lost generation, its exodus to Berlin and beyond, and how the near-collapse of the genre led to innovations in distribution that have led to the current renaissance. - Part 3: Electronic’s lost generation, the exodus, and the turning of the tide If today’s generation of young bass producers has it better than any other group of Canadian electronic musicians since the mid-’90s, then the generation of house and techno producers who came of age before them – in the mid-2000s – arguably had it worse than anyone in that 20-year spread. In between the fall of both electronica and vinyl, Canada was generally known as a place of great start-up talents who were faced with few opportunities and an inevitable exodus. Throughout the middle stretch of the 2000s, a staggering list of electronic artists moved abroad, mostly to Berlin, to pursue careers in a European techno economy that simply couldn’t exist on this continent. Mostly in their mid-to-late 30s now, techno producers such as Mathew Jonson, Deadbeat, the Mole, Adam Marshall, Mike Shannon, Guillaume Coutu-Dumont and many others form the lost generation of Canada’s electronic music scene. Operating within more abstract European styles such as dub-techno, minimal techno and micro-house, these producers were at once artier, less immediate and harder to grasp than the Detroit- and Chicago-influenced ravers who came before them. In many ways, the more intellectual approaches of such artists were a reaction to everything rave and electronica had come to symbolize. They came along in the wake of a widespread English-Canadian crackdown on all-night warehouse parties. Though Montreal was able to support these artists for several years, by the mid-2000s their problems were compounded by growing distribution problems for their music, as well as a steady decline in the sales of 12-inch singles. Parity of the dollar hits labels hard Meanwhile, the allure of well-paying work in the nightclubs of densely populated European markets, all connected by cheap flights, proved too tempting a professional prospect to ignore. By 2004, Canada’s reigning minimal-techno pioneer Richie Hawtin (a.k.a. Plastikman) made the move to Berlin, taking with him his Windsor-based m-nus label, long a flagship enterprise in the landscape of Canadian techno. Many others followed suit over the next two years. Public perception aside, the economic problems of labels and distributors during that time perpetuated the genre’s difficulties. In the early 2000s, the Canadian dollar was trading anywhere between 60 and 65 cents to the U.S. dollar, which made it lucrative for major European electronic labels such as Ninja Tune (who signed Poirier and Kid Koala) and Force Inc./Mille Plateaux (who signed Tim Hecker/Jetone, Akufen, Shannon, Tomas Jirku, Jeff Milligan and others) to set up North American operations. That move helped such companies break into the North American CD market. Meanwhile, homegrown labels such as Tiga’s Turbo could press CDs in relatively cheap Canadian dollars and sell them in lucrative U.S. dollars and Euros, profiting from several mark-ups at once. Yet as the decade progressed and the Canadian dollar began its rise to parity, that appeal began to fade for many labels. The exchange rate benefits all but disappeared at a time when major European distributors for electronic music, such as EFA and Neuton, started experiencing financial difficulties, leading them either to severely cut back the number of labels they carried or simply go bankrupt. Exodus of talent hits critical mass Canadian producers and labels were effectively left in a bind. Public backlash meant that audiences in North America no longer existed in the volume needed to coral proper touring careers. Given the lack of quality vinyl pressing plants and specialized electronic music distributors in North America at the time, Canadian vinyl imprints such as British Columbia’s Wagon Repair were in the strange position of importing their own signing’s finished product to sell at home, at import prices, if they wanted recognition here at all. In Europe, where audiences were growing, vinyl was the price of participation in techno and house. But in North American markets, 12-inch singles no longer sold at all. European artists and labels were able to restructure with greater ease, with many taking advantage of cheap airfare and rising fees for club dates to support performance careers, while moving toward low-overhead, artist-owned imprints to release their records more regionally. Canadians still had to contend with expensive overseas flights. Faced with such circumstances, many European promoters began discounting Canadian performers and DJs based on flight costs alone. Canadian artists who couldn’t perform in Europe had a harder time getting signed to that continent’s labels. The only choice left to many producers was to move overseas. Internet distribution changes the game It’s difficult to overestimate how, in a few short years, the internet has changed everything. Electronic music staples that were once only tangential, expensive, rare offerings of a bricks-and-mortar network have thrived online. The hour-long DJ mix CD was just waiting for podcasts, Soundclouds and Mixclouds to come along. With music more readily available online, so is its sale. North American companies such as Beatport and European ventures such as Boomkat and Juno have built widespread digital infrastructures to sell house, techno and bass music online, anywhere in the world. In the meantime, new Canadian electronic labels are getting their starts without the heavy overhead and cultural baggage faced by their predecessors. Toronto’s My Favourite Robot launched in 2008, initially as a digital-only platform, and was able to build an international following for house producers like James Teej, who has since gone on to release an album and several singles with highly regarded U.K. house imprint Rekids. My Favourite Robot occasionally shares artists and stages with another Toronto house imprint, No. 19 Music, which is distributed exclusively by Beatport. On the techno front, Noah Pred’s Thoughtless Music has long struggled for recognition as a home for quality vinyl, but a recent push toward the online market has raised the label’s international profile exponentially and garnered critical acclaim for rising techno producer Arthur Oskan. Montreal’s Fur Trade Recordings, home to singles by French duo Sinteg, Canadian expat the Mole and synth veteran David Kristian, balances out digital and vinyl offerings depending on whether an artist can make a return on investment for production costs. Meanwhile netlabel Basic_Sounds, home to new releases by Tomas Jirku and Overcast Sound, offers its exclusively digital output entirely for free, via its own website. To be fair, very few electronic artists make a living off exclusively from releases anymore. But at least they’re not losing as much as they once were by producing vinyl in large enough quantities to have a European distributor take interest. Tomorrow... We take a look at the evolution of the live performance over the past decade, and how promoters, venues and festivals are driving the renaissance of electronic music. - Part 4: Performing for a living: The nation’s promoters, venues and festivals. If the music only makes reputations nowadays, then the crux of a professional career has moved to performance. This element has radically transformed the nature of the serious producer from someone who can work in near anonymity while sending out recorded emissions from his bedroom to the world, to someone who is a master of ceremonies, equally adept at DJing and live performance, widely available to media in between travels across the globe. This wasn’t always the case. A decade ago, live performance for electronic musicians was an abstract affair, centred on laptop software such as Ableton Live and powered on computers that regularly crashed during sets. Canadian producers working during those years were exceptions to their generation for having embraced the uses of technology at a time when people and computers lived more separate lives. But today’s audiences have known no such separation, having grown up with laptops, GarageBand, endless free blogs and online magazines, podcasts, samples and Google-searchable file shares, smartphones, tablets, Facebook and Twitter. Electronic music is no longer considered abstract, cold, un-musical. Instead, it has a more intimate relationship with technology. Toronto duo Art Department is a prime example of a successful Canadian electronic act that has maintained a bustling global tour schedule from home turf ever since their breakout single, “Without You,” was named the top single of 2010 by influential online dance magazine Resident Advisor. Art Department members Kenny Glasgow, who began producing Detroit-influenced house music in the early ’90s, and Jonny White, a new-generation producer who co-owns the boutique label No. 19 along with fellow Toronto producer Nitin, emerged from a local scene that had only recently developed new club venues such as Footwork, Drake Underground and Wrongbar, all which consistently host the finest local and international electronic acts. Back when Glasgow first began performing and DJing in the ’90s, Toronto’s main hotspot was the legendary Industry nightclub and the city had a healthy house music culture featuring the likes of DJ Sneak, Nick Holder and others. But as the 2000s crept in and the rave movement imploded under pressure from police and local governments, those clubs faded away and the city’s reputation for quality house music practically disappeared from the international scene. International networking and the seeds of influence It helps that, these days, Toronto belongs to a touring network that includes new, young promoters in North American cities such as Montreal, New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago and Miami – on the East Coast alone. These promoters often pool their resources to bring international talents, creating a reliable circuit that European acts have come to rely upon. For Montreal promoter 13% (a.k.a. Nadir Agha, also known as techno DJ/producer Ostrich), this circuit is partially a family affair. Agha’s brother, Taimur Agha, co-owns New York promoter Blkmarket Membership. The brothers often collaborate on bringing international acts to North American shores because, between them, they can provide at least two gigs and flight shares. When international acts come to Canada, the seeds of influence and experience are sewn into each hosting city. Local promoters often fill the night’s bill with emerging local talent eager for stage time and experience, and fruitful relationships are born from locals and internationals getting to know each other. The concept of breaking down international borders is a quintessentially Canadian one, spawned in Montreal by Alain Mongeau’s Media Lounge in 1997, which began as a program within the Montreal Film Festival. The idea was to present the new wave of European avant-garde electronic music to Canadians in a more conducive audio-visual setting, to give the music and its abstract nature context and to expose Quebecois upstarts such as Akufen, Pheek, Eloi Brunelle, Stephen Beapré, Mateo Murphy, Poirier and others to larger audiences in the process. The birth of MUTEK, and government support for electronic culture In 2000, Media Lounge turned into an independent enterprise, the MUTEK festival, which has since gone on to become the template for several North American annual events such as Seattle’s Decibel, Vancouver’s New Forms and Boulder’s Communikey. In the early days of MUTEK, Montreal was home not only to a new generation of French Canadian producers, but also a number of English Canadians (Mike Shannon, Jeff Milligan, Pan/Tone, Deadbeat, Mitchell Akiyama) and American expats such as Noah Pred. Recently built forward-thinking venues such as Ex-Centris and the Society for Arts & Technology were changing the city's cultural landscape, as were newly established North American headquarters for international labels such as Force Inc and Ninja Tune. This set the stage for MUTEK to capitalize on a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put Montreal producers on the international map. In the early days of MUTEK, Montreal was home not only to a new generation of French Canadian producers, but also a number of English Canadians (Mike Shannon, Jeff Milligan, Pan/Tone, Deadbeat, Mitchell Akiyama) and American expats such as Noah Pred. Recently built forward-thinking venues such as Ex-Centris and the Society for Arts & Technology were changing the city's cultural landscape, as were newly established North American headquarters for international labels such as Force Inc and Ninja Tune. At one time, Montreal hosted three major electronic music festivals every year – the other two were MEG, which has since amalgamated with Osheaga, and the still-running Elektra Festival. These long-running major events – whose artistic merit separates them from raves and therefore makes them eligible for government grants available to all other art forms – breed communities and trickle down into smaller collectives who operate year-round. Winnipeg’s send+receive festival, which highlights the more experimental ends of electronic music, has bred a vibrant community of producers on the prairies, while Malcolm Levy’s New Forms Festival has introduced Canada to a new generation of wide-ranging producers such as Babe Rainbow, Orphyx, Overcast Sound, Monolithium and others. Meanwhile, the long-running, popular outdoor mega-rave, Shambhala, keeps the genre’s old-school hippie spirit alive with a festival that has sold out its last few editions, and a Facebook community that dwarfs every other music festival in the country. A decade on, Canada’s urban centres are no longer the satellites of an American touring circuit, as they’ve traditionally been categorized in rock circles. Rather, they are often central catalysts for performers coming to North America at all. Even Edmonton has its own growing scene. Danksoul Recordings, founded by producers Bron and Inkwell, keeps that city buzzing with regular DJ nights, radio shows and occasional singles. - Part 5: Computerized dance freak-outs and the Canadian media. The first significant exposure for Canada’s rave scene arrived in the pages of the Toronto Star, when in the Feb. 7, 1992, edition of the paper Peter Howell (now the Star’s film critic) wrote of a "combination live concert and computerized dance freakout" featuring U.K. chart-topping dance act the Shamen. Back then, the leading ambassador for dance music’s progressive edge in the mainstream was Toronto’s DJ Chris Sheppard. The Globe and Mail curiously took note of the new underground nightlife scene some 18 months later, drawing a straight line between raves, their growing popularity and a connection to ecstasy (MDMA). From that point on, the traditional view regarding electronic music in Canada is that the only times it is ever afforded any high-profile media attention is when someone overdoses on ecstasy, or a warehouse party goes wrong. It was easier to define techno, house and breakbeat culture (bass’s predecessor) as synonymous with raves in the 90’s. Few people had heard of electronic music before these secretive parties it soundtracked. Ecstasy was new, too. Mainstream media couldn’t resist the story of a generation-defining lifestyle drug along the lines of LSD in the ’60s, and cocaine in the ’70s and ’80s. In the public eye, electronic music became the third sibling of raves and ecstasy by default; the appendix to an otherwise scandalous pairing. Twenty years on, the original raves, with their chartered buses and secret locations, are a thing of the past. They serve as conversational nostalgia for an increasingly grey and pot-bellied generation. Ecstasy doesn’t pack the media punch it used to either, if only because the generation of parents now watching the evening news has grown up having tried it or known someone who has. The music is 20 years older too, and of the three siblings it has fared the best. Though the media doesn't afford it much as much attention on its own, several generations of small but enthusiastic followers have used the internet to build a case for techno, house, and bass as an authentic, viable, and utterly contemporary form of music. From anonymity to celebrity It used to take considerably longer to fawn over the latest emissions from Detroit, London or Berlin. Electronic musicians were once no more than semi-anonymous dubplates, available to most at raves, expensive import record shops, old cassette DJ mixes or college radio. Now they can be picked over and fetishized by mystery-loving fanboys of any age all over the world, simultaneously. And they are, in droves. Electronic music possesses one of the most dedicated and forward-looking sustained conversations currently underway in modern music. In subsequent order, chat rooms, then message boards, blogs and online magazines have brought electronic music fans together. Both the producers and their listeners can absorb as much regional style and taste from anywhere in the world, at any time. Electronic as the hub of innovation for other genres Twenty years on, the reason electronic music is spilling back into the mainstream has little to do with drugs or parties. Rather, it’s that young music journalists are wiser to dance music’s implications. In techno, house and bass music, they see a 21st century track record of instigating many of the more adventurous leaps forward in rock, R&B and hip-hop. Music journalists sense a hub of innovation and curiosity that, in a similarly digital age, bleeds into the fabric of all music. Just as there are now music journalists at many of Canada’s major papers who intrinsically understand and appreciate electronic music (though they may not always get the chance to write about it), a growing pool of influential indie-rock publicists around them are increasingly working to service beats. The paradigm shift travels all the way up the ladder. Even some of Canada’s music industry associations – famously behind the times – have begun to accept the fact that the country’s electronic musicians may be here to stay. Two years ago, the Juno Awards added an electronic album of the year category. Questions still remain as to whether the category can gain enough credibility with underground producers, but the inclusion of Tim Hecker and Arthur Oskan as nominees in this year’s awards is promising. In a sense, the Junos’ problem is a fairly accurate depiction of what’s happening everywhere across the genre. The mainstream is courting electronic music again, finally conscious that there may be life after rave for Canada’s electronic music scene, but once again not quite sure what to make of it. Should this happen, it would be on the music’s own terms, in a much more advantageous cultural and economic atmosphere than the genre has ever been afforded. Canadian techno, house and bass communities may be suspicious of taking part in the Canadian musical landscape just yet, and rightfully so, given the history of misinterpretation. But, the odds for such participation are brighter than they’ve ever been in the past 20 years.

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