The Wavelength Roadshow hits the road tomorrow (Friday June 21) with our first stop in the National Capital Region. Our friends in (H)Ottawa have pulled out all the stops – an appropriate metaphor since the show takes place in a church. Entitled “Holy Smokes!,” the evening will feature our touring bands Most People, Fresh Snow and Del Bel alongside 613 locals The Yips, Alexandra MacKenzie’s traveling backdrop, projections and a post-show dance party.

It’s all being put together by the fine folks at the Arboretum Arts Festival, who are currently preparing for their second fantastic festival this coming August. Inspired by boutique festivals from SappyFest in Sackville NB to the End of the Road in the UK, Arboretum is a community-oriented artist-run festival that shares a lot of values with Wavelength – and looks well on its way to being one of our favourite fests anywhere. We spoke to co-organizer Rolf Klausener - who WL audience will also know from his musical life with The Acorn, Silkken Laumann and the Recoilers – about the pain and joy of presenting an ambitious festival in our nation’s notoriously difficult, yet secretly awesome, capital city.

Without having to adjust your collar and recite your elevator speech, how would you describe the vision of Arboretum Arts Festival to outsiders?

As a multi-disciplinary, weekend-long festival, we curate progressive music, food and media art to showcase what we feel is a long-overlooked city that is rapidly reshaping its identity. I would like to think we embody the attitude of excitement and mutual support that seems to be at the heart of our cultural community.

Arboretum is striving to become a voice and annual high-five for Ottawa's cultural renaissance, while still reflecting the city's core identity. We are, after all, a small city of artistic niches, set amongst vast forests and rivers, with a tightly-knit artistic community that has had hard time convincing anyone beyond its borders that there's anything relevant happening here. 

There's a fierce municipal pride that's palpable when talking to locals. Our biggest obstacle now is getting that message out. In our own little way, we're hoping to be a megaphone for the city's hollering revellers, shouting “Hey buds, Ottawa's kinda dope.” 

With the multi-disciplinary element and the local/regional food and drink, it seems like the festival is really filling a void. Has anyone else ever tried anything like this in the Capital City region?

I’d like to think our approach is unique and our timing paramount. Rather than have a music festival that features art, or a food festival that hosts bands, we’re treating the city’s cultural output holistically: Ottawa as one massive art piece. This definitely includes the city's vibrant food and restaurant scene. This year, we're showcasing local chefs as artists, giving them their own stage with short sets during which they'll serve their courses. We're trying to break the classic music festival model, and really just do things our way.  

That said, we're definitely not the first to showcase our local culture. The city is rife with creative and engaged niche events celebrating Ottawa's food, art and music. Festivals like Ottawa Explosion and House of PainT celebrate our underground music and urban culture, while Oz Kafe's monthly industry night and Knives Out Ottawa remind us that we live in a formidable food town. Westfest, though decidedly more mainstream, established a free, family/LGBT-friendly festival celebrating our west end's local music, artisans and restaurants to incredible success. More than ever, Ottawa's cultural calendar is impossibly packed. 

I don't know that a progressive, multi-disciplinary arts festival would have got off the ground 15 years ago. I cut my teeth in a city whose niches didn't comingle, and whose most ambitious artists naturally felt the pull of larger centres (Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry and Jeremy Gara, 2/3rds of METZ, Kathleen Edwards and Michael Feuerstack being some notable examples).  But at some point in the last five years, our cultural scenes started cross-pollinating, pooling niche audiences. Maybe that’s a lesson Toronto learned a long time ago, but I feel like that strategy has only gained traction in Ottawa recently, and it’s a beautiful thing. 

Last year was your first year of staging the festival. Was there one magic moment "when you knew" it wasn't going to be a one-off? And if so, can you describe the moment and how you felt?

Maybe this speaks to our wildly unrealistic sense of ambition more than anything else, but we never intended the festival to be a one-off. When we conceived the festival, we immediately knew reaching our full vision would require at least 3-5 years. But the fact that Ottawa’s cultural community is reaching a tipping point makes our work feel really relevant. 

That said, once the adrenaline rush of dealing with the days’ infinite to-do lists went from mind-numbing to manageable, I started looking around at the joyful chaos we created. There were some absolutely touching and transcendent moments: watching locals and out-of-towners incredulously downing oysters at a music festival; seeing a dozen or so kids led by experimental musician Michael Caffrey creating spontaneous noise music; and catching myself losing my shit during Cadence Weapon’s outstanding performance, turning around and seeing the rest of the festival doing the same thing. I thought to myself, “Well shit, this is kind of awesome.” 

After spending a lot of time on the road, playing artfully curated and executed festivals in cities both larger and smaller than Ottawa, I never want our city to go without it. 

What is one element of this year's festival that came that you're especially excited about, that other people might not know so much about?

Without a doubt, I'm most excited about this year's main stage grounds, Arts Court's Waller Park, and our chef sessions, a concert-like line-up of the city’s forward-thinking chefs, doling out small plates in one-hour sets.
 Waller Park offers a preview of how we foresee working within natural spaces in the future. The grounds are the perfect size, centrally located, tree-lined, but most notably, will not be there next year as Arts Court is redeveloped. The city breaks ground later this year, and Waller Park will become home to the new Ottawa Art Gallery and a condo tower. 

The idea of an escape within your own city is so fantastic; it’s a completely attainable goal and something that's really missing in our city. 

What myth about Ottawa would you really like to dispel for outsiders? Conversely, what myth about Ottawa is truthfully justified?

I think one myth that I’d both want to dispel and justify is that Ottawa is NOT easy. 

Ottawa's most progressive culture is difficult to sniff out, and oftentimes even more difficult to penetrate and contribute to. Of course you have to scratch below the surface of any city to dig up its gems, but we do so in the face of a handful of confounding obstacles, including the lack of a widely distributed, locally staffed, printed arts weekly (RIP Ottawa Xpress), and a municipal government charged with maintaining our national capital veneer. 

Ottawa's restauranteurs, arts organisations, promoters, bands, visual artists and niche festivals are for the most part vigilant self-promoters, using every affordable and accessible tool at their disposal. We comingle and shamelessly support each other's endeavours, and bask in an almost saccharine syrup of  mutual love and respect. The frustration of having to do this out of sheer necessity in the face of our city's stifling bureaucracy nullifies itself in the face of the collaborations that are created and the ideas that are exchanged as a consequence. Maybe in another city, festivals like Ottawa Explosion and Arboretum wouldn't collaborate, who knows, but through our mutual engagement and our determination to show our neighbours this city doesn't suck, they do in Ottawa. 

We're excited to be collaborating with you guys on our upcoming Wavelength Roadshow date, which is part of another festival, Ottawa Explosion. Can you tell our dear readers about more about that aspect of the collaboration and the super-cool venue and DJs we have in store?

For sure. We’re equally stoked on this collaboration! Ottawa Explosion is the city’s annual multi-venue, punk/hardcore/new-wave/garage festival. Now in its third year (though technically in its fifth, as it was born out of the ashes of the now-defunct GaGa Weekend), Explosion brings together a huge variety of underground acts from around the city, and showcases similar national and international acts. The three-day festival has grown to five days, and takes place in almost a dozen venues, from bars to private courtyards, churches, parking lots and swimming pools around the city and across the river in Gatineau. They approached us early in 2013 to curate an “ARB-flavoured” event as part of this year’s edition.
Though rooted in punk, ARB and Explosion share a really similar ethos and a kinship. And along with House of Paint (Ottawa’s hip-hop/urban arts festival) we’re all working to establish alternative event models in a city known for tourist-friendly, conventionally programmed festivals. 

Since we’re not genre-specific, we wanted to curate something that respected Explosion’s unwritten mandate, but still offered up something that fell within the aggressive/experimental spectrum. When you approached us about presenting the Wavelength Roadshow, it was a perfect fit. 
In addition to the WL Roadshow programming, we wanted to tack on a little bit of local flair. The Yips offer up some dynamic dark-wave pop, with a sprinkling of Siouxsie & The Banshees. 
We’ll close the night with what promises to be a fairly epic ripper of a party featuring DJs Matty & Pat Johnson as well as mind-bending visuals from VJ Hard Science. Matty is an infamous local DJ and co-host of Ottawa’s monthly pop-R&B throwdown, SHAMELESS (Ottawa’s equivalent to Loving In The Name Of, minus the live band extravaganza). Along with drumming in The Acorn and Silkken Laumann, Pat Johnson DJ’s Nightmoves, a wild, new-wave/indie-dance monthly. 

In sniffing around for a venue, we chanced on St. Alban’s, one of Ottawa’s oldest surviving churches. It’s turned out to be an incredible find. Besides having a savvy, organized and arts-friendly congregation, the building itself is absolutely gorgeous. Rife with history, St. Alban’s long A-frame carries sound really well, and its reclaimed hardwood beams and floors aren’t as sonically reflective as stone or concrete. It seemed fitting we dub the night “HOLY SMOKES.” St. Alban's will also be one of our festival venues come August, so this event will be a bit of a preview of what's in store for Arboretum this summer. 

As a longtime fans and followers of Wavelengths, we’re seriously honoured and thrilled to be presenting the Roadshow! See on you Friday!