13 Apr 2013

Last weekend was the annual multi-day Kazoo! Festival. It’s one of the many reason’s Guelphites have to be proud of our local music scene. A week after, I caught up with Brad McInerney to get his thoughts on how this year’s festival turned out.

What’s Kazoo all about?

Kazoo! is a show series and festival run by a group of volunteers. We’re a non-profit organization focused on presenting emerging artists both locally and regionally. Founded in 2006, we focus on presenting exciting new music and art as a way to bring people together. We operate year-round as a show series and throw a festival every spring.

This was actually our 6^th festival and it was a huge success. We couldn’t be happier about how things turned out. This year we expanded our visual art and multimedia programming which is really important to us and is something we’ve always wanted to do. We worked closely with organizations like Ed Video Media Arts Centre and Silence to enrich our programming. We also ran our own pop-up venue at the Green Party offices, which was essentially a large industrial garage space that we transformed into a venue including an interactive light installation by Live Action Fezz. We also launched the ‘Kazoo! Print Expo’ an expanded version of last year’s Zine & Comic Expo, which was a huge success.

So much happened, it’s impossible to pick a single moment but the Pancake Breakfast show is always memorable, so was the Kazoo! Print Expo and all our shows at the Green Party pop-up venue.

Any disasters?

Everything went really smoothly this year. With a project this big, there’s always a potential for things to go horribly wrong but with our great team of volunteers everything was great. We got shut down by the police on Friday night at the Green Party space, but luckily Dusted were already on their last song so it was all good.

I think the hardest part is always finding balance. We try to focus on programming a city-wide series of events while ensuring we don’t have too much going on and spread things too thin. As a volunteer run organization, co-ordinating a multi-venue, city wide festival is a challenge. Luckily we’ve got a great crew of people working on this to make sure it runs smoothly.

It depends on what you consider ‘up and coming’ but a few local bands that played the festival this year that we loved are: Milk & Honey, Dutch Toko, Bill Killionaire, Legato Vipers, and Esther Grey. There’s a ton of other amazing stuff happening in Guelph right now, so people should definitely get out to shows and check out what’s happening.

Not yet, we’re still recovering from this year! We’re going to keep booking Kazoo! shows throughout the year and we’ll see where things go.

A big thanks to Brad and all the people who helped run this awesome music festival. Did you get to attend any of the shows this year? What were your most memorable moments from Kazoo 2013?