Electric Eclectics snuck up on this year (as did the “August” long weekend, which mainly takes places in July). But this crazy weekend of experimental music, sound art and, well, they’ve called it this themselves before, noise, is something everybody should experience at least once. (And then you’ll want to be back again.) The sixth Electric Eclectics is on this weekend.
The blogger has managed to be away the last couple of years during the event, but attended the second and third editions, and with the way the weather’s shaping up this weekend, might just be able to make it this year.
Highlights from those years, which have acquired the tinge of some psychedelic memory, include listening to the weird dissonance of the Nihilist Spasm Band while gazing across the rolling pastoral beauty of the drumlins from Scotch Mountain; theramin suites to die for by Dorit Chrysler; catching some old favorites (Chris Bottomley, Richard Underhill and Mary Margaret O’Hara, among others) in an extremely intimate setting and with new perspective; and an amazing midnight laser light show of the quality you’d find at a major event for thousands occurring under a tent packed with fewer than 200 people. And then there was the on-site camping.
The costs have gone up a bit in the short years since, and the crowds are getting bigger, but this is still a truly an event like no other in the world – this type of music, sound art and installations in this unparalleled setting.
Rather than trying to imagine it from these pale attempts to describe it, start by visiting the website to see what’s on offer this weekend, check out the Meaford Independent’s video from 2009 (below)… and then be there!