EVERYSEEKER, easily Atlantic Canada’s most eclectic music festival, have announced the first artists of their 2020 line-up. The four-day Halifax-based exploratory festival will be boldly going where few festivals have gone before, as they adventure to the very cusp of intelligible music and redefine it for us from June 18-21, 2020.
Many will remember EVERYSEEKER from its previous incarnation as the OBEY Convention. The festival underwent a re-branding over the last year following a cease-and-desist order from street artist Shepard Fairey, known for his OBEY posters and his famous stylized stencil poster of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
EVERYSEEKER, in the same capacity as OBEY Convention, is still expected to push the boundaries of musical conventions. While they ambiguously define themselves as “genre-fluid,” they are quite definitely avant-garde.
“Each year, we present a carefully curated, genre-fluid programme that highlights the fringes of culture and cross-pollinates creative energies. Featuring local, national and international talents performing side-by-side without a single note overlapping, EVERYSEEKER is a platform born of punk ethos and cultivated with love and care for the past 13 years.” say the festival’s organizers.
According to the festival, this year’s line-up legendary afrofuturist jazz unit the Sun Ra Arkestra, Portland’s subtle-psych guitar weaver Marisa Anderson, Brooklyn-based Iranian-Canadian sound collagists Saint Abdullah, Texan queer noise explorer claire rousay, Montreal-based industrial violinist Girl Circles, Charlettown’s badass buzzed-about emcee LXVNDR, powerful Mi’kmaq singer and storyteller Michael R. Denny and brilliant Egyptian poet Marwa Helal, and many more yet to be announced.
The festival will also host the live album premiere of JOYFULTALK’s A Separation Of Being, featuring composer Jay Crocker accompanied by the Bela Strings quartet.
Overall the festival will include more than 20 events and workshops (blessedly, with little-to-no overlap) across the city of Halifax, and will incorporation several alternative and historic spaces among their collage of venues. Organizers also note that 2020 will include their inaugural Convention Convention, a free and open to the public three-day symposium designed to encourage “critical, constructive and progressive thinking around the roles and responsibilities of music festivals and presenters in Canada.”
Tickets for the Sun Ra Arkestra and a limited number of specially priced Early Bird Passes are available now. Visit EVERYSEEKER for more details.