The WISE Hall, an unassuming brown structure in a quiet area of East Van, was the new home of this year’s iteration of a long-standing independent music festival.
In the past, it has typically boasted 70–80 acts across multiple days and venues. The 32nd year of Music Waste, however, looked quite different. It was more modest, with six local acts sharing one stage this past Sunday, on June 7. Julia McDougall, one of the event organizers, said it was a rebuilding year for the festival.
“This year is a little bit different because we lost so many people, and because, as a result … a lot of funding things didn't happen. We decided collectively with everybody who's new and some old people [who] were with the festival, that it made more sense to take this year to restructure and to fundraise,” said McDougall. That meant the bill was smaller, the bands were quite different from one another and the venue was singular. While none of those were problems on their own, the bill suffered from very little crossover between fanbases.
GØØ, a self-described grungegaze band, started the night off at 6:45 p.m. with screamy lyrics and heavy distortion. GØØ was a last-minute, morning-of addition to the bill, after another artist had to pull out.
GØØ was received by a small but hearty crowd, with one or two people immediately beginning to mosh. Their music was fun (this reporter is quite the fan of early 2000s metal and grunge), but that’s not to say it didn’t feel slightly out of place to be headbanging while the sun was still out.
Patrick Farrugia was up next. As the solo artist explained, he was labelled bedroom pop, though that wasn’t his exact genre.
“I feel like … ‘psychedelic pop’ is a bit more describing my stuff,” said Farrugia. “There's influences from all over the world, really … I love music from everywhere, so it kind of all feeds into the stuff that I make and stuff I play.”
Farrugia was the only artist The Ubyssey spoke to who had performed at Music Waste before. His music jumped from genre to genre, with light, vocal-heavy bedroom pop one minute and distorted feedbacked guitar riffs the next. Each song ended with a peppy “Thank you!”
Every artist who got up to perform mentioned how important the local music scene is and encouraged attendees to donate to the festival. As McDougall explained, they had been impacted by a variety of factors, including cuts to arts funding and venue closures.
"We're in a pretty tumultuous time, so I hope we can kind of start working together collectively to push back on things like budget cuts and venue cuts," said McDougall.
By the time Lonely Crowd came on, a group of their friends and family was ready to cheer and dance. The four-piece band mostly met through their programs at Capilano University, getting together to make music about a year ago.
Frontwoman Stefania Vero described their music as “heavy shoegaze,” and their dreamy, distorted ’90s sound was evident in clanging drums and grimy guitar licks. The band, being relatively new, was thrilled to perform at a festival as well-known as Music Waste. They cited several other bucket list items they were looking forward to crossing off.
“Definitely recording, just in general, we would love to get our stuff out there,” said Vero. Guitarist Hudson Golden and drummer Nate Holyome were both interested in filming some music videos, mostly because of their backgrounds as film students.
Next came Doom Loops, with their upbeat sound and energetic stage presence. They told the audience this was the third show they’d played this week, in celebration of their newest single, and shouted out the one person in the crowd who’d attended all three.
Guitarist and vocalist Natalia Beltran said their band’s music comes from a desire to perform and share. “It's really hard to get people together to do anything, so if you have the agreement of a few people that have talent to come together and jam and make something new, and then do shows, that's … such a gift,” Beltran said.
Music Waste was much smaller this year. The crowd maxed out at around 30 people, at a show that was quietly advertised on a new, unverified Instagram account. But McDougall said she hopes this year’s smaller event can set the festival up for years to come.
“Hopefully we can just get it back to being a really sick weekend festival, where people can gather in different venues that maybe [they] don't always go [to]."
