Wavelength Winter Festival is a Toronto institution 25 years in the making, as the community concert series celebrates two and a half decades of boundary-pushing, medium-crossing shows with three nights at St. Anne's Parish (running February 27 to March 1, featuring Owen Pallett, Ducks Ltd., controller.controller, the OBGMs and more).
To mark the milestone, co-founder Jonny Dovercourt shared his year-by-year memories of the festival, and the many times it has blurred the line between musical performance and art installation — from the time a then-unknown Grimes opened up a five-band bill to the many iconic Toronto bands who have passed through the festival on their ascent.
Dovercourt notes, "Though I've been there since the beginning, I couldn't have done this without the immense help of our many staff and volunteers, of whom there are simply too many to thank by name."
2001
Wavelength launched our Sunday night series on a cold February evening in Y2K. Toward the end of our first year, we decided we should do something to celebrate making through those first 50 weeks of curating shows and interviewing the bands in our photocopied zine. So, in February 2001, we took over both floors of our beloved first home, Ted's Wrecking Yard (upstairs) and Barcode (its downstairs sibling space). We decided to invite some of our favourite bands that had played during the year and make it an informal "best of the Toronto underground" fest. There were heroes of the '90s scene like the Dinner Is Ruined and GUH alongside buzzy newer acts like the Russian Futurists and More Plastic.
That format pretty much continued to the present day — and this year at St. Anne's, we're back to a two-floor format as well. The shows were packed and there was a mischievous atmosphere of frivolity. Someone danced on stage with Rhume while dressed up like a toucan. We knew we were onto something.
Rhume courtesy of Jonny Dovercourt
2002
Our second anniversary (a.k.a. WL100, also marking our 100th show) was a bit more low-key than our first birthday bash. We'd lost our original home, Ted's Wrecking Yard, which suddenly closed down in October '01. So we tried stretching out and using multiple venues over the three nights, including Clinton's Tavern (R.I.P.), Rancho Relaxo (also R.I.P.) and our then-new, short-lived Sunday night home, Lee's Palace (thankfully still there). The mood was a bit gloomy in the local music scene after the back-to-back closures of Ted's and the El Mocambo (the Dan Burke-booked incarnation, at least), but there were still some highlights, including dub reggae crew the Resinators, indie-pop sensations Raising the Fawn (whose frontman John Crossingham was in and out of Stars and Suns studio with Broken Social Scene recording You Forgot It in People around that time), and Virginia visitors Skywave, featuring Oliver Ackermann, later of shoegaze blasters A Place to Bury Strangers.
2003
WL150 was the year our Winter Festival formula really came together: a kick-ass lineup at an intriguing mix of venues over one long weekend. We stretched it out to four days and the opening night at Lee's was stacked enough: Toronto's own cinematic heroes Do Make Say Think headlined, with Rockets Red Glare (then the tightest band in the city), Pony da Look, Polmo Polpo (a.k.a. Sandro Perri), and Oshawa's Anagram starting things off with the kind of chaos that would have otherwise been a grand finale. The chaos continued on Friday night with Lullabye Arkestra starting a mosh pit at the newly renovated El Mocambo, and let's just say the new ownership never invited us back…
Then things got more sedate and meditative and then dance-y (!) on Saturday night, when Wavelength did our first-ever show at long-running art space the Music Gallery, then at its third location, in St. George-the-Martyr Church, with a lineup that included both Gallery founders CCMC and Toronto minimal electronic icons Solvent vs. Lowfish. And on Sunday, we were back at our latest home base, Sneaky Dee's — a place that really felt like home. We did an afternoon indie label fair where folks like Three Gut Records and Teenage USA set up tables to sell merch from their catalogue, and then the night show ended with Wayne Petti from Cuff the Duke leading a sweaty, clappy sing-along.
Cuff the Duke by Kim Temple
2004
It was hard to top 2003, but WL200 was pretty wild. Saturday night was Valentine's Day and, unbeknownst to me, some other WL organizers arranged a pink balloon drop at Rockit, the short-lived east-end club at Church and Richmond. I remembered the balloons falling over the crowd at the start of the band Lenin i Shumov's set and everyone lost it with joy. This was the heyday of the dance-punk revival, and the once-immobile indie scene showed off some moves to bands like the Barcelona Pavilion and controller.controller (who have reunited for our 25th this weekend!).
Before they went solo as Final Fantasy and then under their own name, Owen Pallett also played the Music Gallery with their band Les Mouches and also did double-duty on violin with Guelph indie pop legend Jim Guthrie. Oh look, Owen will be back at Wavelength this weekend as well. It's still 2004, right?
2005
WL250 was our "bicenquinquagenary" as it was a weird one — mainly because, at one point, we thought our fifth anniversary was going to mark the end of Wavelength. I'm glad we kept it going another 20 years, though. There were some super fun moments that year, with some friends visiting from Portland — YACHT played tiny DIY space Cinecycle before he blew up, and the Blow "married" the audience at Sneaky Dee's because she was so in love with Toronto. The festival ended with a set of (mostly) Toronto band covers by all-star live karaoke band, the BackTheFuckUps.
2006
The Boat was the new hotspot that year, hosting dance parties like '50s night Goin' Steady alongside weird participatory dance parties. We hosted two cool collab sets on WL300's Friday night in the nautical-themed Kensington club: Castlemusic a.k.a. Jennifer Castle backed up by free-folk-freak-jazz trio the Silt, and a band mash-up called LAND: Lullabye Arkestra and No Dynamics honing in on the Venn diagram between soul music and punk rock.
Photo: Kevin Parnell
2007
For WL350, we had one of our festival's nuttiest tonal shifts: from the uber-established Horseshoe Tavern on Queen West one night to a DIY loft space on Geary Avenue called Salem's Loft the next. That loft show was rammed and off the hook - the whole dance floor was a sweaty hug-mosh for Montreal's Think About Life. (No thanks to the jerk who tried to literally break down the back door to try to get into the show, though!)
2008
We had started booking some amazing musicians from Toronto's African diaspora in the year leading up to WL400, and I have a very fond memory of a packed crowd of indie rock kids on Sunday night at Sneaky Dee's jumping up and down to a ripping set by Donné Roberts, the Magagascan-Canadian guitarist — an artist I'm not sure many of them had heard before. As it was the very end of the festival, me and some of the other WL programmers were dancing pretty hard ourselves.
2009
Remember life before Family Day? When there was no Ontario public holiday between Christmas and… Easter? Thankfully, then-premier Dalton McGuinty sensed the mood of the electorate and created a new holiday with the blandest name possible. And thankfully for Wavelength, it aligned with the second weekend of February, which was already our anniversary long weekend. We immediately saw an uptick in attendance for a few good years there. But that's not what I remember the most about WL450: it was getting to use some new and non-traditional venues, like the Polish Combatants Hall (SPK) at Beverley and College, where a stacked bill including Hooded Fang and the Luyas kicked off with a mind-blowing set of structured vocal improvisation by Christine Duncan's Element Choir.
2010
Okay, WL500 was a big deal at the time. It was our 10th anniversary, our 500th show, and also marked the end of the WL weekly series. To some, it meant the end of Wavelength as we knew it. But we were ready to evolve! We marked the end of that decade of Sundays with a five-night blowout, where we called in some favours from some heavy hitters who had played crucial early gigs at Wavelength, like Holy Fuck and the Constantines, and hosted reunions by From Fiction, the Bicycles (who maybe hadn't broken up after all?) and one-time 2003 internet rivals Rockets Rockets Red Glare and the Barcelona Pavilion. (Isn't it weird that seven years felt like a long time back then? Oh yeah: We were young.)
But the one moment I wish I could relive was Owen Pallett's secret set to close out the fest, which spontaneously morphed into a reunion of the 2003 Hidden Cameras lineup. Everyone cried and hugged each other like we were graduating from rock'n'roll high school. (And hey, look, we're still here: Owen is headlining the very not-secret, totally sold-out Saturday night of the 2025 Winter Fest!)
2011
After our epic 10th birthday, turning 11 felt like… just another year. Eleven (we'd had to abandon the nifty-50 naming convention) still had some very cool, semi-historic moments, such as a pre-"Oblivion" Grimes playing first of five at the Great Hall. But my favourite memory was a packed Garrison rocking and swaying to reformed Hamilton proto-punk crew Simply Saucer on a cold long-weekend Sunday.
Grimes by Jonny Dovercourt
2012
There's not really much more I can say about #WL12 (hashtags were a thing by then) than: METZ at Parts & Labour. My eardrums are melted and my face is still ringing.
METZ by Aviva Cohen
2013
Visuals have always been a big part of the Wavelength experience, thanks to the often-imitated, never-duplicated analog projections of General Chaos Visuals. In the then-new "Black Box Theatre" downstairs at the Great Hall — now called the Longboat Hall — we added guest visualist Fezz Stenton to projection-map the Toronto skyline to accompany a dance-tastic bill including Blue Hawaii, Cadence Weapon and Doldrums. Cadence Weapon will be DJing the opening night of the '25 Winter Fest, tonight (February 27) in another subterranean space, downstairs at St. Anne's Parish Hall.
2014
Colin Stetson at the Polish Combatants Hall is still the best live sound/art installation I have ever seen and heard. A close second is Zoo Owl performing with his alien photoreceptors.
Zoo Owl by Tiana Feng
2015
We turned 15 by running a three-week Pop-Up Gallery on College Street, so went into our anniversary fest already running on fumes, but we got revved up again by a curated evening of Toronto covers at Sneaky Dee's. Most People did Broken Social Scene at our request, which made sense to me, even though they were only a duo and not a sprawling collective, and, as I found out later, MP guitarist Paul McEachern had never heard BSS before.
That night at Sneaky Dee's — which had gotten a bit more dilapidated in the six years since we left — also featured the first of two reunions we've hosted by disco-punks controller.controller. (The other one is tomorrow — get your tickets before they're gone!)
2016
Sweet 16 was notable for being the first time since our very first birthday where we called one venue home the whole long weekend. Roxanne Ignatius and Aaron Dawson transformed the Dundas West club venue into a magical cloudland. "Take me to the main cloud," said Duchess Says frontwoman Annie-Claude Deschênes during their riotous headlining set, and then she climbed all the way across the crowd to the back of the room. Insane.
Duchess Says by Emily Scherzinger
2017
This was the year of Derek Ma's awesome jukebox poster, and our evening shows at the Garrison were bolstered by us making space for all-ages audiences at two daytime shows, one including WLMRT (featuring future members of Dermabrasion) and Jasmyn from Weaves' side project Strands at the Monarch (co-presented by Exclaim!). The other was the one and only-ever "Drone Brunch," featuring Kat Estacio of Pantayo playing ambient drones to confused Gladstone Hotel regulars scooping up eggs Benedict.
2018
The Wavelength Winter Festival started its life as the Wavelength Anniversary Festival (and, for the record, back in 2001 it was called the "Wavelength Anniversary Weekend"), but it wasn't until we turned 18 that we officially adopted the name used by regular showgoers. We leaned into the theme of wintry coziness with hot chocolate and a giant scarf installation by Roxanne Ignatius. It was really, really cold the night Odonis Odonis packed the Garrison and blew out the walls with their industrial grind, and I remember all the front-room windows dripping with condensation from the heat inside.
2019
At what would be our last three-night stand at the Garrison, Toronto (now Montreal) dream-pop-turned-hyperpop duo Isla Den turned their performance into an art installation, filling the club with majesty palms to make it feel like a greenhouse oasis, and lining the walls with interactive analogue video consoles that the capacity crowd could noodle with all night. You never want it to just feel like another show. And will someone please tell me if Montreal's Anemone is ever going to come back with another album?!
Anemone by True Nature Media
2020
And then we turned 20! WTF?! Turning 10 seemed like a big deal, and then suddenly we were double that. It's hard to pick a favourite moment from #WL2020 — which saw us return to a multi-venue, multi-night format — but I think it might be seeing Psychic Weapons (a band made up of some near and dear WL co-founders and scene vets) rocking out with passionate intensity at the Saturday afternoon in-store at Sonic Boom. Anywhere can be a venue!
The Ian Steaman-curated lineup at Longboat Hall was also full of new-to-me discoveries, like R&B singer Desiire, who blew me away with his voice and showmanship. And it was fun playing tambourine with the Hidden Cameras. But little did we know, this was the last festival of the Before Times.
2021
In the depths of pandemic lockdowns, we did our best to make livestreams feel like a festival. I still think about the online performance by Vancouver/Toronto ambient/yacht-rock supergroup Shabason, Krgovich & Harris, broadcast partly from the studio, partly from the bed.
2022
For the second bleak winter of the coronavirus (Omicron variant), we pivoted the fest into a Speaker Series (because, really, at that point, who wanted to watch more concerts on a screen?). Sook-Yin Lee and Hot Garbage's Dylan Gamble made us a really thoughtful film called WHO CARES? (and I'm still impressed by their appetite for art films and bubbly water), but I still come back to this deeply emotional conversation between Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Jeremy Dutcher, where interviewer Errol Nazareth is at one point literally moved to tears.
2023
Well, that was a comeback — to in-person shows, that is. With guest curator Daniel Monkman of Zoon and OMBIIGIZI at the helm, we programmed the biggest Wavelength show of all time: Do Make Say Think's first show in six long years, at the Danforth Music Hall. With animated projections on the ceiling and wind chimes echoing through the historic theatre during quiet passages, it was another one of those shows that felt more like an immersive art installation than a concert (are you sensing a theme?).
I was also floored by some of the amazing Indigenous musicians Daniel invited, including Minneapolis experimental powwow singer Joe Rainey. I just met someone at the Folk Alliance conference in Montreal who told me they went to that show, had never heard of Joe before, and that hearing him changed them. Now that's what makes it all worth it. (Daniel's band OMBIIGIZI plays our sold-out Saturday-night lineup at St. Anne's.)
2024
I knew that Charles Spearin was planning something special for his Saturday night set at St. Anne's Parish Hall for last year's Winter Fest, but I didn't know how freakin' cool it would be until it was happening: first he played a piece inspired by ship horns, featuring a brass ensemble that ringed the balcony of the auditorium, immersing all of us in sound. Then he divided the audiences into quadrants and assigned us a Toronto neighbourhood and wildlife creature, then got us to fire up his latest streaming album, Music for 32 Phones Played Simultaneously. We were the show. After that mind-altering experience, we all streamed downstairs for a viscerally powerful set by Montreal's Love Language, now known as Ribbon Skirt.
Love Language by Danielle Burton
2025
And here we are. 25! I'm thrilled with the positive response to this year's lineup and, besides all the amazing music and art, I'm most looking forward to catching up with friends this weekend. See you at Wavelength!
Tickets for Nights 1 and 2 of the Wavelength Winter Festival are available on DICE. Read more about Wavelength's history on their historical timeline.