Performers
If you are interested in becoming a performer for the summer 2010 festival, please send a one page bio/contact sheet along with a sample of your music. Press packages will not be accepted and only those performers who are chosen will be contacted. Thank you.
Please see below for a list of this year's Hillside Inside performers.
Performers for Hillside Inside 2010!!!
(her only Ontario appearance!)
Ani DiFranco has written hundreds of songs, played thousands of shows, captured the imaginations of legions of followers, and jammed with folkies, orchestras, rappers, rock and roll hall-of-famers, jazz musicians, poets, pop superstars, storytellers and a martial arts legend. She’s “fixed up a few old buildings” and minimized her carbon footprint before it was trendy – from installing a geothermal heating and cooling system in the renovated church that her label calls home to using organic inks on all the t-shirts she sells.
A musician of incredible velocity, Hawksley Workman is at the top of his game when he has the solitude and serenity to write and record his music in atomic bursts, focused into monastic postures, accessing grace and brilliance in fluid, sweeping motions. With his increasing rock triumphs, growing fan communities and formidable body mass, Workman has evolved from the slight, pin-striped oddball with a critically-acclaimed diamond voice, to the panoramic, guitar-punishing superstar with no performance limits.
Owen Pallett’s live violin-looping project was named Final Fantasy, in tribute to the melodramatic videogame series. His sophomore album He Poos Clouds, written and arranged for string quartet, is a satirical song cycle based on the eight schools of magic of Dungeons and Dragons. The Village Voice praised it as having “the best lyrics of the year”. Final Fantasy was awarded the inaugural Polaris Prize for best Canadian full length album.
(his only Ontario appearance!)
A native of Syracuse, New York, Martin Sexton grew up in the 80's, uninterested in the sounds of the day, and fuelled his dreams on the timeless sounds of classic rock and roll. Sexton eventually migrated to Boston, where he began to build his following singing on the streets of Harvard Square and gradually working his way through the scene. His 1992 collection of self-produced demo recordings, In The Journey, was recorded on an old 8-track in a friend's attic. He managed to sell 20,000 copies out of his guitar case busking. John Mayer raves that Sexton is “The best live performer I have ever seen”.
Since the age of three, Basia has been sitting on piano stools and trying to hammer things out. It started with her piano-teacher mum, but along the way Basia's picked up guitar, autoharp, banjo, ukulele, sax and flute. In high-school her instrument was the upright bass a lone girl among "eight-foot-tall guys, goofing off with the tubas". There's a sense of play that still suffuses her music, jostling under the songs of regret and love, want and joy. When her brother began in his teens to play drums with punk bands, Basia would be there with her Demerara voice, joining happily in the jam. When she left for university in London, Ontario, musicians began to drop by her downtown apartment. Many nights were spent with these classically-trained friends, laughing and singing, and together they made a glad, bright noise.
Afie Jurvanen, aka Bahamas, spent two weeks in the winter of 2008 making his debut album, Pink Strat. It is named after his childhood guitar, which he still plays. In addition, he plays bass, drums, piano, various percussion, organ, slide, acoustic, and nylon string guitars on the album, and is joined by his friends from zeus, The Great Lake Swimmers, and Feist on a few of the tracks.
Woodhands is dirty electronic music. "We are interested in
emotional, sweaty dance floors. We want to make you cry while you're having
sex, and it'll be the best damn sex of your life. And you'll be dancing".
Woodhands started in a basement in Montreal, moved to Europe, and is now making
love to Toronto and its environs.
Vancouver-based Delhi 2 Dublin is a group of five musicians who mash up electronica and world music, keeping it heavy on the Bhangra, Celtic and Dub flavours. Fusing tabla, fiddle, dhol, Punjabi vocals, and electric sitar with scorching electronic beats - ranging from reggae to drum and base - the crew takes listeners on a wild ride through global sounds and synchronicities.
“There will be Stars” is the new work of Inuk singer,
composer and filmmaker Elisapie Isaac. This, her first solo recording, is the
much anticipated follow up to the internationally acclaimed, award winning duo
Taima which she co-founded with guitarist / composer Alain Auger in 2001.
“There will be Stars” is not so much an album as a seduction from somewhere
distant, somewhere other worldly. Sometimes full of joy, sometimes lined with
melancholy, at times pop, at times folk, at times sung poems from the North -
is it Polar pop? Arctic Electric? New cool?
Elisapie Isaac was born of an Inuk mother and a Newfoundland father. She was
adopted at birth by an Inuit family and was raised in the isolated community
Salluit, Nunavik - the Great North.
Socalled is a musician, photographer, magician
and writer based in Montreal.
He was born Josh Dolgin in Ottawa, Ontario and raised just north, in Chelsea,
Quebec. As a kid he was always in musicals and drew cartoons for the Ottawa
Citizen. He hated soccer. He was bribed by his mother to continue piano lessons
until high school, then he picked up the accordion. He wrote for the newspaper
and played in any kind of band – salsa, gospel, rock, funk – then discovered
MIDI and hip hop. He worked with rappers, he made madd beats, he got into
studios. He graduated from McGill and made a 50 minute animated film for the
Canada Council, meanwhile writing for Hour Magazine and performing. He has now
appeared on a dozen recordings as pianist, singer, arranger, rapper, writer and
producer.
The Rural Alberta Advantage play indie-rock folk songs about hometowns and heartbreak, born out of images from growing up in Central and Northern Alberta. They sing about summers in the Rockies and winters on the farm, ice breakups in the spring time and the oil boom’s charm, the mine workers on compressed, the equally depressed, the city’s slow growth and the country’s wild rose, but mostly the songs just try to embrace the advantage of growing up in Alberta.
