One thing that has always distinguished Sled from similar ventures is its willingness to give a viable platform to the experimental and avant-garde, shedding a little light on music’s aberrant children; Kim Gordon, Sumac, Boredom, and countless other sonic deviants have found their way to Calgary over the years to play sets for cheering, sold-out crowds full of those hungry for something odder, darker, and more debased. This year was no exception. With deft curation (featuring a little assist from guest curators, Japanese punk quartet Otoboke Beaver), Sled Island brought an exhilarating mix of experimental artists into the fold. Even dodging rain and partying in plummeting temperatures couldn’t stop festivalgoers from lining up outside to catch some of their favourite offerings.

RANGE was lucky enough to be on the ground to witness it all — schedule-conflict permitting! These are the acts that left an impression on us this year. 

SANAM

Photo by Blake McLeod

It is perhaps the mark of good faith in any true experimentalist that their exact genre defies empirical reasoning. By that measure only, Beirut ensemble SANAM are ready to ascend. Their show at Central United Church was an overwhelming and intensely heady listen. The group bent their heads toward tradition, all the while mutating its ordained musical constraints to create something truly extraordinary in the process. The Arabic folk modalities in their low-tuned strings take all the pliancy and precision from kosmiche old dogs like Faust and Guru Guru, plaiting them with Branca-esque levels of creeping, distorted unease. Through a relentlessly shifting mass of percussive dissonance, pleading buzuq and ambient synths passages, singer Sandy Chamoun delivered a disorienting blend of sardonic and grimly earnest political castigations and poetic asides. To those in attendance, even the language separation couldn’t prevent a revelatory moment. One of the runaway best acts at Sled this year, SANAM occupy a space that is all their own, building something beautifully warped in the burning Levant.

Mary Lattimore

Photo by Blake McLeod

North Carolina harpist and composer Mary Lattimore travelled many paths before arriving at Sled to deliver her awe-inspiring set. The classically trained musician never really considered a seat in a symphonic orchestra, and after finishing her studies at the Eastman School in Rochester, NY, she left for Philadelphia and began composing pieces of her own. What followed was a singularly breath-taking body of work, filled with patient dialogues with her environs, by turns ambient and unhesitating, both as wonderfully dulcet as it could be stark and haunting. Now Los Angeles-based and leading countless projects, the harpist and fearless sound artist brought a ruminative beauty to Calgary last weekend, inviting the crowd behind the shroud, where form and function plait into something bigger, better and beatific. 

Tropical Fuck Storm

Photo by Lyle Bell

It’s been five long years since fire-breathing Aussies Tropical Fuck Storm cut a new chronicle of mass distress, and boy, was Sled hungry for it. The air felt electric at the packed Legion, where the quartet loosened their incendiary live show, and the crowd’s euphoria was so thick and palpable, it felt like you could reach out and snare a fistful of it mid-air. The band was in typically fine form, loose and terrifyingly loud, thrashing and pummelling their way through old favourites while also stripping the studio seals off the new material. Pressed shoulder to shoulder up front, standing on the seats, and packed into every conceivable corner of the venue, we stood and braced against the noisy onslaught. The band seemed jubilant to be there, and returned to rip through an encore, an exuberant and cheeky cover of the Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive.” You could hardly tell by the happy smiling faces, both on stage and in the pit, but the world was ending. 

Read our interview with Tropical Fuck Storm 

PISS

Photo by Matt Wallace

If anyone had listened to the three raw demos Vancouver avant-punks PISS have on their Bandcamp, they still would not have been prepared for the sheer loudness, the discomforting honesty and the vast humanity the band put on display at Pinbar Friday night. Tense, daunting and bursting with righteous anger, PISS seemed like a pack of open nerves, ready to engulf the entire room. There were people crying in the audience, as lead singer Taylor Zantingh spoke, screamed and scorched through the ugliest crevices of sustained cruelty, inter-gender violence and predatory behaviour. The band tore through a concentric cluster-fuck of no wave and noise for accompaniment, and the result was blinding. After PISS finished their blistering set, there was the slightest pause before the bar erupted in applause. That short silence was right – it was as if we had witnessed something important happen, and clapping immediately after felt obscene.

Otoboke Beaver

Photo by Sebastian Buzzalino

Japan’s underground music scene has never suffered from a dearth of experimental punk or from fear of ear-splitting volumes, but even in those overfilled history books, Kyoto outfit Otoboke Beaver stand in a space that is all their own. The band’s tumultuous blend of noise and pop, purposeful humour, idiosyncratic arrangements and vertigo-inducing live shows have already made them the stuff of legend. Now, with Otoboke Beaver edging further out into the mainstream, more and more people are getting a chance to take in their eccentric take on femininity and time spent in the trenches of daily life. The band were the main attraction and guest curators of Sled, and their sold-out show at the Palace Theatre was a stormy good time. Even slight technical issues and one callous water-throwing incident couldn’t derail their hectically rapturous performance. Talented, formidable, impudent and incredibly funny, Otoboke Beaver have already comfortably secured their spot in Japan’s noisy catacombs, right next to heroes and peers, Melt-Banana, Boredoms and Fushitsusha. 

Xiu Xiu

Photo by Kyle Wilson

For the past two decades, Californian multidisciplinary artist Jamie Stewart, a.k.a. Xiu Xiu, has made a mission of showing us all just how difficult, discordant and confrontational pop music can be, all the while remaining raw and beautiful. The visionary artist has been plying this craft since their indelible 2002 debut Knife Play, and their set at the Legion was appropriately contrary – catchy, moving and desolate. Playing with their backing musicians in a trio formation, Xiu Xiu delivered a ferocious performance, full of hanging atmosphere, rasping effects and Stewart’s patented vocal oscillations that see-sawed between pitch and range with eerie ease. It was as if the ghost of Scott Walker returned to lead a snarling punk band through a Lynchian fever dream. 

Devours

Photo by Michael Sarsito

Vancouver-based electronic artist Jeff Cancade, better known by their stage name Devours, describes their project as “mutant DIY homo pop.” If those parameters alone aren’t enough for you to fall in love with Devours’ unique mesh of confessional, hyper-melodic outsider synth-pop, there is no saving you. Clad in tantalizing futuristic leather and with eyebrows that would put Frida Kahlo to shame, Devours had a staggeringly busy time at Sled, playing three shows throughout the festival’s run, somehow getting better and better as the weekend went on. Smoothly injecting commentary on body stereotypes, perceptual masculinity, gay civics 101, and the value of identity into their danceable fold, Devours was a festival favourite, unleashing both a mess of highly textured arpeggiated goodness and a rapturous celebration of queerness. 

Read our interview with Devours

Makaya McCraven

Photo by Michael Grondin

Drummer, composer and bandleader Makaya McCraven represents rarified air, not only in the realm of jazz, but in music in general. After all, the revered percussionist is a modern stronghold of perhaps the greatest American musical city – Chicago. The worlds McCraven builds on his LP’s have always been something to behold – big, bright, luminous arrangements that tip their hat to socially conscious hip-hop of the ‘90s, and, often wordlessly, project unflinching commentary on race, persisting inequity and love of life. And McCraven, as always, is able to guide these spacious, nimble pieces with the deftest hand. His pared-down ensemble’s fluid, improvisational set was the perfect closer to an otherwise chaotic, feedback-filled Saturday night, showcasing an astonishing level of interplay between the musicians and proving once and for all that the best, tightest rhythm sections will always belong to jazz.