Festival co-founder and board president Christian Pelletier, who heads the music programming with colleague Jennifer McKerral, says the festival aims to deliver an experience that hits the sweet spot between moments of discovery and fan favourites. The ideal feeling that he hopes to instill in festival goers is the excitement of attending a show by a familiar artist in a location you wouldn’t usually find them, coupled with the surprise of seeing a really great opening act that you weren’t expecting, and that you can’t stop talking about. 

“It was really interesting [when we first launched the festival], because Sudbury’s kind of a weird place in the sense that it’s easy to forget about it. I think we’re competing with Hamilton to be the armpit of Ontario,” he laughs. “But when the bar is so low, it’s so fun to shock people and to do something really cool.”

Pelletier, colleague Andrew Knapp and a group of local artists, started laying the foundation for Up Here In 2012 when they founded volunteer-run, non-profit We Live Up Here. The group’s first act of artistic service to the community of Sudbury was to curate a collaborative photographer book celebrating the city’s urban culture. Then they started painting and curating murals around Sudbury’s downtown, and eventually launched Up Here. The indie-music festival presents more than 50 concerts by emerging artists, as well as pop-up shows in the neighbouring community, and public-art installations. 

Photo by Chris Thériault

“Originally the idea was born because there were a bunch of acts that we were selfishly wanting to see in the north that just weren’t coming here, and we got tired of waiting,” explains Pelletier. 

This year he’s particularly excited about the performance by singer-songwriter Beverly Glenn-Copeland who is opening the festival on the first evening, as well as an unlikely collaboration between Israeli American guitarist Yonatan Gat and Moroccan artist Maalem Hassan BenJaafar. “For me, that’s like the signature Up Here Experience,” says Pelletier. “It’s these special moments that you will not see anywhere else, that will be the buzz of the festival. If you missed it, there’s gonna be a whole lot of FOMO around that event.” 

There are also a few notable artists contributing to the mural project this year, including MissMe, street vandal and visual activist from Montreal, and French artist Anaïs Lera who is based in Vancouver. The majority of muralists arrive about a week before the festival and continue painting right until opening day, when attendees can often catch them putting final touches and signatures on their pieces. Mural tours are scheduled throughout the festival weekend so attendees can learn about the new pieces as well as the legacy pieces (100 and counting) that have been curated since the project’s inception. 

“The beauty of it is, in a smaller downtown like Sudbury, we’re able to have a density of public art that you don’t see in larger centers like Toronto or Montreal. You’ll have more public art in those larger centers, but not the same experience of walking around and turning corners and seeing these incredible, large-scale pieces of contemporary art on the walls,” says Pelletier.

His pride in the festival’s growth is evident as he remarks how amazing it’s been to see the transformation in the Canadian music scene’s collective imagination of what Sudbury is. “In the first few years it was tougher to book acts, but now people want to come, they get it, and they know the reputation of the festival,” he says. 

“They know that eight out of the past 10 Polaris prize winners played Up Here the year they won and then it’s kind of a good luck charm,” he adds. “So we’re really proud of that.” 

Up Here Festival runs Aug. 15 to 18, 2024 at various locations around Sudbury, ON | TICKETS & INFO

Photo by Vanessa Tignanelli