Illustration by Jessica Bromer

My friend Lou is visiting from Australia. We do silly things together, like watch Love Island and listen to music. Lou shows me the video for Chappell Roan’s “Casual,” which follows a girl and a mermaid in a situationship. I’m fascinated. The song is good, too: the slow pumping synth and zesty lyrics contrast with the video’s overall sense of campiness.

I laugh it off, thinking this is another artist my friends and I will talk about but who will remain coded in proximity to community, a secret, a love language for what we love together like girl in red or Rina Sawayama. Someone I can ask new friends about, a question inside a question about who they might be as well as what they love.

And then I hear another Roan song (“Good Luck, Babe!”), and another (“Pink Pony Club”). They get poppier and poppier, reminiscent of ’80s pop ballads I love because of my mother but also somehow the feeling I had when I first began loving Taylor Swift in 2008. Something maybe about the storytelling and the texture of feeling for women who are “different.” I have the feeling that I’m sure everyone has when they start to like an artist, a sense of discovering something both about yourself and in them.

It seems that sense of discovery is viral. I am one of many who fell in love with Roan’s music. By the middle of summer, she’d garnered hundreds of millions of streams. She’s performed at Coachella and Lollapalooza. What’s catching traction online, though, isn’t just her fame but her reaction to it. Roan has stated bluntly, “I told myself, if this ever gets dangerous, I might quit. It’s dangerous now, and I’m still going. But that part is not what I signed up for.”

Roan is being praised for setting a precedent for a new generation of artists and celebrities. She talks about having worked at a drive-thru and scoffs at the media for their surprised or sympathetic reactions. “Most people work horrible jobs.” Commenters cherish the rise of a queer working-class artist—but I wonder about the continual obfuscation of her whiteness, which prevents a certain honesty about her impact and how she’s able to make it.

Roan’s fame picks up pace, and so does her reaction. In August, she releases a series of TikToks. She speaks directly into camera, her iconic curly red hair up in a messy bun. “Would you go up to a random lady and say, ‘Can I get a photo with you?’ And she’s like, ‘no, what the fuck?’ and then you get mad at this random lady?” Should we expect a smile from celebrities and a customer service voice, or should we stay away—knowing that certain actions are expected in the workplace and certain boundaries are in place outside of it?

The celebrity as worker and fame as abuse are interesting arguments to make. When I ask Toronto-based producer Anupa Mistry, who also worked as a culture writer and editor, what she thinks, she says: “…[Roan’s] rancor is valid, but it’s ultimately focused on individual behaviour change on the part of fans and photographers, rather than a condemnation of the institutions of power that fund and amplify and set the terms of fame. She’s young and trying to work out if it’s possible to have an encounter with the music industry on her own terms. But even her ‘controversies’ generate value for her label.”

The idea that Roan’s candor is commodifying feels oddly manipulative. Mistry names what has been on my mind too: race and gender. Privilege, even when it seems absent or well-accounted for. “Do we read Roan’s demands and boundaries as more valid because she is white and cisgender? Her queerness suggests transgression only in its continued association with the American heartland, [the Midwest]. I’ll always think of Thelonious Monk or Lauryn Hill when I think about the costs of pushing back. What about Doja Cat’s shenanigans? When it got to be too much she pushed back and people didn’t like the way she did it.” But Roan’s pushback is applauded.

This brings me back to an original instinct I had ignored. As my enamourment with Roan begins to fray, I scroll her YouTube Shorts. In one, she says: “I wanted to be a cheerleader in high school. But I just never felt like I was that kind of girl. I don’t know. I am, now.” It reminds me of Swift’s rise to fame and her beloved video for “You Belong With Me.” Roan makes people feel seen in a similar way: you’re different, but all the things you want can happen to you too. The really distinct marker here, the key to their mass marketability, is that they’re both white American women.

My friend reposts Roan’s recent photo in Interview magazine on her close friend story, wild-clown themed of course. She writes: If I got straight famous, I’d unravel too. There is a point in math where a limit approaches infinity and cannot be quantified further. There is a point in fame where you simply cannot get more famous than you already are. Did Chappell Roan set out to become Mitski famous and ended up Taylor Swift famous instead? Did she strive toward success, the way any artist does, only to accidentally strive too far, primed by her personal privilege and positionality?

I can’t imagine how disconcerting it must be to be in Roan’s position. When talking about her with writer and poet Victoria Mbabazi, they say: “As a Black femme I understand what it is like for people to look at you as a shiny object and think that your existence giving them life means that’s where your life ends. Usually this ends in a disillusionment for both me and the person who dehumanized me into a fictional version of myself.” The parasocial toxicity artists endure is inexcusable and should be checked.

Yet the question I’m interested in when it comes to Roan is not whether fame is good or bad, whether she’s right or wrong, but of what she makes visible in the culture of celebrity, the purpose behind her commodification. And to me, that’s the power that white women have had and will always have. White women’s palatability imbues their art with the power of “relatability” even as it appropriates from communities, cultures and precedents that are usually created by Black and brown people who are then excluded from the material success of their own legacies. Roan’s drag persona and her lineage with activist, drag queen and queer icon Sasha Colby, a trans woman of Native Hawaiian and Irish descent, is a key example. Roan’s slogan, “your favourite artist’s favourite artist,” comes from Colby’s own tagline: “your favourite drag queen’s favourite drag queen.” This is indicative of the ecosystems of cultural transmission and inspiration, which can be appropriative and can not; which can be racist and can not, but which are undergirded by the uncontrollable, uncontrivable machinery of white supremacy. Intentionally or otherwise, Roan’s inspiration and interpretations in this lineage suffers from a sore reality: when white cis people do it, it suddenly just makes sense to a mass audience.

Don’t get me wrong though: Roan and her team are using Roan’s privilege to do good work. They’re against ticket resellers. She pushes back against rude photographers and makes clear contributions to queering pop. In the fall, she made a political stand by refusing to endorse either U.S. presidential candidate and by invoking Palestine.

But I believe it works against her when she refuses to own her success in all of its complexities. Part of me remains suspicious, reluctant as a fan, unable to fully trust or believe her when she has not once acknowledged her own positionality. It’s a place I’ve been before—with friends, coworkers, lovers—why does privilege do what it does and how do we make sense of the discomfort we are left with? How does this affect our ability to make sense of each other, to feel seen and heard?

I guess it just reminds me of the limits. Both for Roan and for myself and for celebrities like Kehlani, Janelle Monáe, and Victoria Monét, who have done similar work as Roan but were not afforded the same understanding: on the toxicity of the industry, on queerness, on politics, in terms of Palestine. What can celebrities offer us and what we can offer them? What are we owed and what do we owe each other?

My original instinct plateaus. I’m left with an old feeling, despite and maybe because of its flattening effect, a feeling like the popping of a balloon at the end of a party, sad and stalwart in its reminders. Clichés that are cliché as pop music itself, maybe because they stick around in the same way.

Sometimes you get where you’re going only by going too far. Sometimes what we think of someone has nothing to do with who they actually are.

Sometime around 2005, in the halcyon days of the internet when it was still treading its path to ubiquity, I peaked. Hunkered down late at night in a small room exclusively dedicated to housing a family desktop computer, I used the free peer-to-peer file-sharing client LimeWire to pirate the less-free peer-to- peer file-sharing client LimeWire Pro. The genius of such a move is one I will never again equal. From there, I sifted through mislabelled songs, copious malware, and recordings of Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” until I found something called digital drugs. The pirated folder contained audio files supposedly engineered to simulate, using specialized sound waves, the sensations of different substances.

Back then, on the precipice of puberty, I knew about drugs the way I know about the concept of enlightenment now. That is, I knew vaguely what sensation I was expecting without any firm idea of when I’d know I was experiencing it. With a smorgasbord of different drugs’ effects at my fingertips, I ran the gauntlet. Beyond the whole medley that appeared in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there were audio sequences said to recreate the feeling of certain experiences: swimming in a frigid lake, déjà vu, having sex with a co-worker on an out- of-town work trip, confessing your love to a best friend, the anticipation floating around a marathon’s starting gun. I was surprised to find that these promises felt accurate: the sounds did take my mind to another place. To some degree, each felt like dreaming for the first time, like being dropped in the middle of an already running narrative and left to gradually fumble around for my place in the proceedings before being suddenly yanked into another thread of another unfolding story only to start all over again.

Of course, I had no idea whether any of it actually was accurate, or if anything was happening at all. As it turns out, that was a more difficult question than it would initially appear. What was being advertised as “digital drugs” were combinations of sound frequencies known as binaural beats, and their legitimacy, efficacy, and potential medical and recreational impacts remain up for debate.

*

Binaural beats were first discovered by Prussian physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1839 by striking tuning forks on each side of a student’s head and learning they heard the difference in frequency as a slow, third beat. Dove didn’t pursue the discovery further. It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the work of Dr. Gérald Oster, that binaural beats were taken as anything more than a mild curiosity by the scientific community. In 1973, Scientific American published Oster’s article “Auditory Beats in the Brain,” which outlined the differences between monaural beats and binaural beats. Oster described monaural beats as only requiring one ear to perceive. Binaural beats, on the other hand, he described as “perceived when tones of different frequency are presented separately to each ear,” which requires the use of both ears to localize and selectively filter out certain sounds, such as when eavesdropping on a conversation at a large, noisy party. His observations and insight opened the question of whether binaural beats could be a new, rich vein for cognitive and neurological research.

Later work further clarified the binaural beat effect as something akin to an auditory illusion. In the simplest terms, binaural beats aren’t a sound, per se. More accurately, they’re a perception of sound when two pure tones, played at a different frequency into each ear, create the recognition of an additional modulation of tone within the brain. This third tone is the binaural beat. Despite the technical lack of another tone, the brain registers the difference in frequency between the two tones as a third, distinct tone. For example, when a pure tone is played at an 80 Hz frequency in the left ear and a 90 Hz pure tone is played in the right ear, the brain would perceive a third tone at a frequency of 10 Hz. Most interestingly, the origin of this third tone is perceived by the listener to be from within their own head.

In the 1980s and later, neurological and auditory research began to focus jointly on the reasons our brains create this effect and on whether there are any potential usages, specifically whether it can entrain mood or perception or— perhaps—even act analogously to a drug. The optimistic belief in the ability of binaural beats to synthesize a selected result is based on two strong reasonings. One is that, for most of human history, music and sound have been used to tune into a particular headspace. All of us have a song or two that changes our mood, positively or negatively, simply by hearing it. The second reason for belief in the potential of binaural beats is due to our greater scientific understanding of brain waves with the invention and wider use of magnetic imaging.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test that reads electrical activity in the brain using electrodes attached to the scalp which looks familiar to anyone who watches horror movies, we can see how brain cells communicate by measuring electric impulses. Our brain cells are always in communication, and the frequency with which they are in communication shows up as wavy lines on an EEG recording. In 2016, researchers in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University in India used an EEG test to observe and group brain waves. Their research concluded there to be five main frequency bands of brain waves that are believed to correspond to our emotional states.

When we’re asleep, our brain waves are in Delta, low frequency, because there isn’t much to communicate beyond the messages required to keep us alive. During a deeply relaxing scenario, when our minds tend to wander into daydreams, such as being pampered at a spa, our brains are likely in Theta, which operates at a frequency between 4 to 8 Hz and relates to our subconscious mind. A slightly higher frequency, up to around 12 Hz, will likely be registered when someone is passively focused and generally relaxed. Thus, it’s likely this range—Alpha—will correspond to someone who is rewatching The Office for the dozenth time. Basically, it’s being in a general good mood free of the need to meaningfully engage with an external source. The Beta wavelength is typically our normal frequency. It operates between 12-35 Hz and can range from relaxation to anxiety depending on the world around us. The frequency band with the highest Hz, anything above 35, is Gamma, which signals a heightened degree of concentration. This is the wavelength of our brains when we’re focused on a task or situation.

All this is to say that it’s believed by some scientists, and binaural beat connoisseurs, that we can use the brain’s perception of binaural beats to simply recalibrate our current wavelength into whichever frequency band we desire to experience. But the question remains: does it work?

*

Back in 2005, I was an audio addict, digitally dosing myself on LSD, heroin, mescaline, and strange designer drugs only known by some combination of letters and numbers. As far as I knew, the sensations were similar to their physical counterpoints. Digital cannabis made me giggle. I’d have vivid daydreams on audio psychedelics. Binaural beats mimicking cocaine had me impatient and talkative, jittery with a vague sense of violence. Of course, that was the past. And time has a way of softening people, so now I use binaural beats to achieve a flow state of concentration or induce drowsiness for a power nap.

A pilot study conducted by the Oregon Health & Science University and the National College of Natural Medicine on the neuropsychologic, physiologic, and electroencephalographic effects of binaural beat technology on humans found no significant differences between the experimental and control condition in any of the EEG measures. But in that same study, the self-reported measurements of the participants saw an increase in mood and a decrease in overall anxiety. Better put: there was no scientific reason that participants felt an improvement in mood, yet they did.

There must be a motive behind why people are using binaural beats. Anecdotally speaking, I certainly feel calmer when I listen to one of the myriad binaural beats soundscapes that are easily findable online, so isn’t that the same thing as being calmer, even if my brainwaves disagree? After all: I think, therefore I am. That may be the entire point, suggests Dr. Monica Barratt, a senior research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. “There are a lot of activities that affect our nervous system and can produce psychoactive effects, including meditation, chanting, exercising, even doing art,” says Barratt. “Yes, we can consider binaural beats through [this] lens.”

And I’m not alone in using them for this reason. In 2021, Barratt was a researcher with the Global Drug Survey (GDS), an independent research study that aimed to collect data on drug use patterns and trends worldwide. When questioned on the survey, five percent of the over 30,000 respondents said they used binaural beats to experience altered states at least once within the last year.

Dr. Cristina Gil López, a cognitive neuroscience researcher and educator, writes on her website that the beats have become trendy due to our increasing difficulty to focus and be productive in our daily activities. We live in a state of permanent distraction, so we seek new ways to mentally focus and decrease off-putting distractions, like anxiety. Other studies echo the sentiment that exposure to binaural beats can boost cognition by reducing anxiety and the perception of pain, albeit modestly.

So where do we go from here? While large-scale investigations comparing the effects of binaural beats specifically and auditory beats as a whole are still rare, there are some promising case studies for their potential application. One such avenue is the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP). The SSP is a therapeutic tool that uses specially filtered music designed to stimulate the vagus nerve, which carries signals between the brain and heart. The SSP is intended to induce the body and mind into feeling a sense of safety. There have been successful case studies that show SSP exposure can improve social awareness in children and adults with autism and help to reduce chronic pain in older patients.

Barratt herself underwent the protocol as part of her research. For 30 days, she listened to audio files as part of the SSP and may have discovered the everyday benefits binaural beats could have on many of us. “I felt some positive effects and there [weren’t] any downsides. It could all be placebo in the sense that taking time every day to listen to some special music may be an intervention in itself.”

While writing this piece, I thought about what initially drew me to these files. The truth is I have no idea. There was no larger reason behind accessing them beyond the fact that I could.

It took roughly 135 years from a Prussian physicist striking tuning forks on opposite sides of the room and noticing the effect for another researcher to even give that effect a name. Since then, we’ve seen vast leaps in technology that have allowed scientists to measure, with as much certainty as currently exists, that nothing is happening within the brain that can explain why binaural beats can improve our mood and decrease our anxiety levels. But people who listen to them claim that they do, time and time again. In defiance of the science, they feel that listening to binaural beats can impact their mood.

Maybe in another 135 years we’ll discover that they’re right. Maybe we’ll still only know that the effects are something many people enjoy. Maybe that’s all the reasoning I needed to enjoy binaural beats as much as I did when I was 12.

I know it’s all the reason I need to enjoy them now.

In 2016, Felix Viton Ho showed up at La Vitrola on St. Laurent in Montreal, not sure what to expect. An undergraduate looking to feel involved in something, Ho had Googled “Montreal concerts” and come across the show listing. He climbed three flights of stairs and entered the dimly lit venue to find a crowd of two. It turned out to be a vaporwave show: a hazy, irony-soaked genre of electronic music that originated online. When the performance started, the two other people welcomed Ho into their midst, and together, they all began to sway.

It’s no secret that live music has become increasingly—and often exorbitantly— expensive. Artists and fans have to contend with a market that is effectively monopolized by Live Nation Entertainment (LNE). The 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation means that the single company controls 70 percent of the event venues and ticketing market, gouging audiences with unexpected fees and dynamic pricing models. As Soraya Roberts pointed out earlier this year for Defector, just going to see a popular indie act these days often costs upwards of $50. From an artist’s perspective, these concert ticket prices aren’t indefensible: no one really buys records, streamers don’t really pay, and touring costs are only rising. Amidst this bleak landscape, DIY concerts can offer an adjusted model, one that exists not outside of capitalism but, at least, doesn’t require a Ticketmaster account.

After his introduction to Montreal nightlife, Ho started showing up to more local shows, frequently attending a series of small outdoor concerts put on by promoter Josh Spencer under the name KickDrum. “I asked the man at the door, Josh, if this thing was happening more often,” Ho recalls of his first KickDrum show. “He was like ‘yeah, it’s happening every Wednesday.’ So I showed up the next Wednesday, and I showed up the Wednesday after that.” Eventually, Ho asked Spencer what he could do to get involved, and Spencer asked him to hang out at the door and keep him company. “Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two,” he said. Five years later, Ho is one of KickDrum’s two promoters.

For Liz Houle, KickDrum’s other promoter, the goal is to create an artist experience that is “humane-ish…Because it’s not very humane to be an artist right now,” she says. KickDrum is not profit-seeking, which means Ho and Houle can take risks on new artists and program events that feel exciting and unusual. Meanwhile, their low overhead and NOTAFLOF policy—no one turned away for lack of funds—keeps costs down for audiences. They don’t use Ticketmaster, either, instead selling tickets on a platform they built themselves, with no extra fees.

Recent KickDrum events include two shows with PEI post-punks Absolute Losers, a show featuring rising stars Quinton Barnes and Fraud Perry, and a stripped-down folk night at underground venue MAI/SON. When they’re not worried about staying afloat, promoters can dive deeper into their communities, discovering something new—an energizing sound, a strange space—along the way.

*

DIY music as an ethos is commonly traced back to UK punk and post-punk scenes in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when bands like the Buzzcocks and Scritti Politti began self-releasing their music with a view toward transparency and anti-commercialism. But artists across genres have always innovated with what was on hand, from hip hop’s turntable experiments to the homemade instruments of skiffle. “DIY describes a music culture,” writes popular- music scholar Ellis Jones, “wherein emphasis is placed on forming and maintaining spaces for production and distribution which exist outside of, and are positioned as oppositional to, the commercial music industries.”

DIY music is not separate from processes of commodification—concerts and records still affix a monetary value to creative works. But what DIY can do is interrupt the corporate subsumption of all things artistic. “DIY practitioners,” Jones writes, create “commodities that attempt (successfully or otherwise) to bypass or mitigate consumption’s connotations of passivity, exploitation, and alienation.”

Musician and booker Daniel G. Wilson grew up studying these histories of rock, punk and DIY in Mississauga. “I liked the idea that these people were going against the grain,” Wilson says. He mentions that his earliest exposures to DIY came via his Jamaican background. “Musical culture over there already has a sort of natural DIY spirit,” Wilson says. “People wire up and fix up equipment to make soundsystems.”

As a teen, Wilson was part of a thriving all-ages scene in Mississauga, centred around the Masonic Lodge (where Billy Talent used to play in the ’90s, back when they were called Pezz). When the Lodge became too expensive to book, Wilson started trying to get gigs for his band JONCRO in Toronto. But he found bookers were hesitant to book bands without a following, and that this was even more of a barrier for bands with an aggressive sound and a diverse makeup. He points out that it can be easier for white bands to have a built-in audience and that these bands aren’t always welcoming others into their scenes.

Wilson decided to face the problem head-on. In 2017 he founded a festival for BIPOC-fronted and inclusive rock bands, Lingua Franca. “I’m like, ‘ok, I’m going to prove to everyone in this city that you can have an entire bill stacked with amazing bands that are all diverse,’” he says. The festival ran for one night in 2017, its first year, and in 2018, Wilson expanded it to three. “What made me happy was all these people—people playing and coming to the show—for the first time, they were not in the minority,” Wilson says. “The diversity on stage reflected the diversity in the crowd.” Wilson thought to himself: “I’ve done something magical here.”

Lingua Franca has never had grants or sponsorships. “I wanted to prove that you could do this with very little resources, the resources of your community,” Wilson explains. In removing corporate constraints, DIY can create space for marginalized artists who can find themselves structurally shut out of opportunities.

Removing those constraints can also create scenes in places that are ignored by the music industry. Brett Sanderson and Sophia Tweel put on DIY punk and hardcore shows in Charlottetown, PEI. For them, DIY is a matter of keeping music alive.

PEI’s population is only 150,000, Sanderson points out. “So it’s kind of hard to find people to come to shows. But if you keep at it for a long time—”

“You get a little following,” Tweel jumps in. “It introduces people to a scene that they’ve never really had access to before.”

Under the name Secret Beach, Sanderson and Tweel put on all-ages shows, aiming to provide an inclusive space where young people can get excited about music. “We have posters up at every show: no misogyny, no homophobia, no transphobia, no racism,” Sanderson says. “If you aren’t cool with that then you can leave.” They also hang posters from the harm reduction organization PEERS Alliance and emphasize a “no booze, no drugs, no jerks” policy.

Secret Beach has never put on a ticketed show, dealing instead in cash and giving as much of the proceeds as possible to touring bands. Though it may be hard to maintain a scene in a small place, Sanderson and Tweel are enthusiastic about PEI’s emerging artists. “Since we started doing shows,” Sanderson says, “we’ve definitely seen more kids starting bands.”

Likewise, Houle and Ho have noticed an uptick in underground activity in Montreal. “It’s been really lovely to see the surge of young people putting on things in their apartments or at the park,” Houle says. “People are just really down to experiment and try out new types of events and do underground stuff for just their friends.”

Up until this year, KickDrum was mostly run by Ho and Houle, but in January they started getting younger volunteers who wanted to help out and learn how to put on shows. KickDrum went from being two people to seven or eight, and Houle and Ho are excited to be able to pass on what they’ve learned.

For Ottawa’s Hannah Judge and Michael Watson, knowledge sharing is one of the primary motivators behind their DIY label, Club Records. Watson and Judge realized they were effectively running a label before they started calling it one. Watson had been producing and offering distribution to artists and Judge had been showing artists how to release their music, knowledge she gained through her band Fanclubwallet. “One day I just, like, made a logo as kind of a joke and I was like, ‘what if I made a website?’ Before we knew it I was like, ‘oh, this is a record label.’”

Club Records put out their first official release this year, emmersonHALL’s self-titled record. They are proud of the album’s reception, especially considering they spent $80 on promotion. “It feels like every day I’m getting to make a really cool art project with my friends,” Judge says. Like KickDrum, Club Records exists to uplift artists’ work, rather than extract value from it.

“When you sign with a major label, you’re thinking ‘oh, how much money do I owe them?’” Judge says. “And so nothing feels super satisfying,” Watson adds. If Watson or Judge produced the music, they will take a production royalty, but otherwise, at least for now, Club Records doesn’t take a royalty percentage from artists. Instead, when they invoice for a specific job—like producing, or music videos—they add a Club Records tax, which then goes back into their funds for artists. The DIY model allows practitioners to try out different approaches like this, instead of falling into old, exploitative dynamics.

Transparency is built into the Club Records process: the website features a resources page with how-to guides for touring, pitching music, and dealing with “the scary stuff ” (aka, money). Each of the documents on the page is editable, so users can contribute their own experiences, too. The resource page harkens back to those early UK post-punk releases, which featured itemized costs and how- to explainers printed on their sleeves.

Like Houle and Ho, Judge and Watson emphasize the vibrant DIY ecosystem they belong to, pointing to groups like Debaser and Side By Side Weekend. “It’s just cool to see all your friends in the DIY scene trying to do things to uplift the rest of the DIY scene,” Judge says.

*

DIY scenes have to uplift themselves, because their underground and non-profit nature makes sustainability a serious challenge. Venues face some of the biggest hurdles. “I often would joke,” Wilson says, “for the first couple of years every venue that I would book for Lingua Franca—except for the more sizable venues—would close the next year.” In 2017, Wilson booked Toronto vegan cafe D-Beatstro. By 2018, it was gone. The same thing happened the next time around with the classic punk venue Faith/Void. La Vitrola, the venue where Ho first fell in love with Montreal shows, closed in 2020, and underground venue La Plante followed soon after.

Longrunning Vancouver DIY venue and arts collective Red Gate Arts Society is currently facing its own existential threat. Active since 2012 (and even earlier, more informally), Red Gate has moved twice already: first after an eviction in 2011, and again in 2018 following a building sale. In their current Mount Pleasant venue, they operate under a licencing program for arts events in “unconventional spaces.” Co-founder Jim Carrico says that the city is now suggesting they apply for a new licence specifically for night clubs and sent a notice to their landlord. He’s not sure what prompted the notice, but in the time that he has been running Red Gate, Carrico says he’s seen more venues shut down than start up. “For there to be a music scene or an arts scene there needs to be a place where people can kind of mess up and make it up and experiment,” Carrico says, “and it has to be cheap.”

The housing and cost of living crises across the country place structural pressures on artists and practitioners to abandon DIY and professionalize. They also make DIY models increasingly necessary. Vinson Ng and Haina Wan of the dance music collective Normie Corp emphasize the importance of keeping events affordable. “The people that we want to cater to,” Ng says, “they’re just feeling it really hard, so there’s a lot of pay what you can, there’s a lot of pay it forward tickets.”

They started throwing events on Zoom during the pandemic and have expanded into in-person parties, mostly in Vancouver, with a focus on highlighting queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour and women artists. The organizers are especially proud of their Pride and Halloween events. “We can pack the room with like 800 to 900 people,” Wan says. “It’s just such a joy to share.” This year, they also hosted their first music festival, Camp Normie.

The question of whether to grow is a tricky one. Because they don’t prioritize profits, DIY models can lead to burnout, with organizers running out of capacity. Judge and Watson mention that the current structure of Club Records isn’t sustainable and they have still-secret plans to develop the organization.

Wilson would love to have the resources to book classic bands like Fishbone, he says. But he also knows that were he to expand, Lingua Franca would lose something in the process. “I think of the Afropunk festival, where a lot of Black punks are kind of sad because it doesn’t really cater to Black punks anymore,” he says.

For Ho, the question of what happens to KickDrum is almost beside the real point. “KickDrum is a useful resource,” he says. “But if the name KickDrum disappears tomorrow it won’t make a difference. What matters is the people, and the experience they’ve gained.”

Houle appreciates occupying a kind of middle ground between a business and a friend’s living room. “We’re not successful enough to go corporate,” she jokes. But the joke belies what KickDrum offers artists and audiences instead: community, creativity, and a fair deal.