Holding a festival of experimental music was itself an experiment in 2013 but it has been proven successful.
Prince George has its outward appearance, in musical and cultural tastes, but apart from the surface assumptions about country and rock the population here also has an acceptance of and hunger for more of the cutting edge.
In music, that can sound a lot like freeform jazz, improvisational soundscape, modern intellectual classical, and avant-garde country or pop. There are famous champions of this stuff: Rush, Frank Zappa, kd lang, Captain Beefheart, John Cage, Philip Glass. Those are the names mainstream culture may be familiar with, but there are legions more that are best known among musicians themselves for their willingness and ability to push music in directions that have nothing to do with ear-pleasing, toe-tapping, cookie-cutter versions the average listener gravitates too.
Not that any listener is average. Casse-Tte Festival founder Jeremy Stewart knew some people loved experimental music as their favourite genre and almost everyone had an appreciation or curiosity for experimental music in small doses.
Casse-Tte is that dose, and next week it will be held for the third annual time.
"If you have never heard aesthetically challenging music before, there will be something at our festival you will like. If you are deeply educated in music, you will find something you will like. We are a welcoming festival, we want people to feel comfortable about hearing music that isn't part of the mainstream," he said.
"We want to show different ways of interpreting music, but we want you to enjoy the experience. It's supposed to be interesting and fun at every level."
It always starts off with a flurry of frivolity, yet founded on thought provocation. Last year, a (broken beyond repair) piano was dropped from the roof of host venue Exploration Place Museum & Science Centre. It drew large crowds and got the festivities rolling.
This year, a similar stunt is being pulled. Like any true stunt, it is meant to be a thrill but can't be pulled off without formidable talent. This year, the crowds will assemble at The Exploration Place at 7 p.m. on June 3 to listen to Stewart waft ethereal guitar notes across the Fraser River from the brow of the LC Gunn Park hill to the brow of the Fort George Park hill that faces it.
Sound takes awhile to travel distances. Sound is affected by air conditions. Sound bounces. Stewart has to carefully wend the music in order for it to resemble a song by the time it crosses the Fraser and floats past the human ears.
"If you liked the psychedelic guitar flights of Jimi Hendrix, you'll love this," he said. "It is about imagining communication through music, and acoustically using a concert hall that has no confining dimensions and no equal."
The lineup of performers has no equal either. When you attend a country festival, classic rock festival, blues festival, you often get variations and some surprises but there is an overall uniformity to the sound. Not so at Casse-Tte. Everything from unusual chord progressions to atonal outbursts to noise to silence is on the agenda.
The slate of musicians runs Thursday night (7 p.m. to 10 p.m.), Friday night (same times), all day Saturday (10 a.m. to 10 p.m.) and most of Sunday (10 a.m. to 6 p.m.). A festival pass costs $50.
Almost all events take place at The Exploration Place, with some morning panel discussions and other special occasions at Dreamland School of Music.
Some of Prince George's best musicians will take the stage, like Jose Delgado-Guevara, Peter Stevenson, Barbara Parker, Raghu Lokanathan, Burndog Hyena and others. Some are highly touted incoming guest musicians like Blocktreat, Stanley Jason Zappa Quintet, and Susan Campos Fonseca from San Jose, Costa Rica.
"We're very excited she is coming to Prince George for our festival," said Stewart. "She is a composition professor at a university there. She does minimalism and noise. I know there is a sword - a katana in fact - used for one piece. She is doing a world premiere of a piece written especially for her Casse-Tte performance."
It was fellow Costa Rican, now local resident, Delgado-Guevara who recommended her to Stewart.
"One of the things I always do is ask the musicians whom they would like to see at the festival, and Susan was Jose's top choice. The planning worked out and I can't wait to see what she brings to our festival."
Prince George is an exotic experiential locale to someone from Costa Rica, and many other places too. The chance to make music with this calibre of fellow musician is a drawing card for those in the experimental music genre, and the Casse-Tte organizers are rewarding them with local sights and sounds apart from the music. They get a feast of moose meat prepared by local superchef Wayne Kitchen, for example.
They also get to play in the splendid confines of The Exploration Place, in historic Fort George Park, primary home to the Lheidli T'enneh First Nation and the site of the inaugural Hudson's Bay Company location.
"The Exploration Place people have been some of our strongest supporters," said Stewart. "(Executive director) Tracy Calogheros has been very generous with our use of the facility, she likes the kick it gives to the community. And (head curator) Bob Campbell is an experimental musician himself.
"He has an amazing collection of drums and his favourite music is called gamelan, which is a form of Indonesian percussion orchestra music. He understands what we're doing at that level, and that's the kind of supporter you can't just go out and find."
The festival is in need of found sponsorship support, however. Finances are tight and contributions are appreciated to ensure the festival succeeds this year and can justify plans for future editions. Stewart is the general manager of the Prince George Symphony Orchestra, co-owner of Dreamland School of the Arts, and the past marketing director for Theatre North West.
His expertise is giving sponsors abundantly fair return on their contributions. Anyone who can help or wants to be involved in any capacity can find contact info and other Casse-Tte facts at www.cassetetefestival.
