Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 22, 2020, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE C1 ARTS ●LIFE ARTS/LIFE EDITOR: ALAN SMALL 204-697-7431 ● ARTS@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM WEDNESDAY JANUARY 22, 2020 CONNECT WITH THE BEST ARTS AND LIFE COVERAGE IN MANITOBA SECTION C▼ Putting winter on pause Festival encourages audiences to explore the West End I T can be tough to churn up the motivation to get out of the house in January. It’s cold, it’s dark and the post-holiday blues and fatigue make binge-watching a se- ries on Netflix preferable to almost any other activity. But for a while — eight years to be exact — the Big Fun Festival pro- vided a real reason (for music lovers, anyway) to get out and about in Janu- ary, bringing in an eclectic collection of musicians to an eclectic collection of venues each year. In June 2019, festival organizers stated Big Fun would be going on hiatus, leaving a gap in winter musi- cal programming during the weeks post-holiday concerts and prior to the Winnipeg New Music Festival, which paved the way for Winterruption to land in Winnipeg. Winterruption, a music festival, has been running in Regina and Saska- toon since 2015, and along the way has added Edmonton, Swift Current, Sask., and, now, Winnipeg to its roster of participating cities. Winnipeg’s Winterruption will take place at venues throughout the West End, including the Good Will Social Club, X-Cues Billiards, the Handsome Daughter and the West End Cultural Centre, starting tonight and winding up Saturday. “We wanted to make it a neighbour- hood thing, which is not the same as what Big Fun was; Big Fun was a bit more downtown. We want to bring people to walk around the West End, there’s a big intent behind that, we want people to walk around the neigh- bourhood,” says Jorge Requena Ra- mos, the West End Cultural Centre’s booking manager. “We want to make sure that we’re creating an environment where people can go to a show at the Good Will and then go to a show at X- Cues, or come to a show here (at the WECC) and then go to the Handsome Daughter, we wanted it to be a more circulating, ambulant festival.” Though the festival is a chain of sorts, being under the Winterruption umbrella doesn’t really affect how Winnipeg organizers from the West End Cultural Centre, the Good Will Social Club and Real Love Winnipeg have planned and programmed the event. It does, however, allow artists to create a mini-tour by hitting up multiple Winterruptions in multiple cities, which makes touring the Prai- ries in dead of winter more enticing. For the inaugural festival, nine shows take place over the four-day event and include headliners such as Manitobans Leonard Sumner (to- night, 8 p.m., WECC) and Lana Win- terhalt (Thursday, 8 p.m., X-Cues), as well as 2 Heads hitmaker Coleman Hell (Thursday, 8 p.m., WECC) and avant-garde pop artist Hannah Ep- person (Thursday, 9 p.m., Good Will), among others. “We’re trying not to focus on genre to brand the festival in that way. We wanted it to be a mix of things, like Coleman Hell is a Top 40 artist, which is rare for the WECC and we want to introduce ourselves to those people,” says Requena Ramos. There are no festival passes for Winterruption this year, except for three “golden tickets” organizers are giving away in a contest on Insta- gram, so attendees must purchase tickets, which range in price from $10 to $30, for each show individually. As an added incentive to check out mul- tiple venues, those who attend shows at three or more venues in one night will be given a free beer. It’s a small saving that Requena Ramos hopes will encourage move- ment from venue to venue, allowing attendees to explore more of the West End and to feel safe doing so. “We’re very adamant that we want to let people know the West End isn’t a dangerous place. I feel like because of the shooting at the 7-Eleven and the other ‘crime streak’ of people stealing booze from the liquor com- mission or breaking into cars, I feel like we’re getting a bad rap,” he says. “We want to put on a good show so we can get back in people’s good books as a neighbourhood, so we’re making a big effort to bring people over here to our home in the West End.” erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @NireRabel ERIN LEBAR FESTIVAL PREVIEW WINTERRUPTION ● Jan. 22-25 ● Various venues ● Tickets: range in price from $10-$30 in ad- vance, visit wecc.ca for purchasing information SUPPLIED Juno nominee Leonard Sumner headlines tonight’s Winterruption concert at the WECC. SUPPLIED Lana Winterhalt takes to the X-Cues stage Thursday night. AARON VINCENT ELKAIM / THE CANADIAN PRESS Coleman Hell, known for the hit 2 Heads, plays the West End Cultural Centre on Thursday as party of Winterruption. Artistry infused with green vision WHEN the Free Press calls, avant- garde pop artist Hannah Epperson an- swers her phone from Chicago, where she has a long layover between trains as she travels by rail from her adopted home of New York City to Vancouver, where she spent much of her youth. “Train travel is the way of the fu- ture. It’s the way of the past, it’s gotta be the way of the future,” laughs the 32-year-old Salt Lake City native and Canadian permanent resident who is keen to limit her travel by air and car. Epperson, whose musical work is most recognizable for her art-pop-influ- enced usage of violin and implementa- tion of loop pedals, has been building up a strong following since the release of her debut full-length, Upsweep, in 2016. On that record, she created songs in two distinct voices — Amelia and Iris — one of which focused on minimal- ist orchestral arrangements while the other is more experimental pop. Epper- son continued this tactic on her 2018 sophomore release, Slowdown, which brought her to Winnipeg to perform at the Winnipeg International Jazz Festi- val that summer as the opening act for headliner Tune-Yards. This week is Epperson’s first time back to the ‘Peg since that summer of 2018, so the Free Press caught up with the Winterruption headliner to chat about touring Slowdown (the term given to the sound of a specific iceberg grounding on the seafloor, which was recorded in 1997), potential new music for 2020 and the difficulty of being a touring musician as well as a staunch environmentalist. Free Press: Slowdown has been out for more than a year now; do you find these songs are taking on new life as you continue to play them live over and over again all over the world? Hannah Epperson: Definitely. Espe- cially because I’m a solo performer, I don’t have… I’ve found that not having bandmates makes me a lot more eager to collaborate with the individual spaces that I play in, if that makes sense. Sounds, we don’t think of it as taking up space but it’s a very special phenomenon. And the way that sound moves and takes on its own life in a different space, I’ve become so sensi- tive to that because I’m not listening to other bandmates. I’ve definitely found that maybe the songs themselves taking on a different life would not be an accurate way to describe it, but I’ve found that my I guess adaptability to playing different spaces has become much more alive and that’s taken on a life of its own which has been really liberating and exciting. ERIN LEBAR CONCERT PREVIEW HANNAH EPPERSON ● Thursday, 8 p.m. ● Good Will Social Club ● Tickets $13, available at Showpass.com SUPPLIED Avant-garde pop artist Hannah Epperson performs Thursday night at the Good Will Social Club as part of Winterruption. ● CONTINUED ON C3 C_01_Jan-22-20_FP_01.indd C1 2020-01-21 5:24 PM ;