In the midst of a two-month, eight-country tour with his band, Women, there's one question Pat Flegel frequently encounters and he relishes answering it.

So, where are you from?

"People just say: 'What the hell, you're from Calgary?"' he says. "I'm totally into that. It's kind of nice to be from nowhere."

He'd better cherish it while he can.

Women is among a batch of buzz-worthy Calgary bands signalling that a city long associated with country music could be shuffling in another direction.

The past few years have seen the accolades roll in and bands roll out - on prestigious international indie labels and multi-continental tours. There's Chad VanGaalen, a Juno and Polaris award nominee who recently released his third record, "Soft Airplane. Or decorated chanteuse Leslie Feist, who spent in formative years in Cowtown and recently performed at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo, Norway.

Flegel's Women, meanwhile, released their self-titled debut stateside in October to glittering reviews. A spirited show at New York's CMJ festival even earned praise in the New York Times, where the band was lauded for its "expansive, musicianly progressive rock."

Yet a stigma about Calgary remains.

Nicknamed "Nashville of the North" for its entrenched country-music scene, Calgary is still mostly associated with cowboy hats, conservatism and the rodeo - in other words, it's known more for bareback than feedback.

"I spent the summer in Montreal, and every time I mentioned I was from Calgary, people responded, 'I'm sorry,"' said Marc Rimmel, who plays guitars and keyboards in Calgary experimental outfit Azeda Booth. "(I wish) people knew the music and the art scene, and the sort of culture that's going on there."

Adds VanGaalen: "People kind of hate you. Or they're just like, 'no good music comes from Calgary."'

After five years of owning a rock club in the city, Zak Pashak is familiar with that sentiment. He says Calgary doesn't exactly have the cachet of a certified-cool indie hotbed like Montreal.

"There are some great Calgary bands that are maybe even a bit ashamed of being from Calgary," says Pashak, 28. "There is still that perception of Calgary as being sort of backwards, a hick town."

Pashak is working diligently to change that. He owns Broken City, a "little pub with an eight-inch stage" that boasts upcoming dates with bands such as Land of Talk and the Bicycles.

He's also director of Sled Island, a two-year-old Calgary event that is fast becoming one of the premiere music festivals in Canada. The fest has drawn such stalwarts as Spoon, Yo La Tengo, Mogwai, RZA, Of Montreal and Cat Power. Venerable British art-punkers Wire headlined this year, and frontman Colin Newman will curate the next edition.

Pashak is quick to point out that a strong Calgary rock scene isn't necessarily new, but subject to cycles. He notes that local bands such as Chixdiggit and the Primrods had some success in the 1990s.

But the experimental strain of Calgary's recent wave is indeed new, and Pashak credits VanGaalen for invigorating the scene.

While VanGaalen is quick to deflect credit - "I have kind of kept my distance from any sort of scene," he says - he also remembers a time when the city wasn't so progressive.

While in college, VanGaalen was troubled by Calgary's lack of an avant-garde scene. So he and collaborator Eric Hamelin set out to bring a little noise to the Prairie boomtown.

They couldn't get gigs in clubs, so they performed at community centres and anywhere else that would have them.

"It was horrible," VanGaalen recalls. "We were playing to hockey moms and their seven-year-olds that just got out of hockey practice. More just to freak people out.

"I would play a broken alto saxophone with a microphone down the bell, going into a ring modulator. Eric's playing a bunch of trash we collected over the last week, playing it like drums.

"These people hated us."

But before long, they found kindred spirits. With help from faculty at the Alberta College of Art and Design, VanGaalen and friends would put on shows in stairwells and other tucked-away parts of campus. Soon, other local experimental and improvisational artists emerged out of the woodwork.

Still, VanGaalen says there was "no audience" for what they were doing.

"Maybe a couple art kids who were convinced to show up, and our girlfriends," he says.

But VanGaalen sees a different Calgary now.

"There's way more acceptance for that kind of stuff going on," he says. "Now we're all in pop bands and we're trying to sneakily inject that kind of music into our pop music."

Today, the city's best bands are wrapping ambient noise around their tunes like a woollen scarf. Azeda Booth plays ethereal dream pop, carried by the strikingly feminine falsetto of male singer Jordan Hossack. Women's record, which VanGaalen produced, juxtaposes accessible guitar-rock with noisy, sometimes meandering dissonance.

VanGaalen wants the city to do more to support its burgeoning arts scene. He has long been concerned about the lack of affordable studio space in the city, which he says has many of his musician friends "constantly on the verge of leaving."

"Whoever plans this town is just insane," he says. "They can't be a human, obviously. The downtown turns into a ghost town at night, there's barely any nightlife going on."

Yet VanGaalen was born and raised in the city and, his myriad frustrations aside, he says he can't imagine leaving.

He sees a potential in Calgary that's only in the earliest stages of realization.

"Things are just becoming a lot more accessible, and a lot more people are moving here from outside, and they want to know where cool things are," he says. "Now there's a demand for it, whereas it was a little insulated before. Now that we've hit a million people, the city's going a little bit sour. We're kind of smelling the funk a little bit.

"There's just way more possibilities now."