For a few days every June, Calgary transforms. Churches become concert halls. Coffee shops become punk venues. Parking lots become stages and on any given night, festival-goers might find themselves going between a meditative ambient performance, a mosh pit at the Legion and a packed basement show at the Palomino. That sense of possibility is what keeps people, myself included, coming back to Sled Island year after year. While spending the week bouncing between venues, I asked three artists about their experiences. Their answers revealed the different sides of the festival. For Calgary dream-pop and shoegaze band Witch Victim, Sled Island is about community. “Wanting to watch so many bands and only catching a few because there are friends everywhere,” the band said. “We went from smiling at the crowd surfers at Legion to a guy spitting blood on the audience in the Palomino basement. Their perspective captures the festival’s extremes. It sounds chaotic, but that’s part of the appeal. The band says Calgary’s underground music scene thrives because its countercultures are small and fiercely supportive. “We celebrate and support each other,” they said. “Shows are often multi-generational, the old head and young punk shoulder to shoulder, which really fosters the next generation of musicians.” That sense of mutual support is something Calgary musician Wayne Garrett sees as well. Garrett’s music uses the pedal steel guitar to create immersive, atmospheric soundscapes, but when asked about Sled Island, he didn’t focus on his own performance. Instead, he described a whirlwind tour through the festival’s many personalities. “Riding bikes and venue hopping, seeing amazing bands I’ve never heard of,” Garrett said. “From free-jazz hymnals in a church, to sarcastic post-punk in a coffee shop, to parking-lot psych-pop, to glitched-out hip-hop at the Palace, to bug-suit art rock and stage-diving, mosh-pit-puking egg punk at the Legion.” For Garrett, that diversity is Sled Island’s greatest strength. “The city feels so alive in an amazing way.” His description reads almost like a festival itinerary, but it also serves as a reminder that some of Sled Island’s most memorable moments happen while wandering between shows and stumbling into something unexpected. One of those unexpected moments happened inside Central United Church. Chicago musician Sharon Udoh arrived in Calgary to perform a deeply personal set of hymns. Known for her work with clipping, Udoh admitted she was unsure how audiences would respond to a performance rooted in faith and vulnerability. “I was worried people would feel like some American woman was coming and singing about the Lord,” she said with a laugh. Instead, she found an audience that embraced the experience. “It means a lot,” she said. For Udoh, music is inseparable from spirituality. Having spent nearly two decades playing piano in church before performing in clubs, she sees music as a way of opening herself to others. “Life is painful,” she said. “But when I play music, something magical happens. My heart doesn’t close off from the pain, it opens.” That openness became one of the weekend’s most memorable performances, transforming a church concert into something closer to a shared experience. Taken together, the three conversations reveal why Sled Island remains unlike any other festival in Canada. It’s the friendships that make it impossible to stick to a schedule. It’s the freedom to wander from genre to genre, venue to venue, never knowing what you’ll discover next. And sometimes, it’s finding yourself in a church listening to a stranger sing hymns and realizing you’re part of something bigger than a concert. For one weekend, Calgary feels a little smaller, a little stranger, and a lot more connected.
