Ontario @ SXSW 2024
ONTARIO at Canada House @ SXSW 2024
March 12-14, 2024 @ Swan Dive (615 Red River St., Austin, TX)
We’re celebrating our TENTH year at SXSW in 2024, where we’ve proudly showcased more than 50 Ontario artists and supported the companies they work with. Founded in 1987, SXSW allows for unmatched networking opportunities, conference programming, and over 100 stages of music for showcasing bands & conference attendees. Learn more about SXSW by clicking here.
MusicOntario selected artist are presented in partnership with Ontario Creates and the City of Toronto:
Hot Garbage
Hot Garbage melt into a heavily volatile yet undeniably palatable amalgamation of sonic elements. Calling on the driving rhythms of dark post-punk and motorik krautrock, the Toronto-based outfit seamlessly works shining melodies and swirling textures into deliberate, brooding arrangements. Since forming in 2015, the four-piece have toured extensively throughout Canada, the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom, bringing their intense live sets to festivals such as Levitation, Freakout Fest, Treefort, SXSW, Sled Island, FME, M for Montreal and Pop Montreal, and sharing the stage with notable acts such as Osees, Ty Segall, L.A. Witch, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, JJUUJJUU, Mdou Moctar, Wand and Kikagaku Moyo. The quartet recently returned with Precious Dream (January 19, 2024 via Mothland & Exag’ Records), a sprawling collection of songs written in isolation and brought together alongside visionary producer Graham Walsh (METZ, Preoccupations, Holy Fuck, !!!), offering an exhilarating new breath into the world of post-punk and modern psychedelia, a listening experience that is equally cathartic and introspective.
https://www.facebook.com/hotgarbagemusic/
Housewife
Toronto-based artist Housewife, (Brighid Fry), delivers pop-flavored indie rock and writes songs about climate change, messy situationships, and women reclaiming their space in the world. Fry recently won SOCAN's Young Canadian Songwriters Award for her song "Matilda", which she co-wrote with Canadian producer Derek Hoffman (Arkells, Ralph). Additionally, Housewife's latest release "King of Wands" hit the CBC Music Top 40 charts was co-written by Gabe Simon (Noah Kahan, Lana Del Rey) and JT Foley.
Fry likes to describe Housewife as a project comprised of anyone who collaborates with her — in Nashville, Los Angeles, and New York City-based recording studios, or on tour everywhere across North America. Mostly recently Fry traveled to Nashville to write and record these songs and others with music industry mainstays like producer and multi-instrumentalist Gabe Simon (Lana Del Rey, Noah Kahan), performer and producer Mikky Ekko (Rihanna, Vince Staples), and indie pop artist Young Summer.
In 2021, Brighid helped to launch the Canadian chapter of Music Declares Emergency and has been helping to drive attention to the climate emergency within the music industry. In 2023 she was named a Top 30 Under 30 by Corporate Knights Magazine for her work on sustainability in the music industry.
NYSSA
Toronto pagan-punk-poet NYSSA has put her hands into the lion’s mouth, gathering her performing and songwriting powers to conjure the unruly energy of rock n’ roll. Out from under fear’s thumb, NYSSA now sings about wild things, old gods, romance-beyond-borders, and the exorcism of trauma. She has quested, and she has returned.
The goal is fevered connection, a ritual-sense of music as communal release. NYSSA keens and wails and brings her audience along with her to a place of deep feeling, movement, and joy. Her lyrics are poetic and clear, lunar, eerie, angry; NYSSA’s voice is the strong container for all of it. As Dionysus would want it, over-abundance is the way. Guided by the incantation and invocation of the three C’s: Collaboration, Choreo, Covenhood!, NYSSA’s sound and stories run deep into ancient mythos, Celtic lore and back through our modern idols. Re-swaggering, re-wilding hyper-masc night moves and magick hips (think Jagger, Mink Deville, Danzig), NYSSA’s magnetic, elastic ways make satyrs of us all.
Long-listed for the 2021 Polaris prize for her debut solo album Girls Like Me, NYSSA’s sophomore album, Shake Me Where I’m Foolish, will be released on Six Shooter Records on February 1, 2024.
ALTAMEDA
Altameda are a JUNO nominated folk-rock duo consisting of singer/songwriter Troy Snaterse, and visual artist and multi-instrumentalist Erik Grice. The band has toured extensively across North America and Europe, supporting such acts as The Zombies, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, Delta Spirit, Kacy & Clayton, The Sheepdogs, Susto, and others. They have received critical praise from such notable publications including NPR, Rolling Stone, CBC, BBC, Shindig!, Flood, and Exclaim!. Glide magazine included the band in their 2019 list of “30 must- see acts of SXSW.” Their third album, "Born Losers," debuted at #1 on the Canadian folk music charts, and has received considerable radio play from CBC, BBC, Sirius XM, and mainstream AAA radio. The album received a nomination for Adult Alternative Album of The Year at the 2023 JUNO awards.
Indian Giver
Indian Giver is an indigenous hardcore band based in Toronto, ON. With a sound as urgent as the issues still faced by Indigenous communities, Indian Giver's message is straightforward - Reconciliation through reclamation. Our music is a reclamation of of punk, hardcore, and crossover metal which have largely been dominated by white artists and audiences for decades. What was once considered a derogatory term, Indian Giver is holding a flame with clear instructions to reclaim all that has been lost or stolen by colonialism.
https://indiangiverhxc.bandcamp.com/
Sunsetter
Sunnsetter is the Long running project of multi-instrumentalist, composer, and mixing engineer, Andrew McLeod. Andrew has been releasing music since 2014 under the name Sunnsetter, and long before that under different pseudonyms. Based now in Norfolk County, Ontario, they’ve always been a DIY artist, single handedly fusing together every element of their music, including the recording and mixing process; And while the creation is entirely them, the music itself draws from various genres; ambient, singer-songwriter, shoegaze, post-rock, slowcore and moves nimbly between them. McLeod wants each song and album to be distinct. “One of my biggest fears as an artist is to make a series of albums or songs that sound exactly the same.”
With, ‘The best that I can be’, McLeod melds a sound that’s all their own. It’s their debut album on Paper Bag Records and follows 2020’s independently released, ‘The Love you withhold is the pain you carry,’ and 2022’s ambient album ‘All watched over by machines of Loving grace.’ Citing influences such as My Bloody Valentine, Sigur Ros, Mount Eerie and KCAccidental, among many others. ‘The best that I can be.’ was written over the course of three years-some of the most complicated but rewarding personally for McLeod. Not only did they grieve the loss of a close friend and bandmate, but they were dealing with newly found sobriety, their mental health, and concepts around gender identity and queerness. More chaos courtesy of a pandemic added to the mix, but McLeod came out the other side, trying to rebuild their life around more positive and emotionally healthy habits. “Going on five years sober, this experience has been one that has shaped me like no other has,” they say.
Andrew is also a member and collaborator with Daniel Monkman’s project Zoon as well as JUNO nominated Ombiigizi ( Monkman and Adam sturgeon of Status-non-status ) - both of which are polaris prize shortlisted artists.
