Marie LeBlanc Flanagan is the executive director of Weird Canada, a music site, whose mission statement is “to encourage, connect, and document creative expression across Canada.” It has earned renown for its curatorial acumen in promoting obscure, challenging music made across the country and for serving as a space for enthusiastic contributors to pay tribute to the artists who move them. Speaking of moving things, Weird Canada is launching Wyrd Distro, a means of distributing the physical manifestations of the music they love to people who want to buy or sell it. Wyrd Distro launch parties take place all across Canada on Saturday Feb. 15. Here, Marie and I discuss travelling across Canada, the wonders that are the people of Edmonton, what Wyrd Distro and Weird Canada are all about, how they serve musicians and music fans, why a Canadian music site like CBC Radio 3 would poll its users to name “Canada’s Best Music SIte” and what it means that its users voted for Weird Canada, how Weird Canada sustains itself with grants and an inheritance, why it needs to be volunteer-driven, a planned accessibility project in the works that aims to figure out who is and isn’t permitted in given spaces, how a capitalist ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality applies to outsider art and Weird Canada’s methodology, why it might not matter if Weird Canada is sustainable, how listsicles are impacting the coverage of artists and the consumption of art, how a change is coming, why mainstream media outlets seem less concerned about earning cultural capital these days, what the Wyrd Distro parties across Canada on Feb. 15 are going to be like and how people can best utilize the service, the song “Real Talk” by Dan Galway, and more.
Related links: weirdcanada.com vishkhanna.com
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