If You Have to Join a Music Cult, Make it Canada's Shifty Bits

All photos by Dana Budovitch

A motley crew of about 35 artists, writers, producers, filmmakers, radio hosts, musicians and photographers sit in a circle in a dimly lit office space above a kitchen supply store in downtown Fredericton, New Brunswick. Old vending machines, art installations and a drum kit have been pushed aside to make room and handmade signs on the wall read ‘“What do we have?” and “Why do you make art?”’ Guests clutch red cups filled with locally brewed beer, waiting to share ideas written on sticky notes with coloured pens with the Cult.

Fredericton, New Brunswick is a white-collar government city with a long-standing history of supporting visual artists and mainstream cultural events, like Shivering Songs in the winter and The Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival in the fall. But underneath these popular events, a new wave of hardworking, poor but talented artists have been making their mark on the city's history in a different way.

“We didn’t really have anything that represented the mangy underbelly,” says Penelope Stevens, a Fredericton musician and Cult member who plays in the band Motherhood. “A lot of the artists and musicians here don’t really fit into those categories that were already laid out, so we wanted to make one that would celebrate the weird stuff that happens here.”

The Shifty Bits Cult, formed in 2012, is made up of four bands and nine musicians. They call themselves a cult because they devote themselves wholly and religiously to the perfection and integrity of local art.

“I think part of what makes it cool is that there are so many people making music and making art despite all the stuff that is hard about being here,” says member and Motherhood band member Brydon Crain. In a city with a population of roughly 70,000 which includes university students and rising unemployment, Crain notes that “everyone finds a way to make it work." In the summer of 2012, Stevens and Crain threw together a party of 25 bands and called it the Shifty Bits Circus, a festival for Fredericton to show off the strangest, loudest and shiftiest talent it had.

“We were super broke, as we continue to be, so we just worked with whatever we could find. For art stuff, we just went online and got as many old televisions as we could from people and smashed them and used them for installation pieces,” says Stevens. “A lot of the papers we have that we did drawings on were from dumpster diving and I found a bunch of old blockbuster tape cases and used the backs of those to make a bunch of the art.”

The first Circus was held in a basement art gallery on York Street, where bands performed on two stages. The shows were loud and the parking lots were rowdy, but it offered the alternative festival that the straight-laced city had been lacking. Now, the Circus is an annual four-day festival that attracts over 600 people and 30 bands from around Fredericton and eastern Canada to play on several stages in the city, complete with massive art installations like a 25 foot Big Bertha head modeled after the carnival game, a large clown, handmade circus games, and a hangover breakfast of eggs, hash browns and coffee cooked by the Cult themselves.

“When bands come here for the first time and their first show is at the Circus, it’s just mind-boggling for them. I presume that they just think that New Brunswick is a bunch of back country hicks who don’t have emerging culture, that we’re just drinking our Tim Hortons coffee and drinking our Canadian beer,” says Stevens. Take Ottawa’s Tropical Drips for example, who played the Circus last year. The band’s guitar player Mikey Powers didn’t know what to expect, but says he fell in love with the hospitality and alternative energy the Cult offered.

“We played Ottawa then went straight to Fredericton for a festival we didn’t know much about,” he says. “My first impressions were great. So much work was put into the festival—it was oozing out of it. There was a huge mouth you walked through when we got to the venue. I just thought, 'this is awesome.'” Powers didn’t expect much out of Fredericton, but says the Cult went the extra mile to put on a good show. “You would never expect Fredericton to have a thriving scene or a hungry scene. It was shocking for me. I wasn’t shit-talking Fredericton or anything, I just thought, 'What if there’s nothing going on in Fredericton?' Turns out it was bumping.’”

Jordan Murphy from the Halifax-based band Walrus has played several Cult shows, including the annual Circus. He says the scene they’ve carved out resembles something of a family. “The Cult fed us and had we had great time. We did Shivering Songs too, that was more of a different crew of people. What stands out to me is everyone going back to someone’s house after a show and having a good time. It feels like our home away from home,” says Murphy. “They keep trying to make things better, reaching for their music community. I don’t know how they could get much better.”

The Cult held their first community meeting in February, asking the community what they want to see and to discuss what’s next for the Cult and Fredericton's music scene. “We have people who are interested and go to shows and are not musicians, but are carpenters or are really good at web site design and stuff like that. Letting those people be a part of the music scene is cool because they might not have access to it otherwise.”

Now, the Cult is working on a touring circus that showcases bands from Fredericton to cities outside of New Brunswick, creating a Shifty phone book for musicians and artists to find the resources they need, and making a Fredericton compilation to show off their hard work.

“Since there’s nothing laid out for us here there’s nobody telling you what the scene should look, it’s so small that when someone tries something new it almost always succeeds,” says Stevens. “They know we’re a bunch of hosers trying to do something cool and everybody can really latch onto that.”

Dylan Hackett is a writer living in New Brunswick - @dylannnhackett