Electric Eclectics Festival: culture x landscape

‪@electriceclectics1‬ is 2 days and nights of concerts, DJs, art, dancing and camping overlooking the Big Head Valley at the Funny Farm in Meaford, Ontario.
Electric Eclectics is an annual festival of avant-garde and experimental music, sound art, and media
art, taking place in the rural community of Meaford, Ontario. We presented our first festival in July-
August 2006, and we have presented a festival each year since.
Our 2024 festival will be our 19th
annual festival.
EE takes place at the unique settings of the Funny Farm, a 100-acre property 12 km from the town of
Meaford, where we showcase artists and celebrate our environment by mixing culture with landscape.
In addition, we also present festival events in neighbouring towns, including outreach concerts and
educational workshops, as well as online performances in collaboration with regional, national, and
international partners and presenters.
Our events in Meaford and surrounding towns create a connection between the rural part of the
festival and the surrounding town's venues and community businesses, including parks and
community hubs such as Meaford Library, with whom we collaborate to present annual music
workshops through their summer youth program.
The festival's use of the rural venue of the farm as
well as locations in town stimulate the audience's and the artist’s connection to the local community.
We present a varied program of experimental music, sound art, and media art featuring a mix of local
and regional artists, artists from across Canada, and international artists.
Our annual programming
includes Indigenous artists, LGBTQ+ artists, artists of colour, and consists of approximately 50%
women artists each year.

For our annual festival weekend event, we invite all of our artists to stay for several days at the festival
site, where they are provided overnight accommodation and enjoy catered/backstage meals provided
by our staff. This is a necessity since the nearest restaurants are c. 12 km away in town, and one
cannot simply walk down the street from our festival site to find a bite to eat. The meals provided to
the artists and festival staff and volunteers therefore encourage a collective social engagement that
often leads to artistic collaborations. This is an important and regular feature of our festival operation
and concept, and indeed many artists stay for up to a week or more, which often leads to intensive
and fruitful artistic collaborations and interactivity. Thus, we encourage a de facto artists-in-residence
atmosphere that results in spontaneous and sometimes long-lasting artistic collaborations between
our invited artists, volunteers, and staff (our volunteers and staff are mostly artists and musicians as
well).
Additionally, most of our audience attendees are also artists or musicians who also create
spontaneous happenings at the festival site. Therefore, artistic interactions or collaborations between
invited artists and audience happen spontaneously due to our relaxed and open-ended festival format.
www.electric-eclectics.com