Farewell to the World Electronic Music Festival

Farewell to the World Electronic Music Festival

24 July, 2008 | 6.32AM

• Written by: Ellie
• Filed under: Music News: cutting edge, world electronic music festival

This year’s World Electronic Music Festival in Toronto, Canada will be the last.

Organisers Ryan Kruger and Jesse Brown have said that due to a decline in popularity and the sheer amount of effort and money that’s involved, the final event will take place this weekend.

Some may see it as sad news, adding to North America’s dwindling festival scene, but Brown and Kruger are taking a positive outlook, saying they want to concentrate on the expansion of their Cutting Edge rock festival, which evolved after introducing a ‘Cutting Edge’ stage to WEMF in 2006.

“As much as we thought that would be a great idea, to bring rock into the electronic scene, it didn’t really work because the rock people didn’t necessarily want to go to an electronic event,” says Kruger.

“So our thought was the other way around works okay – what we’ll do is throw a rock event and bring the electronic people into that. And that’s worked much better.”

“WEMF will be gone next year, but Cutting Edge will be much bigger.”

This year’s WEMF lineup includes Christopher Lawrence, Max Graham and Mark EG, but only time will tell whether they’ll be appreciated to the site’s capacity of 5,000.

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