2021 was a year of renewal for the collective. We released I Love Oscill8 Vol. 3, Launched our "People Make Music" Podcast and received a grant from "Calgary Arts Development" to help fund an event series in 2022.
We also launched a community discord server to better connect the collective, and other artists. It's a great way to get involved with the musical community, learn from others, and share you sound on a regular basis!
Behind the scenes we were looking inward at our own organization. We re-examined our values and our mission statement to better understand and define our purpose within the community.
We settled on 4 pillars to guide our efforts going forward.
They are
Create - Engage and facilitate content creation
Connect - Bring our community closer together striving to understand and serve them better.
Program - Put on great events that inspire experienced and aspiring Live Performers
Evolve - Commit to a process of growth and improve the way we do things so we can achieve more in service to our community.
Part of our commitment to "Evolve" as an organization was to update our visual Aesthetic.
Our Graphics Design Guru Enoque Carrancho got to work re-imagining a fresh look for the organization. After a few months of various ideas and sketches he presented the logo you see at the top of the page.
It is refreshingly simplistic, with a slight nod to the arcane, thanks to some consideration to the principles of sacred geometry.
Enoque had this to say about its creation "Initially, I was working with fonts only and the spacing between letters and trying to frame them into a square. Then the square is what gave me the idea to work with shapes instead and try to create a symbol that was unique. I tried a lot of different shapes in different ways. When I finally drew this one on paper, it jumped out at me right away with a meaning of the shapes together: music is forever moving forward through time and space."
"Music is forever moving forward through time and space."
This statement resonates deeply with me. Not just the fact that that music is bigger than all of us. That it has brought us together over countless millennia and cultures. It is a shared language we understand from birth. Being a musician is to take part in a vast tradition that spans millennia. Some of the earliest musical instruments found are 10s of thousands of years old and predate written language. It is our honour to carry a small portion of that tradition in step with musicians here and around the world.