Official Shambhala 2019 Pre-Party With Stickybuds in Thunder Bay

The prize on offer was a ticket to a festival on the far side of the country, and it was the whole idea of the night. Each Official Shambhala Pre-Party gave people a chance to win a ticket to Shambhala 2019, so the Thunder Bay night on Friday 26 July doubled as a draw for the trip west.

The festival itself was the 22nd annual Shambhala Music Festival, held in August 2019 at Salmo River Ranch, near Salmo in the Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia. Three provinces lay between that ranch and this city. The pre-party was how a mountain festival reached a lake port.

Ten o’clock, C$15

Doors were at 10 p.m. and advance tickets cost C$15, sold online through the promoter’s shop on TicketScene, which took Visa, Visa Debit and MasterCard. Festival tickets themselves were nearly sold out but still available from the festival’s own site, so the draw was a side door for anyone who had missed the main sale.

Across the fourteen priced shows of 2019 on this site, tickets ran from C$10 to C$45, so C$15 sat near the bottom of that range, and only a step above the cheapest night of the year.

The venue is not named in the announcement, so this page names none. Thunder Bay and a Friday are the facts on offer.

Four names on the bill

Stickybuds headed the list, followed by R-Kill, Icosa and Hekz. Stickybuds is Tyler Martens, a Canadian DJ and producer who trained at the Kelowna Centre of Arts and Technology, worked as an audio teacher, and put out his first release on Goodgroove Records in 2008.

He describes his sound as a melting pot of party music, moving from drum and bass to glitch-hop to funk, with acapella versions of top 40 songs dropped in along the way.

That last habit is a crowd-friendly one, and a sensible choice for a night whose main draw was a prize.

His own biography calls him a Shambhala fixture of nearly two decades, and the pairing makes sense: a pre-party fronted by an artist who plays the real festival each year sells the connection better than any poster copy. Of R-Kill, Icosa and Hekz, the bill gives only the names, and nothing is claimed for them here.

That biography counts more than 70 releases and audiences in over 27 countries, with stages at Envision, Burning Man and Glastonbury. It is a long record for the headliner of a C$15 club night. He had been at it since the late 2000s, and a small-city stop was one more room on the way.

What the festival was that year

Shambhala 2019 ran on six stages: the Amphitheatre, the Fractal Forest, the Grove, the Living Room, the Pagoda and the Village. It drew more than 20,000 people, and by 2019 it was the longest-running electronic music festival in Canada. DJ Mag named it the best festival in North America that year.

Against that scale, a Thursday-to-Monday festival on a family farm and a Friday night in Thunder Bay have little in common except the music and the mood, and the announcement’s own word for the mood, “Shambhavibes”, is doing a lot of work. The pre-party’s job was to carry a small piece of it east.

Where the festival began

Counting back from the 22nd edition in 2019 puts the first Shambhala in 1998, so by this pre-party the festival was old enough to run a network of warm-up nights of its own. They were held in cities across the country in the weeks before the gates opened, and Thunder Bay’s was one of the stops.

The 2024 edition of the series, documented on the festival’s own site, listed eleven pre-parties, from Kelowna and Revelstoke to Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg. Thunder Bay does not appear on that list, which puts the 2019 date outside the later pattern.

The date sat thirteen days before the festival began. That is a reading of the calendar: long enough for a prize winner to book time off, short enough that the excitement had not cooled.