On August 10th, join the Regina Folk Festival for a special marquee concert in the Conexus Arts Centre: The Skygazer Soirée!

Featuring five INCREDIBLE artists, this STACKED concert is a MUST-ATTEND celebration of the Regina Folk Festival! Happening during the festival’s ‘fallow year’, we invite everyone to experience excellent music in an extra-special setting, to sow festival dreams toward its return in 2025.

THE SKYGAZER SOIRÉE

Featuring:

Chantal Kreviazuk

Aysanabee

Great Lake Swimmers

with teaser performances by

Belle Plaine

Merv XX Gotti

Hosted by CBC’s Peter Mills and Shauna Powers

More programming details to come!

Supported by CBC Saskatchewan, City of Regina, Conexus Arts Centre, SK Arts, The Department of Canadian Heritage, The Lorne & Evelyn Johnson Foundation and TD Bank.

Saturday, August 10, 2024

Conexus Arts Centre (200 Lakeshore Dr)

Doors @ 6:00PM, Show @ 7:00PM

Advance Tickets $57.50 (Plus Applicable Service Charges)

Door Tickets $72.50 (Plus Applicable Service Charges)

TICKETS: On sale now!

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Chantal Kreviazuk made her critically acclaimed full-length debut, “Under These Rocks and Stones,” in 1997. Since then, the Winnipeg-born and internationally celebrated 3x JUNO Award and Grammywinning singer-songwriter and musician, classically trained pianist, actress, movie producer, philanthropist, humanitarian and proud wife and mother of three has recorded 10 albums, including a live album, a holiday album and a collaboration with her husband and Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida. A prolific songwriter, Kreviazuk has written global smashes for the likes of Drake, Gwen Stefani, Pitbull, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Carrie Underwood, Avril Lavigne, Shakira, Kelly Clarkson and Kendrick Lamar. Equally committed to helping those in need, Kreviazuk was awarded the Order of Canada in 2014 along with Maida, for their efforts to raise awareness and support for human and animal rights, mental health, education and the environment. Kreviazuk has been an ambassador to War Child for more than two decades and one of the organization’s founding artists.

Aysanabee (Ace-in-abbey) is a two-time JUNO award-winning Oji-Cree artist. With a swirling mix of indie, soul, and electronic sounds and pulse-quickening fingerpicking, his music featured on his 2023 EP Here and Now and his 2022 debut LP Watin is both hypnotic and melodious. Aysanabee made history as the first Indigenous artist to win the JUNO Awards for Alternative Album of the Year and the coveted Songwriter of the Year, for Here and Now.

He is the first Indigenous artist to hit Number 1 on Mediabase Canada's Alternative Rock chart. He has been short-listed for the 2023 Polaris Prize and performed close to 300 shows on major stages, festivals, and venues across Canada and globally.

Featuring a blend of acoustic instruments, rural soundscapes, and wistful vocals, Great Lake Swimmers are a critically acclaimed indie-folk group led by songwriter/vocalist Tony Dekker. Based in Toronto, Ontario, the group emerged in the early 2000s with a succession of heavily atmospheric albums recorded in old silos and rural country churches. The music developed in that pastoral warmth, performed and recorded in acoustically unique and historical locales with a revolving cast of personnel. They are renowned for their homespun folk and lush, intimate Americana in their live set.

Great Lake Swimmers celebrate their 20th anniversary in 2023 with “Uncertain Country,” an album where doubts are followed by discovery, demos end up as finished tracks, and themes of new beginnings, rear-view reflections, and ruminations on the fluidity of time form the basis of the eleven new songs. It follows a prolonged period of collective anxiety. Recorded in different locales—and with a variety of musicians—a theme of questioning runs throughout. Even before the world turned upside down, Dekker felt mired in uncertainty: from the climate crisis to the ever-changing political landscape. The “uncertain country” chosen as the album’s theme is not a specific place. Rather, it’s a territory we, as humans, inhabit in the 21st century — a world that, more often than not, is confusing, unfamiliar and unsettling.

Belle Plaine is the stage name of Melanie Hankewich, a singer/songwriter who was raised on her great-grandparents’ homestead near the hamlet of Fosston, SK. Belle draws from the traditions of country, blues and folk music, while never fitting squarely into one category. She’s part charming folk-singer, part honky tonk front-woman and part grizzled bandmom. Whether you saw her in your local roadhouse or singing with a symphony orchestra, you know that Belle is a storyteller who embodies the heart and soul of the prairies. She’s currently writing her next album, The Weather.

Merv xx Gotti is the award-winning Canadian multi-genre artist behind the solo singer-songwriter dream-pop project, "Guitar Songs”.

His debut solo singer-songwriter release, Guitar Songs EP, was released March 2024 in anticipation of his debut 5-show run at SXSW (Austin, TX).

His EP explores a more minimal sound, emphasizing his androgynous, dreamy vocals to deliver vulnerable, sincere songwriting. The EP has already amassed over 200,000 streams on Spotify, with the EP’s first single, “Jiujitsu”, being played on 21 CBC stations across the country, the biggest syndication pick-up for a Saskatchewan artist in the over 5 years. The EP also charted for 5 weeks in a row across Canada’s campus and community radio stations on Earshot’s Top 30 charts, including Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, and more.

The Skygazer Soirée