Mike Edel

Vancouver singer-songwriter Jordan Klassen is one of the top 3 finalists in the 2012 Peak Performance Project music competition.

The Peak Performance Project announced its top five finalists Thursday afternoon, and Vancouver pop-rock duo Dear Rouge and singer-songwriters Dominique Fricot and Jordan Klassen have earned the top three spots in the music competition.

The winner will earn a grand prize of $102,700 and will be announced at the Peak Performance Project finale at the Commodore Ballroom on Nov. 22. Second and third place will earn $75,000 and $50,000.

Fourth and fifth place finalists JP Maurice and Mike Edel have been awarded $10,000 and $5,000 respectively.

Now in its fourth year, the competition sponsored by radio station 102.7 The Peak and Music B.C. gives 20 bands and artists the opportunity to develop their careers through a program that includes business and media training, live performance evaluation and a “boot camp” with industry experts.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the Peak Performance Project exceeded its mandate of giving artists everything they need to take their art to the next level,” 102.7 The Peak program director Tamara Stanners said in a statement.

Tickets for the finale are now on sale at Ticketmaster for $10.27 plus charges. Previous winners of the Peak Performance Project include We Are the City, Kyprios and Current Swell.

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If there’s a formula for artistry, it’s something like one part elation and beauty, one part angst and rueful inability to hold on to whatever was beautiful.

Somehow, though only in his mid-20s, Alberta-born, Victoria-based folk singer/songwriter Mike Edel has mastered the balance.

Launching a tour to support two new singles and a music video in Kelowna this Thursday, Oct. 25, he’s still struggling with themes from the last time he toured the Okanagan—youthful exuberance versus the realization this period is fleeting and what the future might hold versus the paths already narrowed, choices already eliminated.

Nowhere are these themes more evident than in the place one grew up.

“As much as home is this perfect tactile, concrete place, everyone has these internal struggles about that space,” he said in a telephone interview from the Alberta farm where he was raised.

The 26-year-old artist had just pressed 42 seven-inch vinyls, one song on each side, and framed by his own hand in old barn wood rather than the usual album cover.

His own process thus mirrors the juxtaposition of his subjects, mixing old-world craftsmanship with high-production video to attract a tech-savvy folk audience who like their acoustic streamed live and their music stored in clouds.

But, with five years in the industry under his belt, he also is quite calculated about that mix.

“I don’t make rash decisions,” he explained. “Even though people may see me as a carefree musician, those who really know me would say I move slowly and think things through.”

One of the main things he’s contemplating lately is the state of the family farm where he got the wood to build those album frames. His grandfather escaped the Russian czar, as he puts it, immigrating first to Mexico then to the Canadian prairies where his father, the son-in-law, now farms the family’s 1500 acres.

His sister is a teacher and mother living on that land, but he has chosen a life in music, describing it as “a way to articulate in a concise, yet open manner the microcosm and the macrocosm of the world.”

Music has served him well.

Starting with drums at age 14 and moving into the guitar by age 16, he has worked his way up to a spot in the Peak Performance Project this year; the cut to make the final five occurs in early November.

He’s just completed a business project submission for the popular contest, sponsored by The Peak 102.7 radio station in Vancouver, but says he ultimately plays music so that he doesn’t have to work in business or in a field or as a welder.

“Music has soul,” he said and soul appears to be important to him.

Then again, his father grows wheat, barley and Canola, arguable soul food when he describes it as “bread, beer and canola oil.”

Come out and hear all about it in his new single The Country Where I Come From, the first of the two songs on the newly minted vinyl (the other More Than Summer), a follow up to his debut album The Last of Our Mountains.

Mike Edel plays Habitat, 248 Leon Avenue on Oct. 25. Tickets are $9.50 available online or at the door, 248 Leon Ave - Kelowna Capital News

By Alex Hudson
Mike Edel just announced a Canadian tour with fellow BC-based folkie Jordan Klassen, and now he's unveiled a brand new video for his recent single "The Country Where I Came From."

The clip shows Edel trekking around the back country with his dog, gun and knife. He's clearly at home in the rural landscape, which makes sense given that the songwriter has spent much of the last few weeks helping to harvest the crops at his family's farm in Alberta.

Check out the clip for the atmospherically rustic track below, and also check out his tour schedule with Klassen.

"The Country Where I Came From," plus its B-side "More than the Summer," is available on iTunes.

Tour dates:

10/18 Vancouver, BC - The Red Room (Peak Performance Project)
10/25 Kelowna, BC - Habitat
10/26 Linden, AB - Linden Cultural Center
10/27 Lethbridge, AB - The Miz
10/29 Caronport, SK - Briercrest
10/30 Regina, SK - The Artful Dodger
11/1 Sault Ste. Marie, ON - Lop Lop's
11/5 Hamilton, ON - The Casbah
11/7 Toronto, ON - Cameron House
11/8 Peterborough, ON - The Spill
11/9 Montreal, QC - Burritoville
11/11 Ottawa, ON - Elmdale Tavern
11/14 Winnipeg, MB - West End Cultural Centre
11/15 Saskatoon, SK - Vangelis
11/16 Edmonton, AB - Elevation Room
11/17 Calgary, AB - The Ironwood
11/30 Victoria, BC - Lucky Bar
December 1 Vancouver, BC - The Media Club - Exclaim Magazine

If the Polaris Prize wasn’t enough proof that this country is teeming with talent, then meet Mike Edel. Mike is an musician from Alberta whose sound was cut on the Rocky Mountains. Partnering up with emerging Canadian filmmakers Kasey Lum and Jordan Clarke, the video was shot in nine days and features the vast Canadian landscape as the principle character in the look and feel of Mike’s music. We got to ask Mike a few questions to introduce this burgeoning talent.

What was the inspiration behind the song?
I recently finished harvest on my dad’s wheat farm on the prairies. I travel back here from Victoria, B.C. in the fall most years to work the harvest. My sister recently built a big house with her husband a half mile from my parents house and it made me think of this ‘quiet life in the country’ that all my siblings were living and that I have seemingly given up.

I took some inspiration from a story called Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy, the one character says:

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor-such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps-what more can the heart of man desire?”

What was the inspiration behind the video?
We traveled to the prairies from Victoria and Vancouver on a nine day road trip in a 1993 Mercury Villager. We all felt like kids, we dwelled in the van looking for beautiful landscape in the same way they sleep in a pile in Where The Wild Things Are. We wanted to capture beauty but juxtapose it with harsh objects, the elements and questions. The [man in the video] is a childhood friend of mine who ranches, hunts, fishes and snowboards.

What was it like working on the album?
We have been very busy with The Peak Performance Project in Vancouver, BC. During this we recorded these two songs for a 7? with Colin Stewart at The Hive who has recorded Dan Mangan and Yukon Blonde.

What’s next for you?
Touring Canada and a few dates in the U.S. this fall. It will be my first time to Ontario and Quebec and then turning my efforts toward a new album next year. - Much Music Blog

Edel’s voice of Damien Rice having a meeting with Dan Mangan, departs from the bubble-gum sounding opening cuts from Mountains, to a more welcome straight-ahead, honest latter half. - See Magazine

Mike Edel has spent most of his two years in Victoria as a working musician, a difficult task in a city that's home to an active, thriving community of artists.

Recorded output not being what it once was, most local musicians — even those with original material and national tours at the ready — make their living playing live at one of the city's cover-song spots. Edel, a native of Linden, Alta., has purposefully shied away from the bar-band circuit, choosing instead to play venues where the focus is on the music, where carefully chosen lyrics won't get lost in the din.

By frequenting listener-friendly rooms such as Hermann's Jazz Club, Fairfield United Church and the Victoria Event Centre, Edel has created for himself a solid audience of followers, one that appears to be steadily growing. He is well-regarded in the local arts community, and often works in full-band form with some of the city's finest musicians. But at the end of the day, his career is his own.

That's something of which he's incredibly proud.

"I'm a singer-songwriter," Edel, 25, said recently. "It's an individual thing, in some respects. I like heading up a project, and writing out of my own experience, my perspective and sharing it with people."

Edel is currently winding down a 16-date tour of the U.S. and Canada that brings him back through Victoria on Friday. He is performing with local roots favourite Oliver Swain and rising pop act the Archers, performers who appear to be stylistically at odds with Edel's charming indie-folk.

That's precisely the point of the exercise, according to Edel.

By developing the ability to play with everyone from jam bands to indie rockers, the Alberta native has created a world of opportunities for himself.

"There's a duality," Edel said. "But I think I'll always have an affinity for something that is a little bit organic, a little bit folksy. I love that stuff."

He was born in Calgary, but raised 45 minutes away in the farming community of Linden, a small Mennonite town of fewer than 1,000 people. Edel speaks fondly of his rural upbringing; in fact, you can hear it in his voice, both in person and on record. He was probably raised to mind his Ps and Qs, and does not appear to have anything but good things to say about Linden.

It was a generally quiet life, Edel tells me, until he picked up the drums, thanks to lessons from his pastor, at age 14. Edel, who was in Grade 8 at the time, joined a Blink-182 cover band soon after for some talent-show dates, the memory of which still makes him laugh.

"There's not a lot of music there," he said of Linden, where he stayed until he was 18. "And if there is, it's at noon in the church service."

His pop-punk days didn't last. He soon switched to a more organic form of music, playing acoustic guitar, writing songs, and singing with the purpose of sharing his experiences and outlook with audiences. To properly do that, Edel knew that he would have to leave Linden because if he stayed, he would become a farmer like almost everyone else in his town.

"In a way, you reject home when you're young. But it defines you, in a way, and you coddle it back. The concept of home, in everybody's life, is an interesting idea No person defines it the same way."

Edel's journey took him from his family's farm to Edmonton and then Germany, where he lived for a year right out of high school. He also studied jazz guitar, constantly working at honing his craft. It was all part of a greater journey, Edel explained.

"You're always seeking adventure in your life, even if it's not physically moving to places. When you're young your feet are itchy. You want to read Jack Kerouac and get on the road on a little bit."

He spent two summers working at a vacation spot in the mountains of Santa Cruz, Calif., not unlike the one portrayed in the film, Dirty Dancing. Out of that emerged his debut EP, 2008's Hide From the Seasons.

In 2009, after his first year in Santa Cruz, Edel moved to Victoria. He said he went back to California in 2010 to end that chapter in his life. "People are the most important thing to me. Moving to Victoria, I wanted to hunker down a bit and start a community for myself."

He rose quickly among the ranks in Victoria, endearing himself to musicians and audiences alike. His debut full-length album, The Last of Our Mountains, came out earlier this year, its critical acclaim prompting another spate of performances.

Edel's current trek is his third tour this year, but he isn't thinking about a making a new record just yet. In fact, Edel wants to tour The Last of Our Mountains again next year.

That'll give him plenty of time to craft a followup, he said. "I'm the one making all my decisions, which is kind of sweet. I think pretty grand, but I'm not someone who is quick to act."

Watch a video of Mike Edel performing Bottom Floor Apartment at http://youtu.be/nEpt_elQMCo - Times Colonist

The Country Where I Came From is about living the rural life, which still appeals to Edel — at least in the philosophical sense. “The songs asks the question: What more can the heart of a man desire than living a quiet life in the country?” said the singer. - Red Deer Advocate

"Jumping off from this dramatic end-of-innocence moment, Edel examines the transition to a new reality moving forward from young adulthood necessitates." - Kelowna Capital News

"a delicately catchy record that rolls through its eight tracks as freshly and easily as wind across the harvest." - Calgary Herald

"a delicately catchy record that rolls through its eight tracks as freshly and easily as wind across the harvest." - Calgary Herald

Mike Edel's 'Nothing Left' really hit me, it's a great song. - CBC Radio's Kathryn Duncan

"His songwriting is truly enriched from seeing the world." - BT's Ryan Jespersen