Sled Island 2012 takes place June 20-23 at various locations around Calgary. Festival passes are available from sledisland.com
This Calgary-born music festival is now one of the largest in Calgary which has always featured some really talented acts. This year, Sled plans on being even bigger and better and they’ll be bringing some of the world’s greatest indie rock acts to our city.
On Tuesday, the festival organizers released an extraordinary list of their first eight artists who are going to perform. This includes Calgarian Feist, the frontman of the Sonic Youth – Thurston Moore, The Hold Steady and a few other amazing acts.
In its sixth year, Sled Island continues to grow and this year Archers of Loaf, Canadian electro artist Grime, party rocker Andrew W.K and the roots act Timber Timbre are all guest curators for the festival.
Not to mention, Danny Vacon, the Calgary boy who’s known from favourite Calgary bands like the Dudes, Dojo Workhouse and the High Kicks, will also be a guest curator. He’ll be choosing local area acts and artists who will just further improve this great lineup. One of Sled’s manadates has always been to spotlight the local scene and this year is no different.
Mid-bird, as opposed to early-bird, passes for Sled Island 2012 are already available online from their site. Individual tickets for the Fri-day night show at Olympic Plaza (Feist and Timber Timbre are the two announced headliners) and the Saturday Plaza concert (featuring The Hold Steady and Malkmus) will go on sale Saturday at 10 a.m. through Ticketmaster. The next list of artists for this year’s festival should be revealed in mid-March.
If you get the chance to go to Sled Island, I definitely recommend it! I attended  the festival and I got the opportunity to check out great acts like Of Montreal and the Sheepdogs while also getting to see some smaller acts like Gobble Gobble (now Born Gold) and Yip Deceiver! This year should be even bigger and better, so make sure that you attend!
