The Toronto-based label Stereo Ferment held the event at Cafe Pamenar. Our contributing editor, Lawrence Belanger, was there.
AUG 3. – The sun hadn’t gone down yet, but Cafe Pamenar was bumping to the beats of Oreku, Dacou, and Coy Haste, as the first ever Stereo Ferment dayish party went down. With a laidback yet energetic vibe and a summer-appropriate tropical sound, the label’s crew kept the patio packed and the crowd dancing straight until 11pm.
I first discovered Oreku, AKA Cayden Mowbray, last May as part of my frequenting of Handlebar over in Kensington Market. During a coffee chat with him a couple months later where we discussed his inspiration, label, and plans as an artist, he invited me to cover the upcoming party.
The Show
I wasn’t able to get there right at the start, but when I did, the party was going strong, with a full dancefloor outside and a busy bar inside. Given how lively and full the outdoor, backroom patio was, I had to deftly navigate the dancefloor to the front in order to greet Mowbray on stage without knocking over any drinks or stepping on any toes (and avoiding the reverse).
The set he was playing when I arrived was a bit more acid-y and trance-y than the last time I saw him, while still featuring his effortless shifting of tempos and signature blending of cultures.
Oreku’s music has a global element – evoking the sounds of the Caucuses, Levant, Persia, and India in its samples, melodies, and rhythms. His sets have a habit of conjuring images of traveling the silk road in a sort of retro-futuristic fantasy, where there’s access to samplers and synthesizers and Pioneer DJ decks. Perhaps influenced by our conversation over coffee a couple weeks prior at that same cafe, much of his music I could see myself listening to as inspiration for my worldbuilding.
It was my first time hearing the other two producers, each of whom brought their own spin to the label’s identity.
Coy Haste brought a disco-like sensibility to his set, who started out playing some stuff that reminded me of the era in the late 70s, when producers such as Giorgio Moroder introduced disco produced with synths and machines, perhaps most famously in Donna Summer’s 1977 B-Side single “I Feel Love”. His set shifted into some tunes with a stronger 80s influence at times too, with a faster tempo evocative of Hi-NRG synthpop blended with world music.
Dacou had a bit of a future funk vibe, bringing the show a bit more genre-turned-internet-meme influence.
The night wrapped up with a back-to-back-to-back set between the three DJs, who seemlessly blended their styles and showcased the unified, yet varied sound of the label.
While I’d consider Oreku, Dacou, and even Coy Haste to each have tracks either fitting into house music or with it’s clear influence, its undeniable that the incorporation of samples outside of the western European cultural sphere makes their music unique and appealing to a broader audience.
Despite common views and mainstream portrayals of rave (“EDM”) culture, clubbers, and more, electronic music has a long tradition of appealing to a wide range of people. This was evident in the crowd at Pamenar, which was a broad mix of races, genders, and ages. Off the dancefloor, some of the people I chatted with included fellow non-binary folks, and many people from the regions who’s cultures inspired the music played.
Photos from the party in the evening:
About Stereo Ferment
It was Stereo Ferment’s first “dayish” party. Held in the back patio area of the Kensington Market venue, the local record label Founded by Toronto-based Australian producer and DJ Cayden Mowbray, the label is focused on the “multicultural intersections of disco, psych, funk, house and jazz,” as described on Oreku’s Bandcamp.
Oreku’s label is making a name for itself, sticking out from the crowd in the Toronto electronic music scene. At the show, three people each brought up how Stereo Ferment’s lineup stood out from the house, hip hop, and pop DJs that dominate the Toronto nightlife’s rave and club scene.
Ferment, at least from this writer’s admittedly limited perspective, sets itself apart from typical (and sometimes cringe-inducing) “World Music,” which often appropriates middle eastern, northern and Central African, and Asian influences all interchangeable with a sort of faux-reverence for the cultures that nonetheless romanticizes real people.
What I feel that artists like Oreku, Dacou, and Coy Haste each do in their own way is look outside Europe and North America for sources of inspiration to make something new, rather than to try and appropriate or approximate some idealized notion of “exotic” cultures previously ruled by Europeans. It’s cultural exchange in a way that itself echoes the silk road that their music so often reminds me of, where eastern and western philosophies and ideas mixed and moved throughout Antiquity.
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