On the August long weekend of 2025, the grassy meadow around the bandshell at Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park was a patchwork of picnic blankets and lawn chairs as concertgoers settled in to watch local electroacoustic musician Alyse Johnston, who performs as faun.a. Mosquitos buzzed overhead as Johnston drifted with deliberation from bass clarinet to violin to bansuri to electronics—one hand working a sampling console, the other controlling a modular synthesizer to conjure a daydreamy drone of glowing tones and low vibrational purrs. Nearby, a raven perched in a Douglas fir chimed in with a raspy, persistent call that could have been mistaken for one of Johnston’s loops. When she began bowing her violin against a backdrop of pre-recorded crow calls, it was hard to tell where the composition ended and the meadow soundscape began.
Johnston’s performance was part of Wonderment, Garden City Electronic Music Society’s (GCEMS) flagship festival of ambient and electroacoustic music. Despite enjoying its best-ever attendance, the tenth edition of the festival ended up being its last—at least for the time being. Earlier this year, David Bodrug, founder and artistic director of GCEMS, announced that the 2026 edition had been cancelled due to funding challenges. “It’s been a hard year for navigating finances,” he told me.
Although the 2026 edition of Wonderment had secured government grant support, GCEMS was grappling with financial uncertainty due to delayed funding decisions and a significant decline in donations, making it difficult to sustain its summer festival. In response, the society shifted its focus to Wonderment’s noisier counterpart, NeuzTec.
Local musician and front-of-house engineer Wil Shulba was inspired to found the festival, which he initially named NeuzFest (the name changed in 2017), after playing a Drone Day show in 2015. “Every half-hour there was another artist, and I was super attracted to that,” Shulba told me in a separate, later interview. “I got a pretty decent tax return that year, so I decided to throw a show at Intrepid Theatre.”
Bodrug and Shulba met at the first edition and recognized their festivals’ shared emphases on advancing public experiences with electronic music, related media arts, and technologies. They assembled a board and incorporated GCEMS as a non-profit arts society, allowing them to apply for government grants to supplement their bootstrapped funding.
That also helped the society expand its community presence.
In 2022, after six years of migrating from one venue to another, GCEMS partnered with the Victoria Conservatory of Music to co-present NeuzTec’s seventh edition, which brought NeuzTec to the Wood Recital Hall at the conservatory’s downtown Victoria location, housed in a former Methodist church. The festival has returned each year. “Nothing else happens like this at Wood Hall. It’s their recital space, we’re kind of borrowing it,” Shulba said. In addition to hosting and co-promoting the event, the conservatory traditionally contributes a block of artists to NeuzTec’s programming as well as workshops from its faculty.
While Wonderment was about inviting listeners to dissolve into their surroundings, NeuzTec embraces harsher, more dissonant sounds and eccentricity, with artists as likely to perform from behind tables covered in expensive synthesizers and pedals as they are to use circuit-bent toys and rat’s nests of patch cables, contact microphones, and abused toolbox implements.
Expanded to a four-day lineup, the 2026 edition opens with a program featuring performances from composer and producer Ry Moran (a member of the Red River Métis who is the associate university librarian, reconciliation, at the University of Victoria), Vancouver producer loscil (the electronic music project of Canadian composer and multimedia artist Scott Morgan), and performer-composer Sarah Belle Reid (assistant professor of music technology at UVic, where she specializes in electronic music composition, instrument design, and human–machine interaction).
Montreal’s Martin Messier presents 1 Drop 1000 Years, an immersive audiovisual performance that interprets the process of homeostasis in ocean currents. “His work is almost like a magic show in a lot of ways, so I think that’s going to be well-received here,” Bodrug said. The lineup also includes sets from electroacoustic violinist Meredith Bates and kosmiche droner Magneticring, the festival debut of experimental composer XEL, and NeuzTec alumni such as plunderphonic improvisers Isolated Showers, modular summit Telurk, and dub noise conjurer Troll.
“Alumni are important,” Shulba said. “Many of these artists are only playing NeuzTec. They don’t often play out, they’re not on tour, or they’re just not doing that. I think that’s been the ethos of the noise community here for a long time: People on the outskirts playing in their basements and stuff like that can come together and be among their peers.”
Although Wonderment has been the society’s primary programming focus over the years, Bodrug doesn’t view its hiatus as an existential threat. This summer the society hosted an ambient day in Banfield Park, with plans to continue that tradition in the future, without the Wonderment branding.
With NeuzTec taking on a larger role in the community, Shulba is acutely aware of the added responsibility, but he’s eager to test new programming strategies to introduce the public to the society’s work. He has designs of executing harsh noise shows in unconventional venues, increasing the presence of the society’s synth petting zoos, working more with students in the music and computer science program at UVic, and presenting environmental noise installations for eventgoers to explore. What’s certain for now is that there’s no slowing down. “There’s lots of talk about ‘let’s do NeuzTec forever,’” Shulba said.
Tom Beedham is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, British Columbia. He has written for Chart Attack, Exclaim!, The Grind, Musicworks, NOW, and VICE. He is the managing director of the Toronto arts series Long Winter. In 2020, he co-founded the music writers’ co-operative New Feeling with a group of peers from across Canada, and currently serves as features editor.