Surrey’s Casse-Tete festival offers sonic smorgasbord
Published 9:00 pm Monday, July 6, 2026
It’s all about “expanding the possibilities of delight.”
So says Jeremy Stewart, founder and artistic director of Casse-Tete: A Festival of Experimental Music which returns to South Surrey’s Historic Stewart Farm (13723 Crescent Road) July 10 to 12.
Three days of all-ages free programming will feature everything from extended improvisations and new music in the classical tradition, to unorthodox fusions of styles and instrumentation and often unheard idioms such as “post-rock” and “noise.”
While the name of the festival roughly translates as “head-breaker” (actually a common French term for a puzzle) – nobody’s out to actually break anybody’s head with this music, Stewart noted during a recent conversation with Peace Arch News.
Instead, the idea is to offer a kind of welcoming, playful sonic smorgasbord in which virtually any musical appreciator can find something that is accessible, as well as new and intriguing flavours adjacent to their previous experience.
Headliners for this year’s festival include (on Friday night) Seattle cellist Lori Goldston (who describes herself as “semi feral”– as a classically trained musician who has embraced experimental forms); Costa Rican composer and conductor Jose Delgado Guevara; bassist Olive Shakur, and highly regarded, highly versatile drummer Kevin Romain.
On Saturday, an interactive afternoon program with drama teacher and experimental sound artists Slavko Bucifal is designed for children, while evening performers will include “sound collagist” V. Vecker (also known as Keith Wecker) who builds his highly individual work by layering multiple loops; and fellow multi-instrumentalist (including flat-picking and pedal steel guitar) and media artist Raghu Lokanathan.
Wrapping up the festival on Sunday afternoon will be ok vancouver ok, an avant garde art pop project by songwriter and visual artist Jeffrey Mark Johnson.
Stewart, himself a musician of broad and eclectic tastes (guitarist of improvisational metallic noise project Christians, he is currently deeply involved with his wife Erin in a new songwriting-driven band, Voice Of Fire) started Casse Tete in 2013 in the former home city of Prince George and ran it successfully until 2017.
After they moved to the Semiahmoo Peninsula, he restarted the festival in 2023, initially under the aegis of the White Rock Jazz and Blue Festival.
In 2025 it became a stand-alone event again at Historic Stewart Farm.
“That was our first year there, and we’re very grateful for that,” Stewart said. “The City of Surrey is right there with us.”
The Stewart Garage, where the festival takes place, is “a cute little room,” he added.
“We can seat around 40 to 50 people there, and it worked great last year.
“This is music as art – but in a very come-as-you-are situation,” he said.
“You can’t really have kids asking what kind of instrument that is, in a traditional concert setting.”
This year, he said, the festival is trying a new experiment – two evening performances highlighted by an extended improvisation piece that will bring together many of the featured artists of the festival, hopefully sparking new collaborations and explorations in the future.
Prince George proved very open to such an adventurous culture and community-defining program, but the Semiahmoo Peninsula shows every indication of being ready for it at this point, Stewart said.
In the North and in a lot of cities in Western Canada, he pointed out, “there is a culture of making your own forms of entertainment, of being independent, of not waiting for government institutions to make it happen.”
Vancouver is “a little less that way,” he said.
But Surrey and White Rock, for bedroom communities, demonstrate a great deal of potential to become a sophisticated, richly varied cultural hub, with events like Casse Tete leading the way, he said.
“We have what it takes to be a city – we just need to do it,” Stewart said.
“For me this festival is a way to discover the musical culture here, and be that culture. And all you have to do is show up.”
For more information on the event and performance times, visit cassetetefestival.com