Mike Edel - "Edel's voice is Damien Rice having a meeting with Dan Mangan..."

by Makcolm Petch

There must be something about February that attracts Victoria’s Mike Edel to the road life. He played Streaming Café in February of 2011, and now he’s back again this February on the 18^th.

There is a video loop of past SC performances by various artists which plays in the café during the week, and Edel’s “You smile at me” jumps out at me each time I hear it. The song is actually called “Bottom Floor Apartment”, and when I hear the stabbing opening lines/phrases I always think ‘Okay, I’ve heard this before...’, and then as the song builds and gets to the chorus’s line of “you smile at me” I recall that “Oh, yeah – this is Mike Edel”. You can see those same past-performance videos here.

Edel grew up on his family’s grain farm in rural Alberta, but more recently he’s made his home in Victoria, BC. He’s made a name for himself already, with positive reviews in all types of media:

            "Edel's voice is Damien Rice having a meeting with Dan Mangan..." See Magazine

            "'The Country Where I came From' is not only a wonderful homage to home, wherever that may be, but uses the simplicity of a banjo and hand claps to perfection." Grey Owl Point

            “In the last two years that Mike Edel has been in Victoria he has established himself as one of the region’s go-to musicians” Times Colonist

Mike is warm and personable in performance, and that same warmth comes through on his album The Last of Our Mountains, produced by Winston Hauschild (who’s lent his musical prowess to other Canadian acts like Hey Ocean and Hannah Georgas). No doubt that warmth can find some of its origins in the fact that the album sessions were the last time Mushroom Studios’ vintage gear was used in production. Sigh; the end of an era… The Last of Our Mountains is worth having in your collection even just for its historical value – but the music itself is definitely worth owning, too.

Mike Edel has already toured Western Canada five times. It could be that Mike gets bored sitting around in the mild climate of Victoria, or it could be that he loves the challenge of traversing hill and dale during the frigid winter months; in either case, he’s no stranger to covering the long distances between Canadian towns while on the road, and he seems willing enough to do it when there’s snow everywhere.

You don’t have to travel to Medicine Hat for the cold Tongue On Post Folk Festival, nor do you have to catch a ferry and hit Victoria for the Rifflandia Festival (both of which are events Edel has been part of); you can catch Mike Edel live and in-person on Saturday, February 18, right on your doorstep at the Streaming Café, 596 Leon Ave in Kelowna. Not close enough for you? Then watch and listen online at streamingcafe.net, starting live at 7:00 p.m. – and you can interact with Mike and ask him anything you want, whether you’re physically at the café or whether you’re checking in online. We hope to see you there.

St. Columba from Mike Edel on Vimeo.