Alt Waves Festival 2023

Two people engaged in an energetic dance move on a paved outdoor area.

06-16/17-2023

Alternative Waves

Just a little background: Alternative Waves Music Festival started in 2019 with only eleven bands and expanded each year from there. Keith Auction, creative director, organizer and promotor for the event is local to the Medicine Hat area and felt the need to bring the music scene to life in his home town. Alt Waves has become a staple of the Alternative music culture in Western Canada.

This year's festival was the perfect way to kick off the summer of music festivals with an assortment of punk, metal, rap and EDM. As a bit of a punk rock lover myself, the punk line up was incredible with the Broken Yolks from Edmonton, Trashed Ambulance from Red Deer and Sessions from Calgary. To wrap up the first day’s main stage Emo/goth, viral stars 2 Shadows from Vancouver put on an amazing show! Day two of Alt Waves was geared towards the metal crowd and didn’t disappoint. We heard music from so many bands on the indoor and outdoor stages. Just a few of these bands were Our Last Crusade, All Was Lost and Plaguebringer. See the full list of bands below.

A performer in glasses and a neon yellow t-shirt with a cartoon graphic sings passionately into a microphone.

Keith Auction, Creative Director/Owner/Promotor

A bearded performer in a black t-shirt and baseball cap holds a microphone during an outdoor performance.

Geoff Bourrie LAH, MC

A rock singer in black mesh top performs energetically against a red-lit backdrop.

Otto the Otter and the Festival's logo

One of the first things I noticed about the festival was the logo. The girlie part in me thought it was the cutest logo I have see and the punk part of me thought, "Fuck Yeah with the mowhalk and piercings."

"When I asked Keith about the Otter logo this is what he said, "That there would be Otto the Otter, brainchild of board member and merchandise director, Soncho Austin. Way back in 2015 when the festival first started and I was not even yet a volunteer, the festival had a designed logo with a shark character as the centerpiece. The shark guy was cool and all, but there are no sharks in Alberta... Haha. A while after I had fully taken over the festival, we were trying to find ways to improve on small things first to help with branding like maybe our name, logo etc. Around the time we started thinking of that stuff, there was a news that otters had returned to the South Saskatchewan River in Medicine Hat for the first time in over 100 years. This made the option pretty clear to Soncho, so he began working on a new logo and a character we could expand on in the future. He has ideas for comics, merch and graphics and our friend Alan Wingenbach has started looking at ways to animate Otto. Who knows what will happen in the future as far as all that goes, but Otto is here to stay!"