The ways we discover and create music continue to evolve. Matthew Vanderkwaak’s new project is shining a light on both his own music and other emergent Canadian artists.
Photo: Samuel Landry
It’s 2025, and many of the guardrails and gatekeepers that used to decide what music we consumed are gone. We are no longer bound solely to whatever an A& R rep might decide we like. We can decide for ourselves.
That goes for artists as well. Most of us grew up with the narrative that discovery is either by sheer luck or after getting in the van and burning hard miles down the road. And even if you wanted to make a record, that might prove cost-prohibitive.
While some of that is still true, for the most part, the barriers to entry are lower than they’ve ever been. Today, it’s entirely possible to make a record using your phone and a few other software programs. You can do this without ever leaving your bedroom.
So that’s the good news; if you want to make a record, you can! The not-so-good side effect is that listeners must wade through more and more records before finding you.
Discovery might’ve changed forms, but it still matters.
Enter Matthew Joel Vanderkwaak. Matthew is from Atlantic Canada and is an artist himself. Taking a page from the likes of Fog Chaser, miter and olivia rafferty, he’s creating music in real time, using new pathways, and his readers get to hear it first.
Further, he’s committed to raising the profile of other artists and has a series where he spotlights emerging Canadian musicians, with an emphasis on Canadian folk and country music.
In 2025, algorithms and digital platforms are making a lot of noise. Artists/curators like Matthew Vanderkwaak provide a valuable signal, lighting the way for new listeners.
And with that, I’ll get out of the way and let Matthew share his work.
Enjoy!
KA—
I’m Matthew Joel, an artist from Atlantic Canada on a quest to encounter the spirit of Canadian folk and country music as it lives and breathes in our moment. I’m here today to share about my new project, The New Canadiana—a journalistic series about regular and mostly unknown Canadians who are writing, recording, and releasing music right now.
In the age of algorithmic curation and procedurally generated noise, I think folks are more hungry than ever to make meaningful connections with the human beings who make the music they love. This might be one of the major upshots of ai-generated media—it shows us how precious human-made art really is. More than ever I want to feel I know the people making the music I’m listening to, and more than ever, I’m learning that this kind of relationship requires an almost heroic act of focused attention. That attention, though, leads me into the spirit of art-making that inhabits human life and makes it special.
Last year, I finally finished grad studies and realized I wanted to start recording and releasing music again. It turned out that after 10+ years of desk work, academic writing, and listening to Carrie and Lowell on repeat, a lot had changed in the world of music marketing and promotion. Back in 2010, it was all about selling CD-Rs to my friends, posting on tumblr, and sending out mass emails hoping to strike gold in the blogosphere. I had never distributed music to streaming platforms before. If I did, would anyone hear it? How could I find a community of interested listeners?
Purveyors of music-biz best practice said that I should find out who else was making music like mine and do whatever they did. But who even were these people? Where could I find them? While asking these questions from within the horizons of social media and streaming platforms, I felt lost. The fact was that many of the people I knew making beautiful music had almost no traction on a place like Spotify. But at the same time, as I gathered more and more of this pressingly beautiful music together, I started to see common threads running through these different Canadian cities.
My conviction is that algorithms cannot be trusted to tell the stories of the human beings who make the art most precious to us. It takes human beings to make known what is truly human in our music. Of course, here at On Repeat Records, I’m preaching to the choir. This is how The New Canadiana was born—out of my attempts to practice attending in a more structured and public way to the beautiful human-made art that is all around me.
In this post, I’m distilling what I’ve learned from the year so far: three rules for attending to the music of a place. I’m especially happy to share about these principles, because what I’m seeing in these Canadian cities must be happening everywhere else too. I want to know how you are following rules like these and what you have discovered along the way.
1. Start with music made in the place where you are
In the effort to resist the algorithmic anonymization of music, I think each of us has a special vocation in the places we belong to. The first rule is to begin with the music made by people you know in places you know. Then, follow the threads. Trace the outlines of the scene that you are at the centre of by virtue of the fact that you are the one listening. You are the one who most of all can understand the meaning of the music that arises out of the situation that you also arise out of. And the rest of us need you to help us access to the art you are most equipped to hear.
The spirit of locality is very close to the spirit of music making. Human-made music belongs somewhere, and that place is not primarily an Instagram reel or Youtube video (which are only records of an event). Canada, which is ostensibly the subject of The New Canadiana, is, in truth, much too large a subject.
Instead, I have begun my quest with the actual Canadians I know whose music burns bright in my ears and heart. This first rule is about learning to trust that this feeling shows me the way forward. There’s no one else with my particular experience of this music made by these particular people. This means I have a task—something to attend to.
2. Have meaningful conversations with the music you love
The great threat to music distributed by streaming platforms is that it becomes a mere mechanism to evoke a mood or vibe without ever being allowed to become an end in itself. By contrast, I’m amazed at what I discover when I sit down with a friend and really ask them about their art. I might have assumed that the public nature of an interview would involve too much self-conscious reflexivity to invite meaningful reflection. On the contrary, I find that when I have a conversation that is on record, this imparts a focus and intensity that elevates my awareness of what we are trying to explore together.
As I prepare for interviews, I bring a structured mode of attention to the music that I rarely make time for. As I pay attention, I start to get curious: what makes this music work? What is it saying to me? How can I dialogue with its particular beauty? While conducting these interviews, I feel my conscience prick—why haven’t I asked my friends these questions before? They’ve made this beautiful art, and the meaning of its beauty is at risk of slipping by, unnoticed unless someone stops to recognize what has occurred.
3. Keep a public record of your discoveries
All it takes to dignify a work of art is attention, and the third rule is to give what you have understood in the art a public voice. Let us infiltrate online spaces designed to manipulate and monetize attention with the records of what we have discovered on the ground and in our bodies with other human beings.
Let us keep coming back to places like On Repeat Records to celebrate the beautiful music that has made itself known individually upon each of us as individuals. Keep a record of what you notice—snapshots of live music, reflections on concert experiences, evidence of physical media, listening journals, conversations shared between friends and fellow aspirants. The record of these experiences matters because only a human can access what is human in a work of art.
4. The New Canadiana
I’ve committed in 2025 to make my discoveries public in two ways:
- I am interviewing one Canadian songwriter a month. The interviews are an almost anthropological effort to encounter the spirit of this moment in Canadian music. If you’re to new to the series, I encourage you to start with the first one featuring Simon Bridgefoot.
- I maintain a playlist that situates these Canadians’ music in the larger context of folk and country music in this country. The playlist privileges songs that have come out in the past five years.
The playlist lives here:
It all started as a chance to work out where I can locate my own music, and what I’ve discovered instead is that there is a world to which I already belong. Give the interviews a read and the playlist a listen and let me know what you see in them.
How many of you are already applying principles like these in your own practices listening to music? What have been the results?
Kevin here again: Thank you to Matthew for sharing his work, and thank you for being here. Be sure to check out his project and the other fantastic interviews he’s already done!
Kevin Sent 
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