THE SHOW MUST GO ON, AS THEY SAY.

The Yukon’s oldest music festival, which normally brings together over a thousand attendees and hosts performers from across the globe every year, is going to look a little different in 2022.

Hello dear friends and Festival fans,

We appreciate your patience – we know that it’s nearly the end of June and most years, you’d likely have your Festival pass securely in hand by now. In all honesty, it’s been a very difficult year for the organization. We continue to tackle the realities of producing live events during a pandemic and we are operating at an extremely limited capacity. On the bright side, we’ve accomplished the longstanding dream of upgrading our HQ with the construction of a new building; we now have room for an Executive Director and four summer staff, and boast an accessible and spacious gear room, a small classroom to offer workshops, and most importantly – a studio space for musicians. The Board volunteered countless hours to bring this project to life, and we gotta say, we’re exhausted!

We’ve worked through the exhaustion and are so proud to be offering incredible music under the midnight sun – on Friday, July 15th we’ll kick off with a free, outdoor show by Mariel Buckley and her Americana-infused smoky vocals and driving musicality. That evening a ticketed show will feature more magic from Mariel Buckley, followed by Begonia, an unstoppable force of powerhouse vocals that lives somewhere between pop, gospel, and anthems for the soul. On Saturday, July 16th, Festival favorites and east coast darlings The Burning Hell will open a ticketed show with their witty wordplay-fuelled humour rock. The night will close with Jeffrey Lewis who promises to open eyes with complex, literate lyrics, lo-fi punk sound, and his reputation as a leader in New York City’s anti-folk movement.

DCMF often jokes about being the “hardest working board in showbiz” and it truly, truly is. This incredible team has led the Association through one outright Festival cancellation in 2020, one postponed September mini-Festival in 2021, and is now ready to bring back a little bit of the magic usually presented in July despite the massive hurdles brought on by the pandemic. DCMF is currently without an Executive Director (the sole year-round staff member) so the production of summer performances has been taken on by the Board of Directors. We wish we could offer the “real deal” – the bigtop Mainstage tent, town-wide Music Crawl, 6+ stages, workshops, KidsFest and of course, our signature Potluck and Grand Finale that both feature the full roster of Festival musicians. However, the Board unanimously decided that while it would be a ton of fun, it was simply not feasible, prudent, or sustainable to invite 1200+ people to our small, remote community at a time when COVID is still very much an ongoing risk.

The cancellation of the 2020 Festival feels somewhat like a distant memory now and we are glad to have come so far, but we will continue to proceed with caution and great care. The DCMF Board of Directors extends sincere thanks to festival fans and our community members who make the magic happen every July. We can’t wait to be under our big red and white tent in Minto Park with everyone, and in the meantime we have so appreciated the patience and support of those who have enjoyed our offerings in these uncertain times. We have indeed been busy behind the scenes, and look forward to being in the spotlight again. 

With love and care and so much hope, 

The DCMF Board of Directors

We can be reached at:
[email protected]
for questions, comments, and general inquiries.