After a year -long hiatus due to Covid 19, the ninth annual LEMF (Lethbridge Electronic Music Festival) is set to get you dancing all day long in Galt Gardens, Saturday, Sept. 25.

The free, family, friendly event features a Kidzone with a bouncy castle, beer gardens and a “chill tent” called the T Bird Lounge which is a tribute to Tanner Dietrich, who passed away last year, featuring her artwork. The Lethbridge Handmade Market will provide vendors.

 LEMF, which began with one stage back in 2012 and expanded to three stages, before they were forced to cancel last year’s event, is back to two stages this year featuring 26 DJs, mostly from Alberta.

Toronto Skratch Bastid and Saskatoon’s The Gaff headlines the Zodiac Stage at 9:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. and 7 p.m.- 8:30 p.m. respectively. Calgary’s Woofax headlines the Luminosity stage in between those two from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m.. The rest of the line-up is from Alberta. J DJ Funkhauser will be on at 1 p.m.

 The other performers are on stage for an hour. 

“The Zodiac stage is more house music and the Luminosity stage is more bass,” noted Lethbridge Electronic Music Festival president David Fritz, who is also on the bill as his alter-ego Marty Funkhauser.

He is excited to have watched the festival grow, and, more importantly, to have the festival back this year.

“Usually we’re in August, but we had to cancel last year. This year it‘s been moved up to September, which we may continue to do because the students are back at university,” Fritz said, noting most of the line-up originally scheduled to perform last year, will be performing this year.

“We kept all the contracts,” he said, adding he is also excited that the festival has a local flavour.

“We wanted to keep travel down plus, there is so much talent here that deserves to be supported,” he said. 

He is excited to welcome Skratch Bastid  back to Lethbridge.

Local musician and author Tanner James Holthe is thinking a couple moves ahead by debuting his new film “ Chess 4 Life,” Sept. 22 at Casa,

 He won a $20,000 Telus Storyhive grant to make his 20 minute documentary on an innovative new program to teach at risk youth haw to play Chess instead of doing community service.

“I read an article in Alberta Views about this program that started at the University of Lethbridge by a professor and a judge who started this program for at risk kids to each them how to play the game of chess instead of doing community service by picking up garbage on the side of the  highway,” said Taber born Holthe, who spent 14 years in Calgary, before moving back to Lethbridge last year right before the pandemic, which is when the Telus Storyhive opportunity came up.

“I bookmarked the idea and when they announced their Local Heroes documentary edition, I thought it would be a great idea,” he said, adding he received the full $20,000 grant to make the documentary between February 2021and June 2021. He had to submit it by July.

“It was a pretty tight turnaround. I was editing parts of the film at the same time I was shooting other parts,” he said.

 He’ll have the special screening at Casa for the cast, crew and friends, but Telus will release the movie to the general public in a couple months on  a variety of platforms including Optik TV and their Youtube channel.

He used to be in alternative rock band the Nix Dicksons and is a regular performer at Taber Cornfest. He has a new Calgary based band Kid Cali, which has just released their first single “Third Eye.” He also released his first book in 2017.

 Like everything else, he taught himself to make movies.

“It’s very punk rock. Before this project,  I made a lot of bad horror movies with my friends just to learn how to do it. But this is my first professional film,” he said, adding it clocks in at 23 minutes and includes approximately a dozen interviews.

It looks like Arts Days will be blessed with good weather for Arts Days this week.

 It’s not like a couple years ago when we had snow,” said Allied Arts Council Projects manager Tara Gillanders, noting due to Covid , most events will be outside this year.

“We’re working hard to ensure that everything is safe. So we had planned to move as much as we could outside even before the current restrictions came into effect,” she continued.

 Lethbridge’s annual celebration of the arts begins on Thursday, Sept. 23 with local artists painting the outside windows of of several downtown local businesses including Classique Dance Works, The Allied Arts Council shop, Casa and Sill and Soil.

“It’s an excellent opportunity for people to stop and chat with the artists about their work,” Gillanders said.

 The musical portion of ArtsDays begins on Friday, Sept. 24 with doom folk band Makiisma and local garage rock/new wave band Body Lens, who perform on Rotary Square outside Casa from 7 -9 p.m.